Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. See them below. 

Tuesday, September 10–Wednesday, October 16

Photo courtesy of Thank God for Abortion and Viva Ruiz.

1. “Abortion Is Normal” at Project for Empty Space

Project for Empty Space launches a new multipart exhibition series “Abortion Is Normal,” as a response to the renewed political attacks on a woman’s right to chose. The gallery has teamed with activist collective group Shout Your Abortion to present the work of artists Christen Clifford, Dominique Duroseau, Yvette Molina, and Viva Ruiz + Thank God For Abortion.

Location: Project for Empty Space, 2 Gateway Center Gallery, Newark
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Monday–Friday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Tuesday, September 10–Saturday, October 19

Anni Albers, detail of Camino Real (1968). Courtesy of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, David Zwirner.

In the gallery’s first show of Anni Albers’s work since David Zwirner announced representation of the artist’s estate, Albers’s complex works will be on view in all their geometric glory. A highlight is Albers’s 10-foot-high wall hanging Camino Real, from 1968, seen for the first time outside its home in Mexico City, and revealing the impact Latin American culture had on the artist’s work.

Location: David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Caroline Goldstein

Wednesday, September 11

Louisa Chase, Untitled (1981). Courtesy of Hirschl and Adler.

3. Gallery Night at the Fuller Building

Eight dealers in the Fuller Building are teaming up to hold their fall openings in concert and remind the art world why the Art Deco architectural gem has historically been a gallery hub. Highlights will include six decades worth of prints by Ed Ruscha at David Benrimon Fine Art and neo-expressionist painter Louisa Chase—currently the subject of an exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill—at Hirschl and Adler.

Location: The Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street
Price: Free
Time: 6 p.m.–8 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Qinza Najm, Tabdeeli (2017-19). Photo courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.

4. “Performance & Artist Talk with Qinza Najm” at A.I.R. Gallery

A.I.R. celebrates a trio of fall openings with a performance of Qinza Najm’s Tabdeeli, Urdu for “transformation.” The work, which debuted at the Queens Museum in 2017, features video projections, a soundtrack, and five dancers encased in translucent fabric, representing the restrictions presented by various political and social taboos.

Location: A.I.R. Gallery, 155 Plymouth St, Brooklyn
Price: Free
Time: 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, September 12

Artisan gold-mining tunnel, Andes, Peru, 2016. © Lisa Barnard. Courtesy of the artist and MACK.

5. Lisa Barnard, The Canary and The Hammer Talk and Signing at Printed Matter

Lisa Barnard’s newest book, The Canary and The Hammer (MACK, 2019), blends documentary photography, text, and archival materials to look at humanity’s continued obsession with gold and the lengths we go to obtain it—even as the materiality of wealth becomes increasingly abstracted in our technocapitalist world. Barnard will present a talk on the project at the book’s launch party, hosted by Printed Matter.

Location: Printed Matter, 231 11th Avenue
Price: Free
Time: Thursday, 6 p.m.–8 p.m

—Taylor Dafoe

Culture Canon presents The Crow. Courtesy of Culture Canon.

6. The Crow Screening and Q&A at Nitehawk Cinema

Culture Canon, a new roving film screening series curated by Jon Hogan, launches with an ode to the 25th anniversary of The Crow, perhaps best known for the on-set death of star Brandon Lee. Following a 35mm screening, Hogan will lead a Q&A with Bruce Lee biographer Matthew Polly.

Location: Nitehawk Cinema, 188 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn
Price: $18
Time: 7:15 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, September 12–Sunday, September 15, Thursday, September 19–Sunday, September 22

Elizabeth D. Herman and Celeste Sloman, “Redefining Representation: The Women of the 116th Congress.” Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

7. Photoville at Brooklyn Bridge Park

For the eighth straight year, Photoville sets up shop under the Brooklyn Bridge, parking shipping containers and turning them into art galleries to create an immersive photography village. The New York Times will present “Redefining Representation: The Women of the 116th Congress,” a project by photojournalist Elizabeth D. Herman and photographer Celeste Sloman documenting the 131 women currently serving in Congress.

Location: Brooklyn Bridge Park
Price: Free
Time: Thursday and Friday, 4 p.m.–10 p.m.; Saturday, 12 p.m.–10 p.m.; Sunday, 12 p.m.–8 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, September 12–Thursday, October 12

Erik Mark Sandberg, Jello, 2019.

