COURTESY PAULA COOPER GALLERY
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9
Opening: “50 Years: An Anniversary” at Paula Cooper Gallery
This show is the first exhibition to be held at Paula Cooper Gallery’s new space, a temporary home on West 26th Street (where its headquarters will be located for the next three years), and it celebrates the gallery’s first-ever exhibition, held in 1968 in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition benefited the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and Veterans Against the War in Vietnam, and this upcoming show will benefit March for Our Lives, an organization dedicated to ending gun violence and mass shootings. The new exhibition will feature artworks created during the time period of the gallery’s founding by Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and others.
Paula Cooper Gallery, 524 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: “Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking” at Americas Society
Taking the ideas of Caribbean thinkers Lydia Cabrera and Édouard Glissant as its points of departure, this exhibition considers the ways in which contemporary and modern artists negotiate sometimes-conflicting notions of identity. The show will include work by Tania Bruguera, Simone Fattal, Julie Mehretu, Jack Whitten, and many more. To assemble its all-star coterie of artists, the Americas Society has brought on big talent: Gabriela Rangel, the museum’s director and chief curator, worked with Serpentine Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Orbist and artist Asad Raza to curate the show.
Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, 6:30–8:30 p.m.
CHARLES BENTON/COURTESY VAN DOREEN WAXTER, NEW YORK
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10
Opening: Harvey Quaytman at Van Doren Waxter
In conjunction with the Harvey Quaytman’s first full-scale museum retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California, Van Doren Waxter has put on an exhibition of work by the artist, titled “Rockers and Pendulums, 1969–1977.” It includes five paintings and three works on paper that show him experimenting gallantly with color and form. For Quaytman, who died in 2002, these were works about order. “My paintings mean to me my victory, inch by inch and year by year, over the arbitrary chaos of visual life,” he once said.
Van Doren Waxter, 195 Chrystie Street, 6—8 p.m.
©TOYIN OJIH ODUTOLA/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN, NEW YORK/DEAN COLLECTION
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11
Opening: “For Opacity” at the Drawing Center
This group exhibition presents work by a trio of young artists who use drawing as a means to think through the complex factors that combine to create one’s identity. Though stylistically disparate, each artist is connected by an interest in oblique allusions to their own personal narratives. Figurative drawings by Toyin Ojih Odutola—the subject of a 2017 exhibition at the Whitney Museum and a current two-part show at Jack Shainman Gallery—will be displayed alongside splintered mixed-media work by Nathaniel Mary Quinn and mystical pencil drawings by Elijah Burgher.
The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, 6-8 p.m.
Opening: Beverly Fishman at Miles McEnery Gallery
The Detroit-based artist Beverly Fishman’s forthcoming exhibition at the newly-renovated Miles McEnery Gallery is an extension of a series of work she began in 2012. Fishman’s fluorescent, polychromatic pieces, which use urethane paint on cut wood paneling, recall the clean graphic energy of American pharmaceutical branding in abstract. “Drugs construct and contest our identities,” the artist wrote in an essay for the journal Cultural Politics. She also noted, in the same piece, that “the production and consumption of art can seem like an addiction.”
Miles McEnery Gallery, 520 West 21st Street, 6–8 p.m.
©YASUMASA MORIMURA/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LUHRING AUGUSTINE, NEW YORK
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12
Exhibition: Yasumasa Morimura at Japan Society
For the past three decades, the Japanese photographer Yasumasa Morimura has been working in a Cindy Sherman–like mode, mimicking various art-historical subjects and oftentimes switching gender or race in the process. Occasionally, Morimura has posed as more contemporary subjects, too, such as Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. This exhibition, aptly titled “Ego Obscura,” will survey Morimura’s output over the years, and will also include two new film installations and the premiere of his performance Morimura’s Nippon Cha Cha Cha!, which will meditate on notions of the self in post–World War II Japan.
Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, 12–9 p.m.
Conference: “Mary Corse: A Symposium” at Whitney Museum
To provide context for its current Mary Corse survey, the Whitney has joined forces with the Dia Art Foundation has put together this symposium about the Light and Space artist’s output, which deals with the physical properties of light in painting and sculpture. On hand to chat about these works will be artists Peter Halley, James Welling, and Hank Willis Thomas, as well as Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Carol Eliel and art historian Elizabeth Gollnick, among others. A reception for the exhibition will follow the symposium.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 1–5 p.m. Free with registration
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LYLES & KING, NEW YORK
Screening: Shakedown and Happy Birthday, Marsha! at Brooklyn Academy of Music
This double feature brings together recent works by artists that celebrate black queer women. Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown is a documentary directed by the former videographer for Los Angeles strip club the Shakedown, the famed early 2000s-era cultural haven for black lesbians. Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel’s Happy Birthday, Marsha! is an experimental short set mere hours before the 1969 Stonewall riots; black trans activist Marsha P. (“Pay it No Mind”) Johnson, the film’s subject, would help catalyze the landmark event from which gay pride celebrations were born. A Q&A with Weinraub will follow this screening.
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, 8 p.m. Tickets $7.50/$15
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14
Opening: Aneta Grzeszyowska at Lyles & King
Aneta Grzeszyowska’s latest show, “Mama,” will bring together new photographs by the Polish artist. In the show’s titular series, Grzeszyowska’s daughter is photographed interacting with a life-size, waist-up nude bust of the artist. Another body of work, “Beauty Masks,” is a collection of self-portraits of Grzeszyowska wearing various face masks. With the dual set of photographs, the artist will ponder the ways that representing “the body (and by extension, the self) [can] be both sculptural material and a performative act: a product of great flexibility, and uncertain durability,” according to a statement.
Lyles & King, 106 Forsyth Street, 6–8 p.m.