8 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8

Screening: A One Man Show at The Kitchen
Dirty Looks, the bicoastal queer platform for film, video, and performance, brings Grace Jones’s 1982 concert video collaboration with photographer Jean-Paul Goude to The Kitchen’s screen. The video, which is introduced by Tavia Nyong’o and Bradford Nordeen, combines rock antics with avant-garde theater, and stomps on traditional racial and gender stereotypes. Jones herself writes of the film, “It was about rejecting normal, often quite sentimental and conventionally crowd-pleasing ways of projecting myself as a black singer and female entertainer, because those ways had turned into clichés, which kept me pent up in a cage. I wanted to jolt the adult world that is traditionally left bland by white men, to shatter certain kinds of smugness through performance and theater.”
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 8 p.m. Tickets $10

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9

Talk: “Seasons of Loss: Racism and Resistance in the Cultural Field” at CP Projects Space
Organized by SVA’s M.A. Curatorial Practice program, this panel focuses on how racism and social critique impact the art world. Black Lives Matter, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and post-colonialist thinking will all be considered by the panelists—Jack Persekian, the founding director of the Palestinian Museum; artist and activist Kameelah Janan Rasheed; Anna Laura Stoler, an anthropology professor at the New School; and Nato Thompson, the chief curator of Creative Time. Steven Henry Madoff, a former executive editor of ARTnews and the M.A. Curatorial Practice program’s chair, will moderate.
CP Projects Space, 132 West 21st Street, 10th floor, 7–9 p.m., free with RSVP

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11

Lecture: Krista Thompson at Barnard College
For this lecture, titled “Black Light: Tom Lloyd, Lorraine O’Grady, and the Effect of Art Historical Disappearance,” art historian Krista Thompson will look at how certain figures get written out of history. According to a blurb on Barnard College’s site, Thompson is going to be doing the lecture in the style of O’Grady’s performances, in which she sometimes took on the character of Mlle. Bourgeois Noire. She’ll look specifically at the case of Lloyd, who, during the ’60s, was central to the New York art scene and has subsequently been forgotten.
The Diana Center, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, 6:30 p.m.

Opening: Barry Le Va at David Nolan Gallery
For his latest show, Barry Le Va will unveil a new floor sculpture. No word on what that sculpture will be, or what the drawings and studies presented around it will look like, but in the past, Le Va’s work has used broken glass, powdered chalk, and meat cleavers, among many other materials. Le Va began working during the late ’60s, around when Minimalism came to the fore, and his work has been loosely grouped with the Process art movement, in which the methods of getting to the final product are foregrounded.
David Nolan Gallery, 527 West 29th Street, 6–8 p.m.

 
Talk: “When Artists Speak Truth…” at The 8th Floor
In this talk, ACT UP’s Avram Finkelstein and Dyke Action Machine!’s Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner will discuss how to portray activist ideas with visuals. Finkelstein is best known for designing ACT UP’s famed “Silence=Death” poster, which struck a nerve at the time of the AIDS crisis. Meanwhile, Moyer and Schaffner have tackled the role of lesbians in the gay community. Three activist artists will discuss how best to visualize hot-button political issues, particularly ones that affect the LGBTQ community, with Sara Reisman, the artistic director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation.
The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, 6–8 p.m., free with RSVP to media@sdrubin.org

Opening: James White at Sean Kelly
James White’s images of objects—a locked door, a balloon, wine glasses—look like photographs from far away, but are actually finely wrought black-and-white paintings. Cropped and cut so that the images appear halved or compositionally stilted, White’s paintings look at how photographic images have changed how we think about paintings—his newest works are shaped like widescreen televisions, after all. In this new show, titled “ASPECT:RATIO,” White has begun combining images that seem to have nothing to do with one another. Fairly soon, however, our minds start constructing narratives about how an open door and a glass cabinet connect. When two photographic images are presented together, they give way to false realities.
Sean Kelly, 475 10th Avenue, 6–8 p.m.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14

Opening: Marcel Broodthaers at Museum of Modern Art
In 1968, Marcel Broodthaers began showing the installation Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, which was, as its French title implied, a display consisting solely of objects related to eagles. Broodthaers, a Belgian artist with a penchant for absurdist humor, had the installation travel from museum to museum and, in the process, made the institutions that showed the work look foolish. What kind of place would showcase a display of eagle trinkets as begin historically valuable? But then again, what kind of place would group art by styles just to create a historical trajectory? Broodthaers’s conceptual work, which takes its cues from Dada and Surrealism, anticipates institutional critique—it questioned why museums do what they do. Now, ironically, the artist gets his biggest museum show to date, and his first retrospective in New York ever. The show closely looks at Broodthaers’s 12-year career (he died in 1976, at age 40), moving from his decision to give up on writing poetry through his “décors,” installations that grouped Broodthaers’s past work with other artists’ work.—Alex Greenberger
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Performance: Sarah Ortmeyer and Andrew Wyatt at MoMA PS1
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, Sarah Ortmeyer has teamed up with Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt to create a 6-hour improvisational performance called Valium Valentine, which also features guest performers such as Lykke Li, Empress Of, and Charli XCX. At the top of every hour, female guests will perform a song composed especially by Wyatt, while Ortmeyer will have transformed the usual VW dome into a “planetarium of egg-shaped stars within a set that is as romantic as it is sad,” according to a release. The release also adds: “The audience is invited to join in a celebration of Valentine’s Day’s insipid power.”
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave., Queens, 12 p.m., tickets $15/13