Does This Taste Funny?

September 8 – December 13, 2026 | Opening reception Tuesday, September 8, 5-8 p.m.

Curated by Melissa Brown and John O'Connor

The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center and Lehman College Art Gallery are pleased to present Does This Taste Funny?, a sweeping two-venue group exhibition showcasing the work of 41 contemporary artists. Opening in September 2026, the exhibition marks a collaboration between Sarah Lawrence College, where co-curator John O'Connor is faculty in the Visual and Studio Arts Program, and Lehman College, CUNY, where co-curator Melissa Brown teaches in the Department of Art. 

Does This Taste Funny? explores humor in contemporary art as a generative method for shifting perception. While humor in art is often mistaken for a lack of seriousness, other fields treat laughter as anything but trivial: developmental psychologists read early laughter as evidence of a mind forming expectations about the world, political theory recognizes the joke as a tool of dissent, and linguists study the punchline as a window into how meaning is built.

Within this framework, the participating artists actively embrace humor to disarm viewers and bypass intellectual defenses. The curators have organized these artistic strategies into six distinct thematic groupings, demonstrating how artists wield specific comedic styles to their advantage. Artists leverage The Body through slapstick and physical comedy to provoke visceral empathy, and they lean into Material Absurdity to highlight the irrationality of daily life. They deploy Politics via satire and dark humor as a weapon to undermine authority, while utilizing Language through wordplay and puns to reveal how meaning is constructed and deconstructed. Finally, they turn a critical eye inward with Art Humor, poking fun at opaque institutional conventions through parody, spoof, and sharp observation, and they explore Technology through deadpan delivery and the uncanny to critique our increasingly digital existence.

By utilizing these strategies, the exhibition frames humor as a method to evade our preconceptions about the world, exposing incongruities in our political, personal, and institutional lives. Throughout the show and its connected programming, the artwork serves as a catalyst for a dialogue that reaches across psychology, politics, the art world, philosophy, language, and comedy itself.

The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center: on view September 8 – December 13, 2026. Opening reception Tuesday, September 8, 5–8pm.

Lehman College Art Gallery: on view September 9, 2026 – January 16, 2027. Opening reception Wednesday, September 9, 5–8pm. lehmangallery.org