Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting, and thought-provoking, shows, screenings, and events. See them below.
Monday, September 10–Wednesday, September 26
Joe Nishizawa, Hisanohama Fishing Port. Photo ©Joe Nishizawa.
1. “Refocus” at Aperture
In an exhibition that aims to spotlight under-recognized mid-career photographers, Siân Davey, Janet Delaney, and Joe Nishizawa will show at Aperture after having received $10,000 grants from WeTransfer. Davey and Nishizawa are bringing new work, while Delaney will debut her very first body of work, shot in the SoMA district in San Francisco in the 1980s, having recently documented the rapid transformation of the neighborhood thanks to the growing tech sector.
Location: Aperture Gallery and Bookstore, 547 West 27th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception September 11, 7 p.m.–8:30 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Wednesday, September 12
Photographer Bill Cunningham working during Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2014. Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images.
2. “The Secret Memoir of Bill Cunningham” at the New York Public Library
This month, Penguin Publishing released Fashion Climbing, the memoirs of New York street and society fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, discovered by his family upon his death in 2016. Christopher Richards, the book’s editor, will discuss the artist’s life and career—Cunningham actually got his start as a milliner—with New Yorker critic Hilton Als, who wrote the book’s preface, and Paper magazine co-founder, Kim Hastreiter, who knew the photographer personally.
Location: New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Celeste Auditorium, 476 Fifth Avenue at West 42nd Street
Price: Free with RSVP
Time: 6:30 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Thursday, September 13
Roy De Forest, View of Lake Louise (1979). ©The Estate of Roy De Forest. Private Collection. Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York.
3. Gallery Talk With Raphael Rubinstein at the Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Gallery
Raphael Rubinstein talks about his newly curated exhibition, “A Time Before We Were Born: Visions of Arcadia in Contemporary Painting,” on view through September 29. Featuring the work of artists including Susan Bee, Katherine Bradford, JooYoung Choi, Po Kim, Fay Lansner, Judith Linhares, and Purvis Young, the show is named after the 1983 Talking Heads show “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody).”
Location: The Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Gallery, 417 Lafayette Street, 4th Floor
Price: Free with RSVP (space limited)
Time: 6:30 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Thursday, September 13–Saturday, October 13
Irving Penn Collision, New York, (2006). ©The Irving Penn Foundation.
4. “Irving Penn: Paintings” at Pace
Though he achieved fame as a photographer, Irving Penn started out drawing and painting. Pace holds the first exhibition of his painting, offering some 30 mixed media works from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. Starting with ink or graphite drawings, Penn would photograph his works and then paint in layers on top of the print with watercolor, ink, dry color pigments, and gum arabic, creating a unique, collage-like body of work.
Location: Pace, 32 East 57th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Thursday, September 13–Saturday, October 27
Lee Krasner, Untitled Mural Study (1940). Courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, ©2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
5. “Lee Krasner: Mural Studies” at Kasmin Gallery
In 1940, Lee Krasner made her first abstract works. On view at Kasmin Gallery are rarely seen gouache-on-paper paintings from that same year, created as studies for a mural commissioned by the Works Progress Administration, which provided work for artists during the Great Depression. Originally assigned to Willem de Kooning, who was kicked off the project for not being a US citizen, the mural was ultimately never completed.
Location: Kasmin Gallery, 297 Tenth Avenue
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Friday, September 14
Gabriel Orozco.
Photo by Neil Rasmus, ©Patrick McMullan.
6. “Gabriel Orozco with Paul Holdengräber: Written Matter” at the New York Public Library
Following the opening of his new exhibition at Marian Goodman (on view September 12–October 27) and ahead of the publication of an English translation of his Materia Escrita sketchbooks and writings, Gabriel Orozco will speak about his life and career with writer and curator Paul Bernard Holdengräber.
Location: New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Celeste Auditorium, 476 Fifth Avenue at West 42nd Street
Price: $40
Time: 7 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Friday, September 14–Sunday, September 16
ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion). Courtesy of the Whitney Museum.
7. ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) at the Whitney Museum
In 1989, David Wojnarowicz and composer and musician Ben Neill addressed the AIDS crisis with their multimedia performance ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion). Neill and percussionist Don Yallech, who performed in the original, revisit the piece, which hasn’t been staged in New York in 25 years, at the Whitney as part of the programming for Wojnarowicz’s current retrospective (on view through September 30).
Location: Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street
Price: $25 general admission, $18 for students and seniors
Time: Friday & Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 4 p.m.
—Caroline Goldstein
Saturday, September 15 and Sunday, September 16
Milton Resnick, Untitled (1962). Photo by Brian Buckley, courtesy of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation.
8. Opening Celebrations for the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation
The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation had something of a soft opening this summer with its first exhibition, “Milton Resnick Paintings 1937–1987” (on view through December). Now, the converted Lower East Side synagogue where Resnick lived and worked from 1976 until his death in 2004 is officially open to the public, including the perfectly preserved third-floor room that served as his final studio.
Location: The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, 87 Eldridge Street
Price: Free
Time: 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Friday, September 14–Saturday, October 27
Christopher Myers, Runaway (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort.
9. “Christopher Myers: Let the Mermaids Flirt With Me” at Fort Gansevoort
New York native Christopher Myers’s new show at Fort Gansevoort spans the breadth of his personal interests and creative abilities, including Gees Bend-inspired quilts, contemporary hip-hop lyrics, ship-building, and figurative works inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series.” The lush colors and intricate patterns of Myers’s work stitch together his vision for a more unified landscape.
