Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking, shows, screenings, and events. See them below.
Friday, September 23–Sunday, October 9:
Brian Andrew Whiteley, Donald Trump Tombstone. Courtesy Christopher Stout Gallery.
1. Brian Andrew Whiteley, “Donald Trump Tombstone” at Christopher Stout Gallery
When a renegade artist erected a tombstone inscribed with Donald Trump’s name and the epitaph “Make America Hate Again” in New York’s Central Park, it set off a media frenzy. Brian Andrew Whiteley’s new show at the Christopher Stout Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, shows the tombstone in all its glory.
On Friday, September 30, artnet News’s Sarah Cascone will lead a Q+A session with Whiteley and his attorney, noted civil rights lawyer Ronald Kuby, about political art and its prominent role in this year’s election cycle.
Location: 119 Ingraham Street, Brooklyn
Price: Free
Time: Q+A 7:00 p.m.
—Henri Neuendorf
Monday, September 26, 2016–Sunday, January 8, 2017
Al-Qazwini (1202–1283), “The Archangel Israfil,” from Aja’ib al-Makhluqat (The Wonders of Creation and Oddities of Existence) late 14th–early 15th century, Egypt or Syria. Courtesy of the British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
2. “Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
This timely exhibition explores the importance of the city of Jerusalem in shaping world culture, as the Holy City was home to numerous faiths and cultural traditions during the tumultuous medieval period. See how we got from there to here in this compelling new show.
Location: Met Fifth Avenue, 1000 Fifth Avenue
Price: Suggested admission $25
Time: Sunday–Thursday, 10:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Friday–Saturday, 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Martha Rosler, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation.
3. “Andrea Bowers on Martha Rosler” at Dia Art Foundation
Between Martha Rosler’s landmark video work, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1974), and Andrea Bowers’s most recent exhibition at Andrew Kreps, “Whose Feminism Is It Anyway?,” both artists explicitly tackle historical and contemporary political concerns. A recent panel discussion with Saisha Grayson and Nancy Buchanan gives us an idea of the activist roots of their artworks, and some topics the duo may delve into during their talk.
Location: Dia:Chelsea, 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
Price: $10 general admission
Time: 6:30 p.m.
—Rain Embuscado
Alma Thomas, Mars Dust (1972). Courtesy Whitney Museum.
4. Mike Cloud, Leslie Hewitt, and Erick N. Mack, “Artists on Artists Panel Discussion” at the Studio Museum in Harlem
On the occasion of Alma Thomas’s current presentation of color field paintings at the Studio Museum in Harlem, artists Mike Cloud, Leslie Hewitt, and Eric Mack will discuss her legacy in this week’s “Artists on Artists” panel discussion. The three artists—all of whom bring distinct practices and unique concerns—will consider the late artist’s work as a formalist, “exploring works from every period in her dynamic career, including rarely exhibited sketches, watercolors and early abstractions, as well as her signature canvases.”
Location: 144 West 125th Street
Price: $7 adult suggested
Time: 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.
—Rain Embuscado
The New York State Pavilion. Courtesy of the City Reliquary.
5. “Life of an American Ruin: Philip Johnson’s New York State Pavilion” at the City Reliquary
Despite being one of Queens’s most iconic landmarks, the New York State Pavilion has sadly fallen into disrepair. Following the Queens Museum‘s “New York State Pavilion Ideas Competition Exhibit,” which contemplated a future rebirth for the structure, the City Reliquary makes the case for the importance of modern-day ruins, with photographs capturing the pavilion’s beauty both in its heyday and today.
Location: City Reliquary, 370 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception Saturday, October 1, 7:00 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Friday, September 30:
GALA Committee, HIV Pillow with STD Video Sleeves. Courtesy Red Bull Studios.
6. “TOTAL PROOF: The GALA Committee 1995–1997” at Red Bull Studios
Between 1995 and 1997, artist Mel Chin and the so-called GALA Committee (consisting of other artists that he assembled) arranged with the producers of the cult favorite television show Melrose Place to swap out props with site-specific art objects on the set, turning it into a wide-reaching platform for public art and becoming something of a conceptual art project itself.
TOTAL PROOF is the first comprehensive New York presentation of the artworks, which addressed sociopolitical issues at the time. (The evidence can still be seen in syndicated re-runs of Melrose Place.) The show will be part archive and part film set, and will include a pool, of course.
Location: 220 West 18th Street
Price: Free
Time: 12:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m.
—Eileen Kinsella
Saturday, October 1:
Gender Representation. Courtesy Untitled Symposium.
7. Announcing the Untitled (Gender and Representation) Symposium at the School of Visual Arts
Kate Bornstein, Zackary Drucker, Grace Dunham, Zanele Muholi, Ethan James Green, Ron Gregg, and M. Lamar are among the participants in this day-long symposium, which looks to explore how our conversations about and conceptions of gender have changed in recent years. Panels will discuss such topics as fashion and gender, queer history and photography, transfeminism, and “gender outlaws.”
Location: SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street
Price: $40 VIP, $25 general admission, $10 student
Time: 9:30 a.m.–7:00 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
Ernst Mumenthaler. Typenmöbel (Standardized furniture) (1929). Courtesy MoMA.
8. “How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior” at Museum of Modern Art
MoMA’s new exhibition mainly draws from its Architecture and Design collection, which was founded in the 1930s. Its focus, which also happens to be the title of the exhibition, is one of those grand, unanswerable questions along the lines of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? or Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, and it slots historically between those two examples.
Instead of relying on masterpieces of interior design, the exhibition promises to explore “the complex collaborations, materials, and processes that have shaped the modernist interior,” roughly in the years between 1920 and 1950. This means a variety of work from Lilly Reich, Mies van der Rohe, Grete Lihotzky, Ray and Charles Eames, and Charlotte Perriand, among others. Fascinatingly, too, it will look at the designers’ own living spaces.
Location: 11 West 53rd Street
Price: $25 adult
Time: 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
—Jonathon Sturgeon
Deborah Kass at the Armory Show in 2007.
Photo A. Scott/Patrick McMullan.
9. Lecture/Q&A, “Deborah Kass’s Art History: Before and After Queer Theory” at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
Artist Deborah Kass has been busy this election season. One of her more recent projects involved a Warhol-esque anti-Trump print in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. This week, she’s teaming up with gender and sexuality scholar Ted Triandos, who will deliver a lecture on the artist’s work, detailing “how Kass’s paintings launch a queer theoretical critique” in contemporary art.
Location: 26 Wooster Street
Price: Free
Time: 12:00–2:00 p.m.
—Rain Embuscado