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 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.)
Tuesday, November 10
Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America (1987). Times Square. Photo: courtesy Alfredo Jaar.
1. “Democracy & Voice” at Unfinished
In the wake of last week’s US presidential election, Unfinished Live is here to remind us that Joe Biden’s win does not mean that there isn’t a great deal of work to be done. The second episode of the show will feature, among others, the preternaturally busy Hank Willis Thomas in conversation with Alfredo Jaar, who created one of the most enduring public art campaigns in US history with A Logo for America, his Public Art Fund video work that projected the message “This is not America” to audiences in Times Square in 1987. More recently, Jaar has participated in the For Freedoms billboard campaign run by Thomas and Eric Gottesman. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Carrie Mae Weems are among the evening’s other speakers.
Price: Free with RSVP
Time: 7 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Tuesday, November 10–Friday, January 1
Paul Anagnostopoulos, Never The Right Time (2020). Courtesy of Tchotchke Gallery
2. “Bull in a China Shop” at Tchotchke Gallery
Make sure to catch “Bull in a China Shop,” an online group exhibition consisting of 16 young artists presented by Tchotchke Gallery. The gallery asked the artists to depict their ideas of “chaos,” to show works “highlighting the rejection of delicacy and the relinquishment of caution.” The show includes artists such as Paul Anagnostopoulos, Rachael Zur, Patrick Wilkins, and Austin Furtak-Cole, among others, and is a colorful, exuberant celebration the imagination.
Price: Free
Time: Available digitally at 12 p.m. on November 10
—Neha Jambhekar
Wednesday, November 11
Abigail McGourlay, Festival (2020). Courtesy the artist and Women + Health.
3. “Women + Health Online Fundraising Exhibition: Women’s Lockdown Art”
The London-based charity Women + Health is launching a selling exhibition of works made by women during lockdown to raise funds to support isolated and vulnerable women. The exhibition launches on November 11 at 7 p.m. with an online event including talks by the art historian and curator Frances Borzello, psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach, and Zabludowicz Collection director Elizabeth Neilson. Artists taking part in the exhibition, which runs through December 25, include Eva Rothschild and Rachel Kneebone.
Price: Free
Time: Launch at 7 p.m GMT (2 p.m. EST). Exhibition runs online through December 25
—Naomi Rea
Thursday, November 12
Samuel Adoquei. Photo courtesy of the Art Students League.
4. “The Skin Tones Project: Celebrating the Beauty of Evolution” at the Art Students League
Samuel Adoquei is giving a Facebook Live talk about “The Skin Tones Project,” his ongoing work comparing skin tones in portraits created throughout art history. In addition to explaining the evolution of the Western canon, Adoquei will also give tips to artists interested in expanding their range of representation to depict subjects with different skin tones. The talk is sponsored by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Price: Free
Time: 6 p.m.–7 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Hank Willis Thomas, Icarus (2016). © Hank Willis Thomas, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.
5. “In Conversation: Hank Willis Thomas and Bomani Jones” at the Phillips Collection
As part of the Phillips Collection’s virtual talks program, artist Hank Willis Thomas and writer Bomani Jones are talking sports, advertising, race, and appropriation—all issues both address in their work. Following Jones’s piece for Vanity Fair featuring photographs by Thomas, which touched on many of these issues, the conversation will add another layer to the work.
Location: Online via Zoom
Price: Free
Time: 5:30 p.m.–6:30 p.m.
—Caroline Goldstein
Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo), Realistic Androids for Hospitals in Japan (Audio: Kanzi the Ape Speaking Through a Lexigram Keyboard) (2020). Courtesy of the artist, commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
6. “Puppies Puppies: Trans, Transfeminine, Femme, Trans Womxn, Trans Women, Gender Non-Conforming, Non-Binary, Genderqueer, and Two Spirit People (Dedicated to Camila María Concepción—Rest in Peace” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
As part of the exhibition “Not I: Throwing Voices (1500 BCE–2020 CE),” LACMA commissioned three new works from boundary-pushing New York-based artist Puppies Puppies (alias Jade Kuriki Olivo). One of these, the performance Trans, Transfeminine, Femme… (2020–2021), will be live-streamed without an audience to mark the show’s opening, then made available online as a video afterward. The piece’s title represents the diversity of trans bodies that the artist will invite to inhabit the exhibition, which places artworks in dialogue to investigate the nuances of, and misunderstandings about, what they are each assumed to communicate over the ages regarding their makers, their cultural context, and their historical period. (Please note: the performance includes some nudity.)
