Curated by
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June 12, 2026
Friday, May 12, 6-7 PM
NARS Project Space, 2nd Floor
As part of our Art in Dialogue series, NARS Foundation is pleased to present an artist talk featuring Heather Renée Russ in Conversation with Erica Dawn Lyle, discussing her solo exhibition, Riis Beach: In Reverberation. The talk will be followed by a brief Q&A with the audience.
This program offers a opportunity to engage with the exhibition, on view through June 26. Visitors are welcome to arrive early to view the exhibition.
Riis Beach: In Reverberation centers the historically queer People’s Beach in New York City, increasingly threatened by climate change and development. Through experimental photography, installation, and refracted light projection, Russ traces overlaps between queer precarity and ecological vulnerability. Fragmented imagery echoes the complexity of queer experience and celebrates the rainbowed spaces queers create, spaces like the People’s Beach, that often exist outside the understanding of the machine.
About the artist:
Heather Renée Russ (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist working across experimental photography, installation and bio art. Her practice incorporates queer femme signifiers and organic materials to explore queer ecologies, displacement and climate grief, while centering queer joy and systems of care. Russ comes from a rich history of organizing in underground art scenes. She co-directed Lair Fera, a queer collaborative space in Brooklyn. In San Francisco she co-produced Club Feral, a raucous mutual aid queer nightclub. The experience of stewarding spaces for queer artists in ever-shifting environments informs her work.
In New York, Russ has exhibited at NARS Foundation, Field Projects, Elijah Wheat Showroom, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Wassaic Project, Underdonk, Flux Factory, State University of New York (SUNY) Old Westbury and in Every Woman Biennial at Pen+Brush. Russ has also exhibited at NADA Miami with Paradice Palase, Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum (Cal State Long Beach), IMT Gallery (London) and SoMos (Berlin), Russ has participated in residencies at NARS Foundation, Wassaic Project, MASS MoCA, ChaNorth, TransBorder Art and Vermont Studio Center and received the Powerhouse Arts Subsidy Award in 2026. She is currently a member of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) Studio Program in Manhattan.
About the moderator:
Erica Dawn Lyle is a writer, experimental musician, curator, and cultural instigator who lives in New York and Florida. Formerly the touring guitar player for Riot Grrl punk legends, Bikini Kill, as a solo performer, she has released musical collaborations with Bernadette Mayer, Kim Gordon, The Raincoats, Kathleen Hanna, Brontez Purnell, and many more. The author of several books, she has been a frequent contributor to Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Bomb Magazine and other publications. Her artist books are in the permanent collection at MOMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, Yale's Beinecke Library, the University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, The Getty Museum, The Hammer Museum, and other institutions, and her writings, papers, and correspondence are permanently held and viewable at the Erica Dawn Lyle archive at University of Miami.
