ArtRx NYC

This week, three performers explore living in a black or brown body, Socrates Sculpture Park starts screening films outdoors, Brooklyn activists host a forum on gentrification and displacement, and more.

 Documenting Homophobic Violence

When: Tuesday, July 5, 7:30pm ($8)
Where: Light Industry (155 Freeman Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

In 1997, decades after he was attacked by a group of gay bashers in San Francisco, documentary filmmaker Arthur Dong set out to better understand homophobic violence by interviewing men convicted of murdering gay men. The resulting documentary, Licensed to Kill, takes on devastating relevance in the wake of the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. —CD

 I Call America

When: Tuesday, July 5, 7:30pm ($10)
Where: Fridman Gallery (287 Spring Gallery, SoHo, Manhattan)

Last summer, artist Matana Roberts developed i call america, which responded to the Whitney Museum’s inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See, with sound. Roberts’s exhibition at Fridman Gallery, featuring visual and video work, expands on the project and invites other performers, including artist duo Mendi and Keith Obadike, to improvise and respond to Roberts’s show and provide “their own takes on the contemporary state of the American ideal.” The Obadikes, known for their musical approach and online experiments, promise a unique evening of spoken word and electronics. —EWA

 Black and Brown Bodies in Motion

When: Wednesday, July 6, 7pm (free with RSVP)
Where: BRIC House (647 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn)

As part of BRIC’s new portraiture exhibition, Look up here, I’m in heaven, artists David Antonio Cruz, David Thomson, and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko will each perform a solo piece pointing out the various ways that people of color and queer people are made to feel either invisible or, conversely, highly visible and closely surveilled. Cruz’s performance, “How to Order a Chocolate Cake,” draws inspiration from the last writings of the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca; Thomson’s “Chimera” takes up and examines the power dynamics of race, gender, and appropriation in US culture; and Kosoko’s “the dialectic of light and dark” queers theatrical conventions to underline how gender and race are negotiated and performed. —BS

 Films Outdoors at Socrates

When: Begins Wednesday, July 6 
Where: Socrates Sculpture Park (32-01 Vernon Blvd, Long Island City, Queens)

Step away from your Netflix account and pack a picnic, because Socrates Sculpture Park’s annual outdoor international film festival is back for the summer. Every Wednesday evening through August 24, the park — in collaboration with Film Forum and Rooftop Films — will screen a movie featuring a different country or culture, set against the natural backdrop of the waterfront and Manhattan skyline. Of course, while you’re there, check out Socrates’s 30th-anniversary exhibition, LANDMARK, featuring work by Jessica Segall, Hank Willis Thomas, Meg Webster, and others. —CV

 Hand-built Kingdom of Funk

When: Closing reception Thursday, July 7, 6–8pm
Where: Recess (41 Grand Street, Soho, Manhattan)

Lauren Halsey has been at work at Recess for nearly two months now, turning the small Soho storefront into “an interplanetary liquid environment composed of hyperreal gardens, fantasy landscapes, and pools of beauty water.” Halsey used everyday materials like cardboard boxes and duct tape to construct the fourth iteration of her “Kingdom Splurge,” an environment of funk-fueled liberation. Revel it in this week before its gone, and if you attend the closing reception, pick up a copy of a mix CD made by Halsey and Sable Elyse Smith, who penned an accompanying essay that’s being published as the CD booklet.

 Independent Film Forum from DC

When: Friday, July 8–Sunday, July 10, 7:30pm
Where: Microscope Gallery (1329 Willoughby Avenue, Bushwick, Brooklyn)

Pam Kray, one of the founders of the independent film forum I AM EYE (1982–91), has teamed up with Bushwick’s Microscope Gallery to host a “mini-retrospective” of films produced by the forum’s members. Some of the best-known works to have been presented at the Washington, DC, series include Kray’s own “Penis Puppets” (1987) and John Heyn and Jeff Krulik’s “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” (1986). As explained in the show’s press release:

With a founding principle that no one bringing a movie to screen would be turned away, I AM EYE’s low-key and inclusive atmosphere allowed for a maverick programming that quickly expanded from locals to under-the-radar filmmakers from New York such as Nick Zedd and Richard Kern’s “Cinema of Transgression” movement, as well as from Baltimore, Boston, San Francisco, and even France and Germany.

—TM

 Zoning Scavenger Hunt

When: Saturday, July 9, 10am–7:30pm ($30, advance registration required)
Where: Begins at Open House New York (1133 Broadway, NoMad, Manhattan)

Get your best team of architecture aficionados together for the Zoning New York Scavenger Hunt, co-presented by Open House New York and the Museum of the City of New York to commemorate the centennial of the July 1916 Zoning Resolution. Your Setback Squad or Midtown Plaza Maestros (just throwing out some team name suggestions) will decipher clues that will take you to essential sites of zoning around New York City, where the size of a building and how much sky it claims was visibly regulated. The event comes ahead of the Mastering the Metropolis: New York and Zoning, 1916–2016 exhibition opening at the museum in November. —AM

 Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Forum

When: Sunday, July 10, 12–5pm
Where: Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn)

Back in November, the Brooklyn Museum rented out its space to the Brooklyn Real Estate Summit, whose schedule included attempts to answer such burning questions as, “Which emerging areas are primed for transformation?” Naturally, this pissed a lot of people off, and the result was a pair of protests on the day of the summit. The outcome of those was a promise from the museum that the activists could plan and host a “People’s Summit on Displacement and Gentrification” at the institution — a promise that was then broken, resulting in another protest. Finally, this Sunday, the long-awaited Brooklyn Community Forum on Anti-Gentrification and Displacement will happen, featuring performances, panels, a workshop, and more.

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With contributions by Elisa Wouk Almino, Carey Dunne, Allison Meier, Tiernan Morgan, Benjamin Sutton, and Claire Voon