Your Guide to a Sexy, Artsy, Non-Boring Valentine’s Day in NYC
A Brooklyn zine fair, an exhibition on sex and cults, and other activities to spend the day with your lover, your polycule, or just yourself.
Although our sugary contemporary Valentine’s Day traditions are a far cry from its brutal origins in Ancient Roman sacrifice and martyrdom, it’s not uncommon for February 14 to inspire a little pain. It’s an occasion to reflect on romantic love, and with that comes the pressure to externalize such musings, from planning the perfect date to avoiding all plans in defiance of the social code.
This year, we suggest letting the city’s whims define your day. Yes, love is in the air. But get out of your head and let artists be your guide. It’s just a Saturday with a high probability of finding free heart-shaped candy. Below are 10 art-adjacent cultural activities that will immerse you in visual worlds spanning the spectrum of desire, sex, devotion, and care.
An Exhibition About Sex and Cults
Finally, an activity you can bring the whole polycule to. The Museum of Sex’s Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in American Cults and Communes examines 20 historical “intentional communities,” from the Shakers to the Cockettes to lesbian land-back communes. More than 300 artifacts, photos, films, and garments help explore how spirituality and sexuality worked together to create powerful ideas about transcendence and self-actualization, philosophies relevant to how we live today. As curator Jodi Wille said in a 2013 interview, “Oh man, there is so much of our history that is so empowering that just isn’t explored by mainstream or even indie culture.”
Nightlife Ephemera at Dover Street Market
For true graphic design nerds, the chance to see a collection of rare ’70s and ’80s NYC nightlife print material might be far more exciting than a handwritten card from a lover. As Wrong Answer founder and show curator Geoff Snack says, “We look to the past to explore design that got it wrong in exactly the right way.” Saturday’s opening reception, from 3 to 5 pm, includes a panel discussion featuring James Harris from the menswear podcast Throwing Fits, vintage seller Emma Rogue, and Bradley Carbone of street culture magazine SNEEZE. They’ll be talking all about reference culture — what it is, why the past has become conspicuous in the present moment, and what’s next. Note: RSVPs are necessary; email RSVP@dsm-ny.com.
Writers Against the War on Gaza's Reading and Raffle
The good people of WAWOG, a group advocating for a cultural front in support of Palestine, have organized a community event that will satisfy the most radical of lovers. At the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division in Chelsea, poet Eileen Myles, poet and critic Shiv Kotecha, and artist and oral historian Tamara Santibañez will read texts about love in all its iterations: romantic, communal, and revolutionary. A raffle includes original works by artists Vijay Masharani and Mae Howard, and merch from Parapraxis and Lux magazines. Proceeds will be donated to a local fund for Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees and The Sameer Project’s Ramadan Campaign.
“Ask for a Love Note” at Brooklyn Museum
Have you ever secretly wanted to approach one of the typewriter poets one finds stationed in high-traffic tourist areas, but didn’t want to reveal yourself as too earnest? No? Just me? All afternoon at the Brooklyn Museum, someone can fulfill the dream of playing muse to a member of the Poetry Society of New York. Tell one of the poets on the 4th and 5th floors a little bit about yourself and receive a custom ode to take home. And if you need a last-minute gift idea, feed the poet information about your date.
8Ball Zine Fair and Afterparty
Community radio station 8Ball brings their legendary zine fair to new-ish Bushwick event space Life World, where 43 exhibitors will hawk their printed matter wares from 2 to 7 pm. Look out for Hyperallergic-recommended Shadowbanned Magazine, Misplaced Press, and Pearl Slug Studio, and post up at the DIY valentine-making and tarot tables. Find a nearby restaurant chill enough to not require reservations — Tortilleria Los Hermanos on Starr Street is a good bet — and come back at 9 pm for the afterparty featuring six DJs, a confessional booth, even more tarot, and something called “speed hating.”
Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product at MoMA PS1
With only two more weeks to catch Vaginal Davis’s sprawling MoMA PS1 exhibition that collects ephemera and installations from five decades of her practice, V-Day feels like the perfect opportunity to sink into her world of creative, gender-confounding camp. The artist, once described in Hyperallergic as the “fairy godmother of the Los Angeles queercore scene,” offers myriad explicit references for a holiday that tends to see a spike in Americans’ sexual activity. The showstopper, “The Wicked Pavilion: Tween Bedroom” (2021), features an erect phallus the size of a body, tucked in a rotating twin bed and surrounded by extreme girly-girl pink and frills.
Women’s History Museum at Amant
A tragic take on romance can be found at nonprofit arts center Amant in Brooklyn, whose winter program ends Sunday. The creative duo dubbed Women’s History Museum is showing their first institutional exhibition in the United States, Grisette à l'enfer, or “Grisette in Hell,” featuring bespoke garments, sculpture, print, and video that trace the entanglements of femininity, labor, and value. Towering platform heels, shattered glass, and 18th-century mannequins on loan from The Metropolitan Museum of Art create a narrative about the Belle Époque-era grisette figure, a lower-class garment worker who has historically been erased. Come away with new feelings about capitalism and material desire on one of the major consumerist days of the year.
Film Forum's Tenement Stories Series
Sometimes the best way to celebrate a day about love is to sit in a dark theater and let someone show you how it used to be. From February 6 through February 26, Film Forum presents 50 movies spanning 100 years of American moviemaking, in association with the Tenement Museum. For Valentine’s Day, the theater dug up prints and 4K restorations of Rafter Romance (1932), starring Ginger Rogers and Norman Foster in a romantic comedy charming enough to forgive the pro-landlord propaganda; Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928), in which a sidewalk tintype portrait photographer develops a crush on a secretary who works for MGM Newsreels; and, of course, the crème de la crème that is Leonard Bernstein’s and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story (1961).
Shop for Vintage Valentines and Bespoke Millinery
On any given day, new concept store Surrender Dorothy, founded by multihyphenate tastemakers Leah Hennessey, Ruby McCollister, and Arabella Aldrich, is a source of opulent visual inspiration and an index of underground designers and craftspeople to watch. But this weekend, the Flatiron space painted Wicked-Witch-green boasts a special trove of vintage Valentine’s postcards plus millinery — that's hats and headware — from Sideara St. Claire.
Further downtown, Climax Books brings in “tableware universe” Gohar World to curate a shelf of titles on food design. Flip through Magic in Frosting by John McNamara and Rude Food by David Thorpe while nibbling on heart-shaped treats.
¡Bailamos! at Museum of the City of New York
Scarred by awkward middle school Valentine’s Day dances? The Museum of the City of New York can help you make some new memories with its salsa and mambo night. Trombonist Jimmy Bosch and the Salsa Masters bring the music, and Alvin Ailey Extension leads dance move tutorials. Sneaking away from the dance floor is also allowed; the museum exhibition space is open late, including a show all about dance, a selection of Robert Rauschenberg works, and Joe Macken’s TikTok-viral miniature New York made from balsa wood and Elmer’s glue, shown in public for the first time.