8. “DREAMstate” at GR Gallery

Opening on Bowery this Thursday at GR Gallery is “DREAMstate,” a group show featuring artists Joseph Lee, Erik Mark Sandberg, Dennis Osadebe, and Joshua Vides. All are exhibiting with the gallery for the first time but I’m most looking forward to Sandberg’s works. His fuzzy and gelatinous textures are a sensory experience akin to slime oozing onto Oppenheim’s cup and saucer.

Location: 255 Bowery
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–9 p.m.; Wednesday–Sunday, 12 p.m.–7 p.m.

—Cristina Cruz

François Chaignaud, Дyми Moï (Dumy Moyi). Photo ©Ilaria Scarpa.

9. “Crossing the Line Festival” from the French Institute Alliance Française

The French Institute Alliance Française’s annual arts festival features French and American artists, including Pierre Huyghe, who is presenting his video installation The Host and the Cloud at the FIAF galleries on East 60th Street; and choreographer Jérôme Bel, with the US premiere of Isadora Duncan, inspired by the famed dancer’s autobiography, My Life.

Location: Six venues across the city
Price: Prices vary, some events are free with RSVP
Time: Hours vary

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, September 12–Saturday, October 19

A Joe Massey drawing. Courtesy of Ricco/Maresca.

10. “Shut Up: Joe Massey’s Messages from Prison” at Ricco/Maresca

A mysterious figure of the Outsider Art field, African American artist and poet Joe Massey was serving time for murder in the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus when the surrealist magazine View began printing his submissions, alongside works by the likes of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Ricco/Maresca presents a selection of drawings, mostly done in black or blue pen, created during Massey’s nearly 16-year incarceration. The artist’s later life is shrouded in mystery.

Location: Ricco/Maresca, 529 West 20th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Friday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, September 12–Saturday, October 20

11. “Annie Morris” at Timothy Taylor

British artist Annie Morris’s first show with Timothy Taylor features new tapestry works as well as her precariously stacked spherical sculptures, formed from plaster and sand and painted with ultramarine, viridian, and ochre pigments that the artist has hand-sourced.

Location: Timothy Taylor, 515 West 19th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Friday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Thursday, September 12–Saturday, October 26

Hannah Van Bart, Face to Face (2018). Image courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery.

12.”Hannah Van Bart: Places and Beings” at Marianne Boesky Gallery

This marks the sixth solo show of work by Amsterdam-based artist Hannah Van Bart and the selection of new paintings—landscapes, portraits, and still-life scenes—feature her signature moody palette and often mysterious imagery. Van Bart is known for skillfully melding figural and abstract styles to convey both the physical imagery and psychological sense of people and places..

Location: 507 West 24th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Eileen Kinsella

Thursday, September 12–Saturday, November 2

Flowers Gallery, Aleah Chapin, We Held the Mountains on Our Shoulders (2017).

13. “Aleah Chapin: What Happens at the Edge” at Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery is starting the fall season with a bang with a solo show of New York Academy of Art alumna Aleah Chapin. Chapin juxtaposes soft, nude female figures against the rigidity of rocks and other natural formations in these large, monochromatic paintings in an effort to explore a “world concerned with ‘in-betweenness and edges.'”

Location: Flowers Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, third floor
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Neha Jambhekar

Friday, September 13

Agathe Snow and Marianne Vitale, Customers (2019). Photo courtesy of the Elaine de Kooning House.

14. “Double Vision: Agathe Snow & Marianne Vitale” Closing Reception at the Elaine de Kooning House

Artists and frequent collaborators Marianne Vitale and Agathe Snow spent the month of August creating work in residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton. The resulting exhibition is a multimedia explosion, with figurative paintings as well as sculptural installations, including a piece made from car bumpers left behind by John Chamberlain, who lived in the house after Elaine de Kooning. The artists have also built a bar in the basement, which they’ve been using to serve drinks—including Casa Dragones tequila—during a series of parties and events, all culminating with a closing party this weekend during the Bridge, an invitation-only art and car show in nearby Bridgehampton.

Location: The Elaine de Kooning House, 55 Alewive Brook Road, East Hampton
Price: Free with RSVP
Time: Closing reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Inspectors on the roof of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Photo: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images.

15. “Restoring Notre Dame: A Look at the Digital Scans That Could Help” at the Frick Collection

In the wake of the devastating fire that burned the spire of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, Lindsay Cook, a visiting assistant professor at Vassar College’s art department in Poughkeepsie, New York, presents high-resolution 3-D laser scans of the historic church conducted by the late architectural historian Andrew Tallon beginning in 2010. Cook will explain how this near-complete digital record of the building is assisting in the restoration efforts.

