9 Art Events to Attend This Week in New York City

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11

Lecture: Nana Oforiatta Ayim at Cooper Union
“There were obvious gaps and imbalances in the seemingly complete knowledge of the world,” Nana Oforiatta Ayim wrote earlier this year in an essay for ARTnews about why she decided to found ANO, an “Institute of Arts & Knowledge” in Accra, Ghana, that was established in 2002. Oforiatta Ayim has devoted her career toward rectifying those imbalances, specifically in relation to Africa, with such projects as The Cultural Encyclopaedia, an initiative focused on arts in the continent. Here she will deliver a lecture titled “Future Museums.”
Cooper Union, 41 Cooper Square, 7–8:30 p.m.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13

Exhibition: Liliana Porter at El Museo del Barrio
After a renovation, El Museo del Barrio will reopen its Spanish Harlem digs with a Liliana Porter exhibition titled “Other Situations.” The show, which travels from the Savanah College of Art and Design’s museum, surveys work the Argentine artist made between 1973 and 2018. Included will be the photographs for which Porter is most known: a series in which people’s hands, each with forms drawn onto them, complete geometric shapes in what has been viewed as a statement about the relationship between individuals and groups. During the show’s run, Porter will unveil a new performance.
El Museo del Barrio, 1230 5th Avenue, 12–4 p.m.

Opening: Pope.L at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Pope.L has called the works on view at this show “a disgustingly neat pile of doubt, experiment, and denial shoved up hot against claim, leap, gambit, and caesura—your basic scrabbling about in the dark . . .” Included are works from the artist’s “RePhoto” collage series, for which he edited and recombined images of body parts to create “figural encounters,” as well as sculptures and an installation featuring versions of Pope.L’s video Syllogism. Titled “One thing after another (part two),” the show follows Pope.L’s recent winning of the Whitney Museum’s $100,000 Bucksbaum Award.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Concert: Hairbone at Honey’s
Blank Forms will present this record release party for the debut studio LP from the Brooklyn experimental music trio Hairbone, which features the artists Nathan Whipple, Jessie Stead, and Raúl de Nieves. (De Nieves memorably showed work in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1’s 2015 Greater New York quinquennial.) The dissonant music by the band (formerly known as Haribo) is connected to a larger history of no wave and artist-led rock bands. Also on the docket for the evening is the duo Odwalla1221, from Los Angeles via Baltimore, another artist-fronted group that trades in deconstructed electronic music indebted as much to punk as it is to avant-garde sound poetry.
Honey’s, 93 Scott Avenue, Brooklyn, 8 p.m. Tickets $12/15

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14

Exhibition: “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” at Brooklyn Museum
This survey of artists involved with the Black Power movement presents more than 150 works made between 1963 and 1983, a crucial period in the development of African-American identity and empowerment in America. The work in the show, which has previously made stops at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Tate Modern, varies in form and content, from the abstraction of William T. Williams to more directly political work like Faith Ringgold’s iconic American flag paintings, which sometimes seem to be bleeding. Also included will be assemblages, sculptures, and photographs—notably vintage prints from Ming Smith, the first African-American female photographer to have work acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

Opening: “Punch” at Jeffrey Deitch
Curated by the artist Nina Chanel Abney, this group exhibition brings together friends and associates who trade in work that, in one way or another, deploys figuration as a method for examining current events. This includes paintings, sculptures, and photographs that takes cues from graffiti, design, and the look of the internet. The show features work by Austin Lee, Katherine Bernhardt, Caitlin Cherry, Derrick Adams, Ruby Neri, and more.
Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, 6–8 p.m.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

Exhibition: Judson Dance Theater at Museum of Modern Art
Active between 1962 and 1964, the Judson Dance Theater, a New York–based troupe of dancers, artists, and musicians, eschewed everything that their contemporaries believed to define “dance” through performances that involved chance and everyday movements. The show will document their boundary-breaking work, with archival footage of past performances on hand to add context, as well as props originally used in these works, such as flimsy mattresses, dish sponges, and American flags worn as capes. Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, and Trisha Brown are among those whose work will be represented. Performances related to the exhibition will be staged throughout its run.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Opening: “Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974–1995” at SculptureCenter
First staged at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Massachusetts, this show highlights ten video artists: Dara Birnbaum (who was profiled by ARTnews earlier this year), Ernst Caramelle, Takahiko Iimura, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Muntadas, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Friederike Pezold, Diana Thater and Maria Vedder. The work on view, dating from 1974 to 1995, was produced at a time when artists were experimenting with television sets as physical objects and as ways of transmitting visual information. Importantly, for each artist, video was integrated into sculptures, bringing the moving image into the third dimension.
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Queens, 5–7 p.m.

Opening: EJ Hill at Company Gallery
EJ Hill, fresh off his well-received “Made in L.A. 2018″ installation at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, has in the past used the body—usually his own—to explore spaces and who is kept out of them. Most of these works have been performance-related, but for this show, his first solo exhibition in New York, Hill offers a new series of photographs. In a show description, artist Wilmer Wilson IV writes, “It is apropos for EJ to have turned to photography, the medium of light, to conduct grounding acts of looking during the shadowed moments of this performance period, through which he can continually situate himself in a specific place and time and with specific people.”
Company Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, 6–8 p.m.