9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 28

Exhibition: “Golden Kingdoms: Luxury & Legacy in the Ancient Americas” at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Traveling from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles as a part of the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, “Golden Kingdoms” will come this month to the Met. The show is comprised of over 300 objects from 52 lenders in 12 countries, and it focuses on the golden objects produced by the Incas, Aztecs, and their predecessors across the Americas. In some cases, the objects were meant for rituals; in others, they were simply beautiful symbols of wealth and worldliness. By drawing attention to moments when these peoples altered the ways gold could be worked, the exhibition highlights how materials were selected and transformed.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

THURSDAY, MARCH 1

Opening: Deana Lawson at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Hot off a memorable appearance in last year’s Whitney Biennial, where her works were shown alongside Henry Taylor’s paintings of police shootings and black families, Deana Lawson’s photographs will be shown at this exhibition. Lawson’s work plays with conventions of portrait photography and often features African-American sitters posed in middle-class homes. These new works continue Lawson’s exploration of how identity gets performed for the camera. In Soweto Queen (2018), for example, a nude woman poses suggestively on a blue couch, one hair pushing forward her big hair, as though she were in a fashion shoot.
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 530 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: “Outrageous Fortune: Jay DeFeo and Surrealism” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Featuring over 70 of the Beat generation artist’s works, “Outrageous Fortune” will showcase paintings, photographs, collages, and works on paper from Jay DeFeo’s oeuvre over the course of three decades, from 1955 to 1986. In a similar way to how the Dadaists and Surrealists invoked various symbolic emblems through unlike subjects, DeFeo’s juxtaposition of forms and mixed-media approaches messed with the role chance plays in art-making. The show will act as a teaser for New York audiences who can’t make it to Dijon, France, for a major survey of DeFeo’s work at Le Consortium.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, MARCH 2

Exhibition: Grant Wood at Whitney Museum
Though American Gothic (1930) is perhaps one of the most recognizable works of 20th-century American art, Grant Wood’s work encompasses far more than just a double portrait of a farmer and his wife. The artist’s Whitney retrospective, “Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables,” will feature over 40 paintings that span his career, along with earlier objects, murals, and book illustrations by the Regionalist artist. Though Wood depicted an idealized, harmonious rural American world, further examination of his work reveals a dark undercurrent in his work. Fittingly, the show will shed light on Wood’s little-known identity as a closeted gay man.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

Exhibition: “David Bowie Is…” at Brooklyn Museum
New York City marks the final stop of this globe-trotting survey dedicated to the late David Bowie—a fitting end, considering that the legendary musician and artist called the city home for the final twenty years of his life. Loaded with ephemera culled directly from the David Bowie Archives, the show features costumes, lyric sheets, album covers and a whole lot more. Everything is wrapped up in a multimedia installation that charts Bowie’s artistic development over the course of more than 50 years.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Book Launch: Craig Owens at New Museum
Published by Badlands Unlimited, Craig Owens: Portrait of a Young Critic is a newly revised version of a seminal interview given by the late critic, theorist, and Art in America senior editor Craig Owens to Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield in 1984. The interview—part of Blumenthal and Horsfield’s larger video series “On Art and Artists”—covers a wide range of topics, including the often-paradoxical relationship between contemporary art and politics, a timeless issue if there ever was one. The night of the launch, there will be a panel discussion moderated by Badlands Unlimited’s Paul Chan and New Museum director and curator of education and public engagement Johanna Burton.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Tickets $10/$15

Screening: Salt of the Earth at Brooklyn Academy of Music
The history behind the production and release of Salt of the Earth (1954) has almost overshadowed the film itself. Herbert Biberman’s film follows a group of Mexican-American miners who, along with their wives, strike, demanding equal rights to their white co-workers. Biberman and others who worked on the film had been blacklisted, and the film was promptly denounced by Congress upon its release. Its relevancy has caused it to endure, however. Here, it screens alongside a documentary about its production as part of a series about women in the work force on film.
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, 7 p.m. Tickets $15

SATURDAY, MARCH 3

Opening: Robert Mapplethorpe at Gladstone Gallery
For its first Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition since it started representing the photographer’s estate, Gladstone Gallery has brought on a notable guest curator: the artist Roe Ethridge. Mapplethorpe’s slick black-and-white photographs of celebrities, flowers, and fetishism—the last of which were controversial when they were first shown in the 1980s—will all be included in Ethridge’s selection. “Mapplethorpe didn’t make pictures of daily life; his daily life was making pictures,” Ethridge has said. Included in the exhibition is a photograph where Mapplethorpe, donning a leather glove, has reached into the camera’s view and scrawled one word with a fountain pen: “Pictures.”
Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, 5–7 p.m.

Opening: Erika Verzutti at Andrew Kreps
This show features sculptures and reliefs from Erika Verzutti, whose work straddles the line between representation and abstraction. The Brazilian artist’s debut New York solo exhibition was a 2015 outing at SculptureCenter that featured a twelve-foot-tall swan sculpture. Here, she scales her work down a little. Using bronze, oil and acrylic paint, a new work, 2018’s Homeopatia, features colorful, pill-like forms atop a weathered surface. If the work is a worthy preview of where the Brazilian artist’s work is headed, expect her to almost completely move away from figuration in her new show.
Andrew Kreps Gallery, 535/537 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.