Each week, we search for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. In light of the global health crisis, we are currently highlighting events in person and digitally, as well as in-person exhibitions open in the New York area. See our picks from around the world below. (Times are all EST unless otherwise noted.)
Monday, March 29
Rachel Rossin, I’m my loving memory (2020–21). Installation view, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing. Photo courtesy the artist and Hyundai Motor.
1. “World on a Wire: Rachel Rossin Artist Talk” at the New Museum
Rhizome, the New Museum’s digital art affiliate, has teamed up with Hyundai Motor Company to present “World on a Wire,” a digital art exhibition. In a Zoom conversation held in conjunction with the show, Rachel Rossin, one of the featured artists, will talk with Michael Connor, artistic director of Rhizome, about her tech-savvy practice and the increasingly blurred boundaries between reality, simulation, and the body.
Price: Free with registration
Time: 9 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Monday, March 29–May 2
Joris Bochman, Treeat (2020). Courtesy of Eve Leibe Gallery.
2. “Cave Canem” at Eve Leibe Gallery
Curator Lauren Powell was quick to adapt to selling art online after lockdown. In this, her 28th digital exhibition, hosted by the nomadic Eve Leibe Gallery, she has put together a selection of paintings and sculptures celebrating man’s best friend, and the increased importance of canine companionship during the isolation of the pandemic. The virtual group show is presented in a gallery filled with grassy sand dunes.
Price: Free
Time: Online daily at all times
—Sarah Cascone
Tuesday, March 30
Jacob Lawrence, Dream Series #5: The Library (1967). Funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Collectors’ Circle, the Henry D. Gilpin and John Lambert Funds, and the Pennsylvania Academy Women’s Committee.
3. “Rediscovering Jacob Lawrence” at Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
This is the inaugural lecture in the new “Anne Sallee Greenwood Discovery Series,” a collaboration between the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, organizations with which Greenwood and her family have strong ties. The traveling exhibition, titled “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle,” united the paintings from the artist’s series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” for the first time in over half a century. PAFA curator Brittany Webb, and Crystal Bridges chief curator Austen Barron Bailly will host a conversation about looking at Lawrence’s work with a renewed perspective.
Price: Free with registration
Time: 7:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m.
—Eileen Kinsella
Image courtesy of Chatsworth House Trust.
4. “Historic Houses: The True Stars of Period Dramas” hosted by World Monuments Fund
Calling all Bridgerton fans! This talk, hosted by World Monuments Fund executive director of Britain John Darlington, will show the intensive work required to turn historic houses into sets for film and TV. Guest speakers include actress Nell Hudson, Bridgerton director Julie Anne Robinson, and Chatsworth head of marketing Sally Ambrose.
Price: Free with registration
Time: 1 p.m.
—Eileen Kinsella
Wednesday, March 31—Thursday, April 1
Elizabeth Catlett, Danys y Liethis (2005). Image courtesy the Brodsky Center at PAFA, Philadelphia; ©the artist and the Brodsky Center at PAFA, Philadelphia. Photo by Jack Abraham.
5. “Spring Print Sale” at Brodsky Center at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Visitors can explore Brodsky’s fine-arts editions, works on paper, and artist books by the likes of Kiki Smith, Barkley Hendricks, Frank Bowling, Elizabeth Catlett, William Kentridge, Pat Steir, Richard Tuttle, and more. PAFA Peale Circle members receive an additional 5 percent off of discounted prices. Proceeds will support the Brodsky Center at PAFA, a program that invites artists to create new artworks, and educates students and audiences.
Price: Free
Time: On view daily at all times
—Eileen Kinsella
Friday, April 2–Saturday, May 8
By Behrang Karimi. Photo courtesy of Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.
6. “Fifteen Painters” at Andrew Kreps
Could an all-painting group show sneakily be the blockbuster hit of the spring? What about if you’re never heard of most of the painters? Asking these questions is Andrew Kreps, the wily dealer who has continued to fulfill expectations in unexpected ways since moving his Chelsea HQ down to a sneakily expansive Tribeca space tucked into a cobblestoned alleyway. Now that lucky vaccinated New Yorkers can actually go out to real galleries, it’s a flex to go deep on that old stalwart, Capital-P Painting—especially after a year in which paintings were the only thing that came across half decent on the screens. But, once again, a Kreps show is set to satisfy and surprise, as the exhibition rejiggers the concept of the ol’ paint-on-canvas concept by inviting more than two dozen newcomers, all born after 1980, to pick away at the genre’s tenets.