Location: Online via Vimeo
Price: Free with RSVP
Time: 8 p.m.–9 p.m. ET (5 p.m.–6 p.m. PT)
—Tim Schneider
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, For⟶forever… (2020). Photo ©Mierle Laderman Ukeles by Hai Zhang/the Queens Museum.
7. “Two Works by Mierle Laderman Ukeles Respond to a City in Crisis” at the Queens Museum and the 8th Floor, New York
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the unsalaried Artist-in-Residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977, sees a link between the financial woes of New York in the 1970s and the effects of the current global health crisis on the city. She’ll talk with Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation executive and artistic director Sara Reisman and Queens Museum executive director Sally Tallant about that connection, her current public art installation thanking service workers, and her inclusion in the current 8th Floor group show, “To Cast Too Bold a Shadow.”
Price: Free with RSVP
Time: 1 p.m.–2:30 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Through Friday, November 13
Claude Monet, The Tuileries (1876). Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Photo: Bridgeman Images, Berlin.
8. “Collecting Impressionism,” at Paris Nanterre and Rouen Normandy Universities
This online symposium is part of the ongoing program of the Normandie Impressioniste Festival. It will address Impressionist collecting in the context of the time period of the collector and the political, social, and economic environment of the era. The entire symposium will be bilingual, with the videos available in English and French, and talks translated live with a voice-over. See more on the program line-up here.
Price: Free with registration
Time: Various times
—Eileen Kinsella
Thursday, November 12–Saturday, December 19
Martin Puryear, Tabernacle (2019). Image courtesy Ben Davis.
9. “Martin Puryear” at Matthew Marks, New York
Six sculptures by Martin Puryear, several of which were included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, where he represented the US, are going on view for the first time in New York. Among the works on display will be Tabernacle (2019), a six-foot-tall steel-and-fabric reconstruction of a Civil War-era cap worn by American soldiers. Another work takes part of the form of an Irish elk, an extinct animal that once roamed across Ice Age Europe and died off, biologists believe, in part because of its impracticality enormous antlers, which were an ostentatious display of masculinity.
Location: Matthew Marks, 522 West 22nd Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: By appointment
—Pac Pobric
Friday, November 13
David Hockney, Celia, Carennac, August 1971 (1971). Photo by Richard Schmidt, ©David Hockney, courtesy of the David Hockney Foundation.
10. “David Hockney: Drawing from Life” at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York
Learn more about Hockney’s portrait drawings, over 125 of which are featured in the Morgan’s new show (on view through May 30, 2021) in this presentation by Isabelle Dervaux, the Morgan’s curator of modern and contemporary drawings. The exhibition traces the artist’s exploration of different styles over the decades, offering wildly different portrayals of recurring subjects.
Price: Free with registration (limited availability)
Time: 3 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Friday, November 13–Sunday, April 4, 2021
Salman Toor, Four Friends (2019). Collection of Christie Zhou, ©Salman Toor. Image courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
11. “Salman Toor: How Will I Know” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Artist Salman Toor’s long-delayed first museum solo show finally opens at the Whitney and features figurative paintings of imagined queer Black and brown men in peaceful, idealized settings. Ahead of the opening, on November 11 at 6:30 p.m., the artist will chat with curator Dexter Wimberly on Instagram Live with the New York Academy of Art.
Location: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York
Price: $25
Time: Monday and Thursday, 11:30 a.m.–6 p.m.; Friday, 1:30 p.m.–6 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.
—Tanner West
Through Saturday, November 14
“Bianca Abdi-Boragi: The Heel of the Loaf” at the Border Project Space, Brooklyn. Photo courtesy of the Border Project Space.
12. “Bianca Abdi-Boragi: The Heel of the Loaf” at the Border Project Space, Brooklyn
Inspiration struck Bianca Abdi-Boragi in March when, at home with her dwindling food stores, she tore a hole into the center of a slice of bread and began sewing around it. She’s since expanded on that impulsive gesture by building a fragile, four-foot square box out of the discarded ends of loaves of bread, with circles to peer through on each side. Adbi-Boragi wants the sculpture’s shape to recall the die used in gambling and games of chance as a commentary on how the odds of capitalism are stacked against much of the people of the world. The artist also informs me the installation “smells incredibly good.”
Location: The Border Project Space, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn
Price: Free
Time: Saturday, 3 p.m.–6 p.m., or by appointment
—Sarah Cascone
Saturday, November 14
Dan Perjovschi, Social Distance (2020). Courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery.
