Art Rx
This week the doctor is prescribing a good, strong dose of Manhattan, to help balance out the effects of last weekend's jam-packed Bushwick Open Studios.
This week the doctor is prescribing a good, strong dose of Manhattan, to help balance out the effects of last weekend’s jam-packed Bushwick Open Studios. She’s focused on healing your more official, institutional ailments, so a lot of museums are in the mix — lunchtime poems at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a VHS celebration at the Museum of Arts and Design, and a panel discussion about Keith Haring at the Brooklyn Museum. And while you’re on the island, she’s sending you to Chelsea for openings of some of the more interesting group shows that clog the art world’s summer schedule. But don’t worry — she hasn’t forgotten about the rest of the boroughs! A festival of old cartoons at the Observatory should keep you from having hunger pains for Brooklyn eccentricity.
Brooklyn Shelf Life
When: Thursday, June 7, 6–8pm
Where: Printed Matter (195 Tenth Avenue, Chelsea, Manhattan)
Three awesome arts organizations — Showpaper, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and Printed Matter — are teaming up for this yearlong project, Brooklyn Shelf Life, which celebrates print, art and printed art and kicks off with a festive event on Thursday night. The actual installation will be located on the streets around BAM, where five artist-made sculptural news boxes will house both Showpaper and a curated selection of independently printed work. Long live DIY! (With a little help from bigger friends like BAM.)
Immersive Words
When: Opens Thursday, June 7, 6–8pm
Where: Magnan Metz Gallery (521 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)
Magnan Metz has built a solid reputation as a gallery that shows adventurous, often complicated work by lesser-known artists. For this solo exhibition, Generative Lexicon, artist James Case-Leal riffs on linguistic theory by Noam Chomsky in an attempt to explore the connections between language and social relations. The artist will construct three chambers representing different aspects of the human psyche, performing inside the central one on opening night.
Young Curators, New Ideas
When: Opens Thursday, June 7, 6–9pm
Where: Meulensteen (511 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)
The art world in summer is a time of group shows and more group shows, and though they’re generally pretty hit or miss, there are always a few that manage to do something more interesting with the format. Meulensteen’s Young Curators, New Ideas gathers not just artists but curators — 12 of them — into a two-floor sprawl of stimulating and organized chaos.
Lunch Poems
When: Friday, June 8, 12pm, free with museum admission
Where: Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan)
Poet Frank O’Hara lived in New York at a time when the poetry and art worlds overlapped much more than they do today. In addition to writing poems, O’Hara was an art critic, and he had friendships with Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and other artists and worked at the Museum of Modern Art (originally at the front desk). MoMA pays tribute to him with a lunchtime reading of some of his lunchtime poems, which he wrote while wandering through midtown on breaks from the museum.
The Big — No, Little Picture
When: Opens Friday, June 8, 4–6pm
Where: Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (530 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, Manhattan)
Some Hyperallergic readers may know how we feel about big art these days, so we couldn’t be more excited for this group show at Sikkema Jenkins. Riffing on its title, The Big Picture, the exhibition showcases the work of eight painters who work almost entirely on a small or modest scale, including Josephine Halvorson, Ryan McLaughlin and Robert Bordo.
Going Retro with VHS
When: Friday, June 8, 7pm, $10 ($7 members and students)
Where: Museum of Arts and Design (2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan)
After the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) hosted a program devoted to the work of David Bowie last summer, we didn’t think it could do much to top itself. But lo and behold: on Friday night MAD kicks off a series devoted to the most beloved of all crappy media forms, the VHS tape. The event is a screening of underground exploitation film Something Weird, whose plot features LSD, psychic phenomena, a kung fu socialite and more, and later in the summer, MAD will host work-out-video parties and a video rental store in the museum.
Vintage Cartoon Carnival
When: Friday, June 8, 7:30–9:30pm, $12
Where: The Observatory (543 Union Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn)
For those who love the weird, the old and the NYC-related, the Obscura Society (real-world extension of the website Atlas Obscura) offers the 10th Tom Stathes Cartoon Carnival. The event will feature early animated cartoons made in New York between the 1910s and the 1940s, all screened in 16mm format on a projector. A rare chance to see some vintage amazingness.
Bionic Garden
When: Opens Saturday June 9, 1–4pm
Where: Flux Factory (39-31 28th Street, Long Island City, Queens)
Flux Factory’s latest exhibition explores the unlikely ways and places in which people have grown plants — a perfect topic for New York City, where we’re always in need of more greenery and rooftop and backyard gardens abound. The press release promises “indoor lawns,” “crops that tweet when they’re in need of water,” and “vertiginous grass,” among other things. Like so many Flux shows, this one should get you thinking creatively.
Keith Haring’s Language
When: Sunday, June 10, 2pm, $12 ($8 for students and seniors)
Where: Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn)
In conjunction with its current Keith Haring exhibition, the Brooklyn Museum hosts a panel discussion focusing on how the artist developed his own language system and used it throughout his work. Speakers include art historian Dr. Robert Farris Thompson, artist John Ahearn, graffiti artist and designer Eric Haze and visual culture scholar Dr. Martin Irvine.
Last Chance: Cindy Sherman
When: Close Saturday, June 9, and Monday, June 11
Where: Metro Pictures (519 West 24th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan), and Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan)
If you haven’t seen the queen of contemporary photography’s retrospective at MoMA or her latest large-scale works at Metro Pictures, this is your last chance! Love them or hate them, Sherman’s disconcerting and often darkly comic self-portraits are already part of the art-historical canon, and the exhibition at MoMA offers a chance to follows the trajectory of the artist’s continual transformations.
