9 Art Events in New York City to Attend This Week

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18

Performance: Jibade Khalil-Huffman at Swiss Institute
Jibade Khalil-Huffman has had a strong year, having first shown work as the Studio Museum in Harlem following a residency there, and then debuting a new piece at the Swiss Institute’s show “Against the Romance of Community” last month. This week, Khalil-Huffman will stage (Like) Kwame, a new performance based on interviews with the actress Cecily Tyson that the New York–based artist found. Before the performance, which is about the role of speakers in a world where authors and sources matter less and less, Khalil-Huffman will also show a new video.
Swiss Institute, 102 Franklin Street, 7 p.m. RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19

Opening: Cheng Ran at New Museum
How often does the U.S. debut of a young artist include a nine-hour film? Almost never, but such is the case for Cheng Ran, whose New Museum show will include 15 videos. Among them is In Course of the Miraculous (2015), the aforementioned epic that traces the stories of three people who went missing at sea. (Bas Jan Ader, the artist who mysteriously vanished during a performance, is one of them.) Also on view will be Diary of a Madman (2016), a new work that resulted from a residency at the museum. Featuring footage from the Chinese artist’s trips around New York City, the video finds Cheng exploring his own alienation, and the surprising delights of being a stranger in a strange place.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Opening: “Max Beckmann in New York” at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Everyone knows Max Beckmann for being a German Expressionist, but in a way, that’s something of an inaccurate label, given that Beckmann left Germany in 1937 and, after spending ten years in Holland, came to America in 1947. Having decamped from his home country after his work was called “degenerate” by the Nazis, Beckmann lived in New York for one year, from 1949 until the end of his life, in 1950, when he had a heart attack walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of all places. This show includes the 14 paintings Beckmann produced in his brief New York period. Distinguished by their angular, dark forms, the New York paintings continue Beckmann’s interest in allegory and spirituality, with such works as Falling Man (1950), in which a nearly nude man tumbles into what appears to be the Hudson River. Also on view here will be 25 works by Beckmann from collections around New York.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Performance: Carlos Martiel at the 8th Floor
For a new performance called Maze (2016), Carlos Martiel will take on a big, tough topic: the mass incarceration of black and Latino immigrants. It’s been a crowded year for art about that subject, with Andrea Fraser and Cameron Rowland both tackling it through minimalist installations, but Martiel will explore the prison-industrial complex using bodies. He’ll specifically look at the nature of prison labor, taking it as an example of various tactics used to oppress minorities throughout Western history. Stillness will play a role in the performance, showing how prisoners are made virtually immobile when put behind bars. A release notes that the performance may not be suitable for children.
The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, 8th Floor, 6 p.m.

Screening: Son of Sam and Delilah at Howl Arts
Charles Atlas’s 1991 video Son of Sam and Delilah is meant to capture what it felt like to be in New York during the early ’90s, a time when the AIDS crisis was not to far in the past. Here’s how Atlas describes the 26-minute work: “This tape is an entertaining amalgam of cross-cut scenes featuring New York performance luminaries including John Kelly, Hapi Phace, and DANCENOISE. It is a dark vision of an America where life is cheap and even the moments of tenderness have a life threatening edge.” After the screening, Stuart Comer, the chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s media and performance department, will discuss the video with Atlas.
Howl Arts, 6 East 1st Street, 7 p.m.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20

Opening: Elliott Erwitt at Edwynn Houk Gallery
Elliott Erwitt always carried two cameras with him—a black-and-white one, and a color one. It’s the former that always got more attention, until 2013, when a book was released that offered a rare look at the American photographer’s color work. This show, titled “Kolor,” brings together many of the photographs reproduced in the book. On view will be five decades of color photography, mostly taken for advertising or editorial purposes. Images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe will be shown here, as will more quotidian subjects, like sunbathing women and playing children.
Edwynn Houk Gallery, 745 5th Avenue, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21

Opening: Carolee Schneemann at Galerie Lelong and P.P.O.W.
This two-part show is titled “Further Evidence,” as if to suggest that yes, Carolee Schneemann has produced some excellent work beyond her essential performances from the ’60s and ’70s. “Exhibit A” at P.P.O.W. centers around Known/Unknown: Plague Column (1995–96), a video installation that compares enlarged images of cancer cells with religious icons. That work, like many others by Schneemann, looks at the connection between the biological and the industrial, with a subtly feminist bent as well—the column Schneemann is alluding to deals with 17th-century witch hunts. “Exhibit B” at Galerie Lelong is devoted to Precarious (2009) and Devour (2003), two video installations that look at the role of conflict and warfare in everyday life.
Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.; P.P.O.W., 535 West 22nd Street, 6-8 p.m.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22

Opening: Jennifer and Kevin McCoy at Postmasters Gallery
The centerpiece of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s latest show is BROKER (2016), a film that simultaneously parodies and plays into tropes about real-estate brokering. Gillian Chadsey plays the broker in question who tries to sell a high-cost apartment using clichéd statements that the McCoys culled from the internet. Ultimately, the broker comes to realize that her own reality, like the apartment she’s trying to find an owner for, is cold and empty, and also strangely desirable. Alongside this new film will be a model of the apartment that visitors to the gallery can explore, as well as new glass sculptures of broken objects.
Postmasters Gallery, 54 Franklin Street, 5:30–8 p.m.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23

Opening: Mark Leckey at MoMA PS1
For an artist so well known, it’s surprising that Mark Leckey, who has won the Turner Prize and is currently nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize, is just now getting his first major U.S. survey. Titled “Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers,” and curated by Peter Eleey, Stuart Comer, Jocelyn Miller, and Oliver Schultz, the show will include many of the British artist’s greatest hits. Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), the cult classic video about how a brand of jeans became a symbol for dance hall culture, will be positioned front and center, but so too will some of Leckey’s more recent efforts, like an expanded version of his autobiographical essay film Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD (2015). Also on view will be Leckey’s experiments with the digital, showing how mainstream culture and the everyday mutate when technology is involved.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, 12–6 p.m.