13. “Dan Perjovschi: The Nightmare It Is/The Nightmare It Was” at Jane Lombard Gallery, New York
Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi, who creates drawings that resemble political cartoons and graffiti, brings his humor to comment on the climate of division in a two-part show that inaugurates Jane Lombard gallery’s new Tribeca location. Since the day before Election Day, the artist has been making new drawings daily on the gallery’s street-facing window on themes like the possibility of the future. Perjovschi also has a billboard in Queens, New York, part of the public exhibition, “Ministry of Truth 1984/2020.” And, if you want to mask up, you can buy the artist’s face covering, featuring a drawing on the theme of social distancing; part of the $40 you pay will go to charitable causes.
Location: Jane Lombard Gallery, 58 White Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: public opening, November 14, 1-6 p.m.; show through December 19
—Brian Boucher
Sunday, November 15
Photo by Kevin Allen, courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
14. “Fresh Talk: Place and Power” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
The National Museum of Women in the Arts brings together culinary historian Laura Shapiro, interdisciplinary artist Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, and food rights activist Ianne Fields Stewart for a virtual discussion on our global food production and distribution system, and how it ties into issues of food access, gender, class, and labor.
Price: Suggested donation $10
Time: 4:30 p.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Through Sunday, November 15
Rosa Loy, My Dear Chimera (2020). Courtesy of Lyles & King.
15. “Rosa Loy: Everything Stays Different” at Lyles & King
Rosa Loy’s painterly world is a phantasmagoric utopia of women that blends social-realist scenes of work with Narnia-like imaginings. (In one image, a unicorn floats as though tethered to a woman’s floating braid.) One of the few women artists associated with the New Leipzig School that arose out of Germany’s post-reunification climate, Loy works primarily in casein, fast-drying paint made from milk-protein, imparting her quickly rendered scenes the fleeting vibrancy of a dream only partially remembered. This exhibition, which marks her first solo show in New York in a dozen years, is an enchanting window into Loy’s quietly influential practice.
Location: Lyles & King, 21 Catherine Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; Sunday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.
—Katie White
Through Saturday, November 28
Installation View, Bianca Nemelc: As It Ripens, 2020. Courtesy of the Artist.
16. Bianca Nemelc: As It Ripens at Cheryl Hazan Gallery
There are just three Saturdays left to see Bianca Nemelc’s show at Tribeca’s Cheryl Hazan Gallery. Wowing crowds at Ross Kramer’s 2019 booth at Spring/Break art fair, her work is made in various shades of brown and depicts shapely and sensuous bodies. Cropped close and curiously posed, these abstracted and faceless figures flirt with being interpreted as landscapes. Plants, fruits, or flowers accompany each form, which are inspired in part by the tropical and Caribbean landscapes from which her family originates.
Location: 35 North Moore Street
Price: Free
Time: Saturday, 12 p.m.–5 p.m.
—Cristina Cruz
Through Saturday, November 28
Robert Indiana, Jesus Saves. Image courtesy Galerie Gmurzynska.
17. “Robert Indiana: Love Is in the Air” at Galerie Gmurzynska
This expanded exhibition of Robert Indiana’s work features art ranging from 1959 to 2007. It includes LOVE WALL (Red Blue), a reimagining of his hallmark graphic with the famously tipped “o.” Indiana first conceived LOVE for MoMA’s Christmas card in 1965, and a stamp bearing the same motif became a bestseller when it was released in 1973. But Indiana’s art was always highly personal, as in his works featuring signs that read “Eat/Die,” a reference to the blinking diner road signs he associated with his impoverished youth.
Location: Galerie Gmurzynska, 48 East 78th Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Monday—Friday, 10 a.m.—5 p.m.; appointments encouraged
—Eileen Kinsella
Through Saturday, January 9, 2021
Luisa Rabbia, I Am Rainbow (2020). Courtesy of Peter Blum
18. “From Mitosis to Rainbow” at Peter Blum, New York
In this solo show by Italian artist Luisa Rabbia, a new body of work is made up of large-scale paintings in monochromatic blues and purples that give the impression of amorphous forms coming alive. Dealing with themes of life, birth, and spirituality, these works bathe the viewer in feelings of serenity and calm.
Location: Peter Blum, 176 Grand Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Friday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m. and Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
—Neha Jambhekar
Through Saturday, January 23, 2021
Teresita Fernández, Caribbean Cosmos (2020), detail. Photo courtesy of Lehman Maupin.
19. “Teresita Fernández: Maelstrom” at Lehmann Maupin, New York
Don’t be fooled by the shiny surfaces of Teresita Fernández ‘s monumental mosaic Caribbean Cosmos: like all the sculptures and installations in her new show, it’s inspired by the destructive power of colonialism in the Caribbean, the abstract swirling vortex suggesting a catastrophic hurricane set to make landfall, leaving unthinkable devastation in its wake.
Location: Lehmann Maupin, 501 West 24th Street, New York
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, Thursday, November 12 from 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; appointments encouraged
—Sarah Cascone