There’s Bendt Eyckermans, the young Belgian who makes expressionist paintings from life that buzz with ionic charge. The Hong Kong-based Henry Shum—that’s right ladies and gentlemen, he was born in 1998!—wowed viewers with the Blakean annunciation scenes at his solo debut at Empty Gallery last fall. And then there’s the lush landscapes of tense interiors by Gabriella Boyd, a master of developing scenes of neuroses awash in technicolor. And there’s 12 others.
Location: Andrew Kreps Gallery, 22 Cortlandt Alley, New York
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 4 p.m.– 7 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
—Nate Freeman
Friday, April 2–Sunday, September 5
Pixy Liao, After Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, “Experimental Relationship” series (2019). Photo ©Pixy Liao, courtesy of the artist.
7. “Fotografiska, Pixy Liao Your Gaze Belongs to Me” at Fotografiska
In her first major US solo show, Pixy Liao subverts traditional gender roles, photographing herself in positions of dominance over her boyfriend, Moro. He has served as the Chinese artist’s muse for the past 15 years, posing in over 100 photographs for her series “Experimental Relationship.”
“Moro made me realize that heterosexual relationships do not need to be standardized,” says Liao in an artist’s statement. “The purpose of this experiment is to break the inherent relationship model and reach a new equilibrium.”
Location: Fotografiska, 281 Park Ave South at 22nd Street, New York
Price: $24 general admission
Time: Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–9 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Through Thursday, April 18
Michele Pred, The Art of Equal Pay (2021). Photo by Alyssa Meadows.
8. “Michele Pred: The Art of Equal Pay Billboard”
Southbound drivers stuck in traffic on New York’s Henry Hudson Parkway should keep an eye out for the latest billboard from Oakland artist Michele Pred, promoting “The Art of Equal Pay,” her initiative that aims to bring the prices for women’s art in line with those of their male counterparts. Pred first announced the project in 2020, but celebrated its official launch just last week, on March 24—also known as Equal Pay Day, or the day in the new year where women’s earnings have finally caught up with those of men, on average. Pred is encouraging women artists to raise their prices 15 percent, and has also launched an artist salary survey to help paint a better picture of the true extent of the gender gap in the field.
Location: West Side Highway and West 155th Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: On view daily at all times
—Sarah Cascone
Through Saturday, April 24
Maria Fragoso, Seeding (2020). Courtesy of 1969 Gallery.
9. “María Fragoso: El jardín entre tus dientes” at 1969 Gallery, New York
In her first exhibition with 1969 Gallery, the 25-year-old Mexico City-based artist María Fragoso presents six new paintings and 13 new works on paper. In decidedly ritualistic tableaux, Fragoso’s volumetric figures often appear seated at tables dotted with strange emblems and objects—bruised fruits, shells, snails. In one painting, Seeding, two seemingly identical women are pictured on one side of a cloth-lined table. They raise their red-gloved hands, and each spouts water from their mouths. This painting, as with many of Fragoso’s works, is dominated by intense hues of reds and pinks, imparting a feverish, carnal, even unnervingly violent quality (the gloved hands, at first glance, could be mistaken for bloodied ones). An illusory quality permeates the works, often the same figure appears doubled, as though refracted in a mirror, and bringing to mind Frida Kahlo’s famed double portrait, and in the figures weighty dimensionality, pre-Hispanic figures, too.
Location: 1969 Gallery, 39 White Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.– 6 p.m.
—Katie White
Through Sunday, April 25
Melissa Alcena, Shavonte. Photo courtesy of Ortega y Gasset Projects.
10. “Becoming Buoyant” at Ortega y Gasset Projects
Water becomes a symbol of life and resiliency—simultaneously recalling freedom, healing, and trauma—in this three-person show about Black bodies in the diaspora featuring photographs by Melissa Alcena, collages by Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, and watercolors by Adrienne Elise Tarver.
Location: Ortega y Gasset Projects, 363 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn
Price: Free
Time: Saturday and Sunday, 1 p.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Through Sunday, May 2
Katya Grokhovsky: FANTASYLAND” installation view at Smack Mellon. Photo courtesy of the artist.
11. “Katya Grokhovsky, FANTASYLAND” at Smack Mellon
Ukrainian artist Katya Grokhovsky, who recently curated the inaugural Immigrant Artist Biennial, presents the American Dream as a foreboding mirage in her Smack Mellon solo show. The site-specific mixed-media installation’s bright colors, with its neon signs, inflated beach balls, and giant stuffed animals, hide the festering reality of a society fueled by big-box stores and insatiable consumerist lust.
Location: Smack Mellon, 92 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn
Price: Free
Time: Wednesday–Sunday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone