9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

MONDAY, OCTOBER 19

Talk: “Inside the Artist’s Studio” at the 92nd Street Y
Everyone knows that artists work in a variety of ways, but rarely do people think about what happens once an artist walks into his or her studio. That’s why Brooklynite artist Joe Fig wrote a book about it, titled Inside the Artist’s Studio, and this week, he’ll be speaking at the 92nd Street Y with several other artists. His fellow panelists will be Tara Donovan, who has shown work at Pace Gallery and, more recently, the Parrish Art Museum; Kate Gilmore, who just won $200,000 at ArtPrize; Leonardo Drew, who has shown at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.; and Jonathan T.D. Neil, the director of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Though the event is sold out, there will be a wait list.
92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue, 7:30 p.m., $32

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20

Opening: Jeff Wall at Marian Goodman Gallery
In one of Jeff Wall’s most famous photographs, a boss in a sweatshop yells at a stunned worker. Another worker briefly stops working to look at her boss; other workers continue on with business as usual. It’s a photograph so loaded with details, you’d almost believe it were really happening. This play between documentary and staged images, usually shot using a large-format camera, is what Wall has become known for, and, with this exhibition of new work, Wall will continue to mess with what viewers believe to be the truth in his pictures. Ten days after this show opens in New York, a second exhibition of new work by the Canadian photographer will open at Marian Goodman’s London branch.
Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, 6–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22

Opening: Beatriz Milhazes at James Cohan Gallery
Beatriz Milhazes’s paintings suggest the whimsical colors and forms of Robert Delaunay by way of the dramatic, baroque architecture of her home country, Brazil. Using a process she calls “mono-transfer,” Milhazes puts hand-painted decals on her canvases, creating a sense of movement that almost feels musical or rhythmic in some way. Appropriately, this exhibition is titled “Marola,” the Portuguese word for ripples. In addition to the new paintings made for this show, Milhazes will also show sculptures that involve wood balls, beaded curtains, colored Plexiglas, silk flowers and mirrored steel.
James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Martha Wilson at P.P.O.W.
Before there was Cindy Sherman, there was Martha Wilson, who, in the early ’70s, began taking photographs of herself enacting various identities. Several decades later, she continues to do this in a new body of work called “Mona/Marcel/Marge,” in which Wilson turns her eye to advertisements and art history. This show finds Wilson compositing her image onto makeup ads, the Mona Lisa, and a portrait of Michelle Obama, among other things. With many of the images comes a pun—none of her images ever depict just one idea or identity. It just goes to show that, in today’s day and age, there’s no such thing as just one gender construction, or one solid definition of race, or even one interpretation of art-historical imagery.
P.P.O.W., 535 West 22nd Street, 3rd floor, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Max Ernst at Paul Kasmin
“Max Ernst: Paramyths, Sculpture 1934 – 1967” marks the first major North American solo exhibition of Dada artist Max Ernst since 1993. 14 bronze and stone sculptures, dated throughout a 40-year period, beginning immediately after the artist returned to Paris in 1934 after a summer spent with Giacometti in Switzerland. Paul Kasmin will be the first American institution to display Ernst’s 1967 limestone sculpture, La Plus Belle, a life-size work that inspired by his wife, Dorothea Tanning.
Paul Kasmin Gallery, 515 West 27th Street, 6—8 p.m.

Opening: Michael Wang at Foxy Production
Foxy Production’s last show at their current Chelsea space will be Michael Wang’s “Terroir.” Made from the crushed bedrock of Barcelona, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Milan, New York, and Paris, Wang’s monochrome paintings represent a representation of urban geography, occupying a liminal space between Land and Conceptual art. Wang collected rocks from construction sites, parks, and roadsides, later grinding them into a fine dust in his New York studio, and then making that dust into pigment. Berlin apparently retains a grayish brown color, while Hong Kong takes on a rusty hue, and New York glitters blackly.
Foxy Production, 623 West 27th Street, 6—8 p.m.

Panel: “Blockchain Horizons” at the New Museum
This discussion, organized by Rhizome, will focus on the cultural implications of blockchains, which are, as a release defines, “distributed databases, secure and transparent by virtue of peer-to-peer networks that collectively validate each entry.” Critics, artists, and entrepreneurs will convene to speculate how the technology behind cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin will impact publishing, licensing, and distribution of artwork.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Tickets are $8. 

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23

Opening:  Zanele Muholi at Yancey Richardson Gallery
The name of South African artist Zanele Muholi’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, “Somnyama Ngonyama,” translates to “Hail, the Dark Lioness.” Artist, activist, and member of the black LGTBI community in Johannesburg, Muholi draws upon “the performative and expressive language of theatre, and the highly stylized archetype of black and white fashion photography,” according to a press release, to create a series of self-portraits in which she is both subject and gaze, participant and creator. The works, inspired by the advent of the selfie, are also processed in a way that highlights the blackness of the artist’s skin. Muholi says, “By exaggerating the darkness of my skin tone, I’m reclaiming my blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other. My reality is that I do not mimic black; it is my skin and, the experience of being black that is deeply entrenched in me.”
Yancey Richardson Gallery, 525 West 22nd Street, 6—8 p.m.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25

Opening: Joaquín Torres-Garcia at the Museum of Modern Art
This survey of Uruguayan avant-garde artist Joaquín Torres-García contains drawings, paintings, objects, and sculptures from the late 19th century up until the 1940s. Organized both thematically and chronologically, the show divides the works on view into two main chapters: the years from 1923 to 1933, a time when Torres-García was involved in early modern avant-garde movements such as Catalan Noucentismo to Cubism, Ultraism-Vibrationism, and Neo-Plasticism; and those from 1935 to 1943, a time in which he was fully committed to creating works in his unique style of synthetic abstraction.
MoMA, 11 West 53 Street, 10:30 a.m.—5:30 p.m.