9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6

Exhibition: Leon Golub at Met Breuer
Leon Golub’s paintings are often violent and confrontational, but few are more so than his Gigantomachy II (1966), a 24-foot-wide canvas that features flayed-looking figures wrestling. The painting was gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts in 2016, and now the Met Breuer will survey the late painter’s output over the years. Included alongside Gigantomachy II will be early works, paintings of the Brazilian dictator Ernesto Geisel, and works from Golub’s “White Squad” series that unflinchingly depict police violence. Appropriately, the museum has named the exhibition “Raw Nerve.”
Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7

Reading: Christopher Knowles at White Columns
“Christopher has the ability to conceive of his works in minute detail before executing them,” John Ashbery once wrote of Knowles’s poetry, which repeats words and phrases with precision—so much precision, in fact, that Ashbery likened to something spat out of a computer. This week, with a vinyl album called The Typing Poems releasing, Knowles will read some of his written works. The reading, which doubles a book launch for Knowles’s new monograph, In a Word, is the final event at White Columns’s current West 13th Street space before it departs for a new home on 91 Horatio Street.
White Columns, 320 West 13th Street, 6–8 p.m., with reading to begin at 7 p.m.

Talk: “Narratives from Inside” at Aperture Foundation
With a new issue bearing the theme “Prison Nation,” Aperture has turned its attention to the role photography and video plays in mass incarceration. This talk will focus specifically on how storytelling can help prisoners, specifically when it’s combined with photography and writing workshops. Artist Nigel Poor, playwright Virginia Grise, and Tribeca Film Institute vice president of education Vee Bravo will be discussion with Shani Jamila, the managing director of the Urban Justice Center.
Aperture Foundation, 547 West 27th Street, 7–8:30 p.m.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8

Opening: “Copy, Translate, Repeat” at 205 Hudson Gallery
Hunter College’s downtown satellite gallery will present a number of works from the collection of philanthropist and ARTnews “Top 200” collector Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. The selected pieces examine the status of global contemporary art through historical narratives. In bridging the distance between past and present techniques, the exhibition showcases the means of contemporary art production in Latin America. The show includes work by Jonathas de Andrade, Waltercio Caldas, Elena Damiani, Leandro Katz, and Jorge Macchi, among others.
205 Hudson Gallery, 205 Hudson Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Carrie Moyer at DC Moore
Nearly a year after Carrie Moyer’s eye-catching DC Moore debut comes her second solo exhibition, titled “Pagan’s Rapture.” In a riposte to today’s dark times, Moyer has created a new body of work that is decidedly upbeat. Her vibrant acrylic paintings include silhouettes of flora, planets, and bodies, in sensual, colorful forms in line with the “Pleasure Principle.” And this exhibition isn’t the last of Moyer that New York will see this season: Mary Boone Gallery, working in collaboration with DC Moore, has also planned a follow-up Moyer show for March.
DC Moore, 535 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9

Exhibition: Danh Vo at Guggenheim Museum
The conceptual assemblages of the Vietnamese-born artist Danh Vo bring together broader cultural and political concerns in personal groupings of objects. Vo was the recipient of the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize, and now he is back with a full-scale survey in the Guggenheim’s spiraling rotunda. The exhibition, titled “Take My Breath Away,” covers 15 years of Vo’s varied output, and will include sculpture, photographs and works on paper.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:45 p.m.

Opening: Pablo Helguera and Suzanne Lacy at the 8th Floor
Pairing the work of two leading social practice artists for the first time, “The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy and Engagement” will feature the multidisciplinary work of Pablo Helguera and Suzanne Lacy. Together, Helguera’s School of Panamerican Unrest (2006) and Lacy’s Skin of Memory (1999) highlight overlapping concerns regarding migration, collective memory, and community organizing. The installation includes collage, sculpture, photography, video, and archival documentation, and was first shown at the University of California at Santa Barbara as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative. A conversation with the artists regarding their work will take place on February 10.
The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Screening: Charles Atlas at Light Industry
In memoriam of the passing of post-punk iconoclast Mark E. Smith of the English band the Fall, Light Industry presents a screening of Charles Atlas’s Hail the New Puritan (1986). The film covers a day in the life of the choreographer Michael Clark and features music from the Fall alongside Clark’s colorful dance pieces, which themselves were very much inspired by the music and nightlife of the time. Influential figures like the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the drag queen Lana Pellay make appearances in the film. There is also a cameo from Smith himself, speaking in the kind of enigmatic syntax that made him such an enduring presence in the worlds of alternative and underground music for over four decades.
Light Industry, 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m., $8 suggested donation

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10

Exhibition: Tarsila do Amaral at Museum of Modern Art
The 1920s was a productive decade for the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral. Over the course of those years, she traversed continents and developed an international art presence while creating paintings like the 1928 classic Abaporu. The piece, which features a surreal outstretched figure next to a cactus, was made for her husband, the poet Oswalde de Andrade, and it went on to inspire Brazilian artists to find ways to engage aspects European modernism and make them their own. This exhibition, the artist’s first at a major institution in America, zeroes in on one crucial decade of work from do Amaral.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.