Martin Wong, “Brainwashing Cult Cons Top TV Stars” (1981), acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 in, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Gift of JP Morgan Chase (image courtesy the Bronx Museum of the Arts)
This week, don’t miss a museum retrospective for Martin Wong, festivals devoted to comics and text-sound poetry, a Gordon Parks photo series about segregation, and much more.
Martin Wong Retrospective
When: Opens Wednesday, November 4
Where: Bronx Museum of the Arts (1040 Grand Concourse, Concourse, Bronx)
We’ve been anticipating this show since September, and now it’s finally here: the first posthumous museum retrospective for prolific artist Martin Wong. Unlike recent exhibitions that have focused on Wong’s collecting habits, Martin Wong: Human Instamatic will delve into his painting practice, considering both his formal talents and his use of the medium as a way of engaging with the communities around him (in line with other artists before him such as Marsden Hartley and Alice Neel). Sixteen years after his death, it’s a view that’s long overdue.
Urban Poverty After Riis
When: Wednesday, November 4, 6:30pm
Where: Museum of the City of New York (1220 Fifth Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan)
The Museum of the City of New York recently opened an extensive retrospective of the life and work of Jacob Riis, a journalist, photographer, and social reform advocate in turn-of-the-century New York City. Riis considered himself a writer and advocate foremost, but using the new technology of photography he visualized poverty in a powerful, enduring way. This discussion considers the importance of his legacy in the present-day city, which faces its own issues of housing and income inequality. The panel is led by historian Daniel Czitrom, with Andrew Elliott, a journalist with the New York Times; Mark Levitan, formerly director of poverty research at the Center for Economic Opportunity; Nancy Wackstein, executive director of United Neighborhood Houses; and historian Craig Steven Wilder. —AM
Segregation Story
When: Opens Wednesday, November 4
Where: Salon 94 Freemans (1 Freeman Alley, Lower East Side, Manhattan)
Earlier this year, the High Museum of Art exhibited Gordon Park‘s Segregation Story (1956), a series of images commissioned and published in LIFE magazine under the title “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” Instead of documenting scenes of protest and violence, Parks chose to capture the insidiousness of state-sanctioned racism by focusing his lens on everyday moments and interactions in Mobile, Alabama. The High Museum show was made possible after the Gordon Parks Foundation rediscovered Parks’s long-lost transparencies. This week, all 26 photographs from the published essay will be exhibited at Salon 94’s Freeman space — apparently the first time they’ve been displayed together in New York. —TM
Gordon Parks, “Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-shopping, Mobile, Alabama” (1956), archival pigment print, 30 x 30 in (image courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation and Salon 94, New York)
Decomposing Hierarchies
When: Thursday, November 5, 7–10pm
Where: Manhattan Bridge Anchorage, (DUMBO Brooklyn)
Hyperallergic contributor Sarah Walko is also the director of arts programming at Marble House Project, and this Thursday night she’s organized a night of videos with contributions from a number of the project’s artist residents. Screening outdoors, on the Manhattan Bridge anchorage in Dumbo, the program focuses on one of my favorite topics for artistic rumination: deconstructing outdated hierarchies and systems. Contributions include an homage to the swamps of the American South by Anne Senstad, a Jeannette Ehlers piece inspired by the Haitian revolution and filmed on location in Haiti, Catherine Page-Harris’s trans-species dining experiment (which we recently covered), and more.
Get Schooled by Radical Scholars
When: Saturday, November 7, 11am–5:30pm
Where: The New School (66 West 12th Street, West Village, Manhattan)
How can artists and radical thinkers break out of the cycle of standard scholarship and cloistered collegiate communication? The 10 speakers participating in this daylong symposium, “In Service to Nothing: Intellectual Inquiry in the Open” — who include new media artist Marina Zurkow, Michael Berger of the shadowy Iron Garters Crime Art Collective, and artist and Hyperallergic contributor Joseph Nechvatal — practice modes of thinking and making that forego fusty academic contexts and conventions to achieve a more open and accessible critical discourse. —BS
Comic Arts Brooklyn
(image via Facebook)
When: Saturday, November 7 & Sunday, November 8, 11am–7pm
Where: Mt. Carmel Gymnasium (12 Havemeyer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
Williamsburg comics shop Desert Island presents this annual extravaganza, featuring more than 100 artists, illustrators, cartoonists, and publishers hawking their wares, plus an official afterparty at Secret Project Robot. And this year, in addition to the books-and-prints bonanza, there’s a part two: artist talks and panels all day Sunday at the Wythe Hotel, including Daniel Clowes interviewed by New York Times critic Naomi Fry and Art Spiegelman discussing children’s comics. Plus there are satellite events all week, from a screening series at Spectacle Theater to art exhibitions at Wayfarers Gallery and Cotton Candy Machine. —OL
A Festival of Text-Sound Poetry
When: Saturday, November 7–Tuesday, November 10
Where: Goethe-Institut (30 Irving Place, Gramercy, Manhattan) and Wendy’s Subway (722 Metropolitan Avenue, 2nd floor, Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
This four-day festival, organized in part by Issue Project Room, will trace the 100-year history of text-sound poetry through a series of lectures, listening sessions, and performances, in addition to exploring the definition and state of the form today. The program features a diverse array of artists from around the world, including poet and PennSound co-director Charles Bernstein, media artist Marc Matter, and experimental sound artist Anton Bruhin. Throughout the festival, Wendy’s Subway library will also be open for attendees to browse related audio and printed matter. —CV
Centennial of the Armenian Genocide
When: Monday, November 9, 6pm
Where: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Film Center at NYU, Theater 101 (36 East 8th Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan)
Visual artist Silvina Der-Meguerditshian, photographer Diana Markosian, and novelist Nancy Kricorian are some of the most engaging artists of the global Armenian diaspora. They tell stories and create images that soothe pain, heal wounds, and explore new incarnations of a culture that’s one of the oldest in the world. This year, the centennial of the Armenian Genocide (an event that pushed jurist Raphael Lemkin to coin the word “genocide”), artists have been at the forefront of marking the occasion by reflecting on the role of memory. I was delighted that they asked me to moderate this discussion. —HV
* * *
With contributions by Oriana Leckert, Allison Meier, Tiernan Morgan, Benjamin Sutton, Hrag Vartanian, and Claire Voon