Location: Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
—Caroline Goldstein
Saturday, September 15
Still from Pramod Prati’s film Abid, 1972. Image courtesy of the Kitchen.
10. “An Evening with Experimenta India” at the Kitchen
In collaboration with the founding director of EXPERIMENTA, Bangalore’s moving-image art biennial, the storied nonprofit space will host an evening of avant-garde Indian short films stretching from the 1970s to the 2010s. Worth your time on its own, the cinematic quartet also expands on themes central to Chitra Ganesh’s exhibition “Her Garden, a Mirror,” which opens in the Kitchen’s galleries 48 hours earlier.
Location: The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street
Price: Free
Time: 7 p.m.
—Tim Schneider
Saturday, September 15–Saturday, November 10
Shang Yang, Decayed Landscape No.2. (2018)
Image courtesy of the artist and Chambers Fine Art.
11. “Shang Yang: New Works” at Chambers Fine Art
The career of Chinese painter Shang Yang, who was born in 1942, got off to a late start owing to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. He eventually abandoned the prevailing style of Social Realism he had adhered to earlier and instead experimented with various styles, always focusing heavily on the deterioration of the environment. The most important of three major phases of experimentation for the artist occurred in 1988 and ’89 when he executed a group of abstract paintings titled States. The artist has often criticized China because of what he sees as the country’s “preference for everything that is flashy and superficial.” In addition to the work on view at the gallery’s Chelsea location, Shang Yang’s works will be also be displayed at the gallery’s Art Farm outpost in Salt Point, New York, on an appointment-only basis.
Location: Chambers Fine Art, 522 West 19th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception 2 p.m.–6 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
—Eileen Kinsella
Through Sunday, September 16
Mie Yim, Untitled 2 (2018). Photo by Christian NguyenNguyen.
12. “Mie Yim: Sfumato” at Ground Floor Gallery
Mie Yim’s first solo show in a decade marks fifth and final portion of Ground Floor Gallery’s fifth-anniversary celebrations. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s much-vaunted sfumato technique, blending shapes and colors with masterfully soft edges, Yim presents a selection of new abstract paintings with hazily defined fields of deeply saturated colors. The show ends with an outdoor Korean BBQ.
Location: Ground Floor Gallery, 343 5th Street, Brooklyn
Price: Free
Time: Closing reception, 3 p.m.–5:30 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 13 p.m.–8 p.m.; Saturday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Sunday, September 16–Friday, October 26
Photo: courtesy of the artist and Kai Matsumiya.
13. “Pedro Wirz: Breastfed Tadpole” at Kai Matsumiya
Known for his unconventional use of natural material and found objects, Swiss-Brazilian artist Pedro Wirz presents new work at his second solo show at Kai Matsumiya.
Location: Kai Matsumiya, 153 Stanton Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Wednesday–Sunday, 12 p.m.–6 p.m.
—Henri Neuendorf
Through Saturday, September 22
Morteza Khakshoor, Men of High Culture (2018). Courtesy of the artist and IPCNY.
14. “Multilayered: New Prints 2018/Summer” at the International Print Center New York
IPCNY’s 58th edition of its biannual New Prints Program is on view at the Chelsea-based gallery space, selected for this iteration by artist Juan Sánchez. The show features 43 prints, including examples of lithography, screenprints, woodcut, and etching, and are united by their articulation of “new narratives” that illustrate “an increasingly hybridized cultural world.”
Location: International Print Center New York, 508 West 26th Street, 5A
Price: Free
Time: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
—Caroline Goldstein
Through Sunday, September 23
Wayne Thiebaud, Nine Jelly Apples (1964). Photo by Tony De Camillo, ©Wayne Thiebaud.
15. “Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman” at the Morgan Library
The confectionary canvases of Wayne Thiebaud, known for his colorful paintings of cakes, pies, and other desserts, look good enough to eat at the Morgan Library, which has brought together his works on paper, including pastels, watercolors, and charcoal drawings.
Location: The Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street
Price: $20 general admission
Time: Tuesday–Thursday, 10:30 a.m.–5 p.m.; Friday, 10:30 a.m.–9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Through Friday, September 28
Yuanyuan Yang. Photo courtesy of the Chinese American Arts Council.
16. “Yuanyuan Yang: Theater of Crossroads” at the Chinese American Arts Council
In her first New York solo show, Beijing’s Yuanyuan Yang shows off her visual storytelling, creating narratives the blend fact and fiction, drawing from historical films and novels as well as her photographs and writings. Yang’s new work, Prologue: Curtain’s Up, is an investigation into female actresses and opera singers who left China between 1914 and 1970, uncovering their forgotten stories scattered across the globe.
Location: Chinese American Arts Council, 456 Broadway, 3rd Floor
Price: Free
Time: Monday–Friday, 1 p.m.–6 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Through Saturday, October 13
Sandra Sheehy, Untitled. Photo courtesy of Cavin-Morris Gallery.
17. “Big Bang” at D-Day Studio
Designer and D-Day co-founder Jodi Busby has tapped friends and collaborators for this group show, which includes new t-shirts by Susan Cianciolo and a foam and snakeskin sculpture by Anicka Yi, among other works.
Location: D-Day Studio, 60 Tinker Street, Woodstock, New York
Price: Free
Time: Saturday and Sunday, 12 p.m.–5:30 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone