9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

TUESDAY, JANUARY 15

Opening: David Robilliard at Ortuzar Projects
The first New York exhibition of the artist’s work since 1990, “David Robilliard: Works 1984–1988” will bring together paintings, works on paper, and various archival materials related to queer communities in London during the 1980s. Robilliard first showed his work, which often combines handwritten text and scrawled pictures, in 1984, and this show will feature a selection of his dynamic “poem-paintings.” Many of the artist’s poetry publications will also be on view.
Ortuzar Projects, 9 White Street, 6–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 17

Opening: Rhoda Kellogg at White Columns
This show, the first-ever exhibition devoted to work by Rhoda Kellogg, will feature a selection of the late psychologist and educator’s own collages, drawings on paper, and furniture designs. Throughout the course of her career, Kellogg collected over one million drawings made by kids between two and six years old, and this show will also feature historical documents related to her extensive study of children’s art. The presentation is organized in collaboration with the Rhoda Kellogg Archive and curated by artist Brian Belott, who, in 2017, put together an exhibition of Kellogg’s archive of children’s art at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York.
White Columns, 91 Horatio Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Outsider Art Fair at Metropolitan Pavilion
The 27th New York edition of the Outsider Art Fair will feature 65 exhibitors from 37 cities and 7 countries, with all the offerings at the fair dedicated to work by so-called outsider artists. Eight galleries are set to participant for the first time, including the Los Angeles outfit Maccarone, which will stage a booth dedicated to work from Ace Ventura Pet Detective–turned–artist Jim Carrey. As part of the fair, art critic Edward M. Gómez has curated a section devoted to Phyllis Kind, the late dealer whose gallery frequently exhibited work by self-taught artists at the fair.
Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, 6–9 p.m. Opening tickets $53.29; regular tickets: $27.04

Talk: “Winter Salon: Writers at Home” at Brooklyn Museum
This program runs in tandem with the institution’s current exhibition of Do Ho Suh’s installation The Perfect Home II (2003), an evocation of the artist’s home in translucent fabric. Included will be a tour of the show with curator Eugeine Tsai followed by readings by Jason Too, T Kira Madden, and Alice Sola Kim in the museum’s American Art galleries. (The writers that evening will read portions of Go Home!, an anthology that examines issues related to Asian-American identity.) The night concludes with a conversation between the writers moderated by editor Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 6:30–8 p.m. Tickets $14/16

Talk: “Speculative Moments: Show and Pray Tell with MOTHA’s Commissioned Artists” at New Museum
The Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art (MOTHA) will this week stage an evening related to the group’s current New Museum show that was produced with Chris E. Vargas. The event will showcase a selection of artists commissioned by the MOTHA to propose new monuments in commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall riots. The multigenerational group they’ve put together includes artists Chris Bogia, Catherine Lord, Devin N. Morris, and D’hana Perry; their works across a variety of mediums will probe the legacy of the protests today.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Tickets $10/15

FRIDAY, JANUARY 18

Opening: Yukultji Napangati at Salon 94
For her first U.S. solo show, Yukultji Napangati will present a series of landscape paintings focused on Aboriginal traditions and personal history. Napangati is considered a leading figure in Australia’s contemporary Aboriginal painting movement, and her abstract works often reference the country’s Western Desert, where she was born. Her paintings, which are frequently composed of lines in swelling and hypnotizing arrangements, have also been informed by ancestral myths called “Dreamings.”
Salon 94, 243 Bowery, 6–8 p.m.

Talk: “Programmed: A Conversation Between Ben Lerner and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro” at Whitney Museum
This talk complements the Whitney Museum’s current exhibition “Programmed: Rules, Codes and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018,” which focuses on algorithmic sets of rules as they have related to the work of Sol LeWitt, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Charles Gaines, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and many more. To discuss the conservation of work involving digital technology, the Whitney will bring together poet and author Ben Lerner and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, associate director for conservation and research of the museum. The topic befits the exhibition—for “Programmed,” Mancusi-Ungaro oversaw a partial restoration of the Nam June Paik piece Fin de Siècle II (1989), which features 207 television sets blaring at once.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 6:30 p.m. Tickets $8/$10

SATURDAY, JANUARY 19

Exhibition: Bill Traylor at Betty Cuningham Gallery
The work of Bill Traylor, currently the subject of a retrospective of a retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. (which is now closed due to a government shutdown), is surveyed in this 25-work exhibition. Traylor, who died in 1949, was a former slave; long relegated to obscurity, his work has in the recent years been celebrated by critics and curators. The majority of the pieces will come from the Charles E. and Eugenia C. Shannon Trust, and they will attest to Traylor’s skill at rendering humans and animals with minimal details.
Betty Cunningham Gallery, 15 Rivington Street, 4–6 p.m.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 20

Opening: “Tissue” at Company Gallery
This press release for this group show, which is spread across both of Company Gallery’s spaces in the Lower East Side, is sparse. It features merely an intriguing list of featured artists—A. K. Burns, Dachi Cole, Hannah Levy, Troy Michie, Ser Serpas, Linnéa Sjöberg and Sophie Stone—and a poem by the aforementioned Ser Serpas. That Serpas poem reads: “set really a setting writing in blank / the spaces relate / to each other they try the thing you find in the t-shirt / and leave, your own / a self alone attuned to / the skin wet spot through your clothes / bye at / your fail a flag with the rising destroy / me.”
Company Gallery, 73 Allen Street and 88 Eldridge Street, 6–8 p.m.