Location: The Frick Collection, Music Room, 1 East 70th Street
Price: Free
Time: 4 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Opening Friday, September 13

Janiva Ellis, Something Anxiety (2017). Courtesy of 47 Canal.

16. “Janiva Ellis” at 47 Canal

One unmissable highlight of the 2019 Whitney Biennial was Janiva Ellis’s Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet (2019), a 20-foot-long show-stopper of a painting depicting a woman with child busting through an oil-slicked neon river against a crimson sky. The deafening praise made it easy to forget that Ellis, who is 32, has had just one New York solo show in her career, and it was just two years ago. Her second opens Friday at the star-making Lower East Side outfit 47 Canal. There’s little information about what’s in store, but hopefully we will get another set of grandly scaled, psychedelically tinged paintings.

Location: 47 Canal, 291 Grand Street, Second Floor
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Nate Freeman 

Friday, September 13–Sunday, October 20

17. “Holly Village” at Bodega

A strange and delightful press release accompanies “Holly Village,” a group show opening Friday at Bodega, on the Lower East Side. Instead of the normal abstract artspeak, curator James Michael Shaeffer describes, at great length, the series of unlikely events that led him to put together the show—starting with a chance encounter with artists at, of all places, a sports bar in the East Village where he was watching an NBA Finals game. “Unwittingly, this sports bar had managed to attract a gaggle of MFAs,” he writes. From there, Shaeffer describes how he chose works by Whitney Claflin, Trisha Baga, Greg Parma Smith, and Lutz Bacher, among others for the stacked group show, and in a meta note, he also describes the process behind the press release itself. The first set of eyes to read it was his mother.

Location: Bodega, 167 Rivington Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Wednesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Nate Freeman

Friday, September 13–Saturday, October 26

Tali Lennox, The Ballad of Linda Leven (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Meredith Rosen Gallery.

18. “Tali Lennox: The Ballad of Linda Leven” at Meredith Rosen Gallery

For her first solo exhibition with Meredith Rosen, Tali Lennox presents a series of portraits that mash up real New York subjects with fantastical representations of the (often forlorn) personal mythologies they’ve manifested. Inspired by the haunting allegorical imagery of Brassaï and Otto Dix, Lennox captures the eerie beauty of ravaged hopes, as well as the weirdly alluring aftermath of entire lives lived in excess on the societal fringes of modern America.

Location: Meredith Rosen Gallery, 11 East 80th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Normal hours, Tuesday–Saturday, noon–6 p.m.

—Tim Schneider

Friday, September 13–Saturday, November 2

Aliza Nisenbaum, Jenna and Moises (2018). Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery.

19. “Aliza Nisenbaum: Coreografias” at Anton Kern Gallery

After her star turn at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Aliza Nisenbaum is making her New York gallery debut at Anton Kern with a new suite of portraits and raucously colorful canvases. The works are born from Nisenbaum’s interaction with community groups as an activist, and that level of intimacy and investment in her subjects shows.

Location: Anton Kern Gallery, 16 East 55th Street
Price: Free
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Caroline Goldstein

Saturday, September 14

Suzy Kellems Dominik, I Can Feel. Photo courtesy of BFA.

20. “Tracing Feminism” at Brooklyn Bridge Park

Suzy Kellems Dominik’s neon sculpture I Can Feel, a celebration of the female orgasm, a hit during Art Basel Miami Beach back in 2017, has touched down in Brooklyn Bridge Park courtesy of Chashama. To celebrate the opening, the artist is holding a conversation with Jasmine Wahi, founder and co-director of Newark’s Project for Empty Space and Kathleen Landy, founder and president of the Feminist Institute; moderated by arts publicist Ellie Hayworth.

Location: One Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn
Price: Free with RSVP
Time: 2 p.m.–4 p.m.

—Sarah Cascone

Sunday, September 15–Monday, December 16, 2019

Christian Nyampeta, “Words after the World” installation view, Camden Arts Centre, 2017. Photo: Damian Griffiths.

21. “École du Soir (The Evening Academy)” at SculptureCenter

At SculptureCenter, Rwandan-born artist Christian Nyampeta takes the institution’s prompt, “thinking Africa” then and now, to consider the idea of an “evening school,” as well as functional communal objects.

Location: 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City
Price: $10 suggested donation
Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.; Thursday–Monday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

—Caroline Goldstein