9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

MONDAY, JUNE 19

Opening: Carsten Höller at Gagosian Gallery
It’s been five years since Carsten Höller’s last New York show, at the New Museum, where he created a slide that corkscrewed through several floors. For his big return to Manhattan, the Belgian-born artist will show a recent series of works about mushrooms. Some of these fungi will appear as upside-down sculptures that hang from the ceiling; others will come in the form of collages. For Höller, mushrooms are mysterious things that can allow viewers to reach altered states, and so too can his paintings and neon works, some of which will be on view in this show, titled “Reason.”
Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, 6–8 p.m.

TUESDAY, JUNE 20

Opening: “The Body Politic: Video from the Met Collection” at Met Breuer
Summer is when most viewers seek air conditioning and blockbuster exhibitions, but this season, the Met Breuer is offering a little counter-programming. For its exhibition “The Body Politic: Video from the Met Collection,” the museum’s curators have brought together four videos—by David Hammons, Arthur Jafa, Steve McQueen, and Mika Rottenberg—that feature citizens who rebel against power structures. Among the works is  Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016), a sweeping video essay about race in America set to Kanye West’s song “Ultralight Beam.”
Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21

Opening: “Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno” at Various Venues
Ugo Rondinone will stage a New York City–wide survey dedicated to the famed poet, performer, and artist John Giorno (who also just so happens to be his husband). Thirteen alternative spaces, museums, and institutions around the city will showcase the 80-year-old Giorno’s work, which runs the gamut from proto-Conceptualist gestures to performances in Andy Warhol films. In addition to pieces by Giorno, the exhibition will also include works made in homage to the artist by Scott King, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and more. Participating institutions include Artists Space, High Line Art, Howl! Happening, Hunter College Art Galleries, the Kitchen, New Museum, Red Bull Arts New York, Rubin Museum of Art, Sky Art, Swiss Institute, White Columns, and 80WSE Gallery.
Various venues, consult exhibition website for details, 5–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, JUNE 22

Opening: Meschac Gaba at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
At the height of a refugee crisis comes Meschac Gaba’s latest show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, which will feature the U.S. premiere of the Beninese-born artist’s installation Reflection Room Tent (2017). Originally on view at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, this rainbow-colored structure—a reference to the tents that refugees stay in—can be entered; Gaba considers it a hopeful work, rather than a cynical one. Also on view will be woven sculptures that resemble stylized wigs, a memorial to refugees who drowned in the voyage from Africa to Europe, and a new video.
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: “Grupo Frente” at Galerie Lelong
Between a Lygia Pape show at the Met Breuer and an upcoming Hélio Oiticica show at the Whitney Museum, Brazilian modernism is having a moment in New York. Add to that trend this group show, which focuses on a short-lived avant-garde group known as Grupo Frente. Working between 1954 and 1956 in Rio de Janeiro, the Grupo Frente artists experimented with hard-edged geometric abstraction and color theory. The group, founded by Ivan Serpa, was radical for its time, and it would ultimately pave the way for the out-there actions and performances of Neo-Concretists like Pape, Oiticica, and Lygia Clark. This exhibition will include work by those three artists alongside pieces by João José Costa, Rubem Ludolf, Décio Vieira, and more.
Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Sturtevant at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
Sturtevant’s signature style was everyone else’s signature style—she was known to create exacting fakes of works by Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and others, and claim them as her own. Partly as a feminist attack on male artists’ chokehold on the market and partly as a statement about originality in a time when everything is mass-produced, Sturevant’s work scrambled signals during her lifetime and has remained critically acclaimed since her death in 2014. (A Museum of Modern Art survey that year also brought her work to a new audience.) This show, curated by Robert Snowden, will survey the artist’s varied output.
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 439 West 127th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Talk: Deborah Treisman, Anne Doran, and Hilton Als at 192 Books
Walter Hopps’s game-changing curatorial style finally gets a proper showcase in The Dream Colony: A Life in Art, a new semi-memoir cobbled together from interviews with Hopps about founding Ferus Gallery, working for the Pasadena Art Museum, and curating at the Menil Collection. Put together by Deborah Treisman and Anne Doran, who is a senior editor at ARTnews, the book explores how Hopps brought the New York scene to Los Angeles and helped shape the legacy of Pop art. At this talk, Treisman and Doran will be on hand to discuss Hopps’s career with New Yorker writer Hilton Als.
192 Books, 192 10th Avenue, 7 p.m.

FRIDAY, JUNE 23

Opening: “Face Shifts” at Microscope Gallery
With a proliferation of selfies, profile pictures, and avatars, it seems that portraits are more widely available than ever before. This show, cleverly titled “Face Shifts” after the motion-capture technology used by apps like Snapchat and Instagram, focuses on exactly that. Featuring six artists whose work stresses the relationship between users and their devices, “Face Shifts” includes work that is both digital and analog in nature. Theodore Darst, Nick Doyle, Rina Dweck, Ja’tovia Gary, Kevin Reuning, and Jessie Stead will all display new and recent work here.
Microscope Gallery, 1329 Willoughby Avenue, #2B, Brooklyn, 6–9 p.m.

SATURDAY, JUNE 24

Opening: “Race and Revolution: Still Separate – Still Unequal” at Smack Mellon
The second in a series of shows titled “Race and Revolution,” this exhibition focuses on inequalities in the American education system that persist, even more than 60 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The artists in “Still Separate – Still Unequal” wonder how much, if anything at all, has changed since that epochal decision in 1954. The artists in the exhibition are Dennis Redmoon Darkeem, Nicole Suzette Soto-Rodriguez, Mitsuko Brooks, Iviva Olenick, Marvin Toure, Kayla Muldrow, Antoine Williams, Damien Davis, Shervone Neckles, Carina Maye, jc lenochan, Aram Han Sifuentes, Mona Saeed Kamal, Dominique Duroseau, Karen Lomax, Uraline Setpembre Hager, Olalekan Jeyifous, and L. Kasimu Harris.
Smack Mellon, 92 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, 6–8 p.m.