9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24

Performance: Sarah Cahill at Noguchi Museum
Humans have a tendency to forget that plants, too, are sentient in their own way. As a remedy for this, pianist Sarah Cahill will be taking up residence at the Noguchi museum for five days, during which she will perform Mamoru Fujieda’s magnum opus, Patterns of Plants (1996–2011). A Post-Minimalist synthesis of nature and technology, Fujieda’s piece was created by measuring the electrical impulses on the leaves of plants and converting the data into sound with a visual programming language. According to senior curator Dakin Hart, “His Patterns of Plants offer intimations of the orderly, inherently beautiful natural structures and operations that we once sought as the basis for the universe and everything in it.” —Hannah Ghorashi
Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Queens, New York, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Opening: Sherrie Levine at David Zwirner
Sherrie Levine’s work looks, ironically, as though it could be by anyone but Sherrie Levine. Over the past three decades, Levine, who rose to fame alongside Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, has become known for appropriating work by Walker Evans or mimicking modernist art and then passing it off as her own. Doing so reveals the context of these original works. How do we construct authorship or genius in a time when these artists’ pictures have been reproduced time and again? For her latest show, her first with David Zwirner since joining the gallery, the Pictures Generation artists will debut a new installation that features monochromes on mahogany paired with refrigerator doors. Each painting takes its color from a Renoir nude, suggesting that, despite art historians’ assertion that the Impressionist was particularly talented at painting flesh, his colors were hardly genius at all—they appear everywhere in daily life. —Alex Greenberger
David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, 6–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25

Opening: “In The Making: Artists, Assistants, and Influence” at Luxembourg & Dayan
“In The Making” is fairly explicit in regards to its premise, which turns a spotlight on the invisible hands that have played such a major role in the creation of works throughout art history: those of the artist’s assistants. In focusing on two major paradigm shifts in recent history—that of Andy Warhol’s assembly line production, and Robert Rauschenberg’s collaborative practice—the exhibition not only sheds light on the realities of artistic creation, but also delineates a history of the significance of the artist’s assistant in relation to the meaning of the work of art itself.
Luxembourg & Dayan, 64 East 77th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: “Nice Weather” at Skarstedt
David Salle curated this group show, which takes its name from Frederick Seidel poem about one day’s weather leading into the next’s, and which, appropriately, features multiple generations of painters. Salle, a vocal fan of formalist painting, selected artists whose work explores basic structures inherent in the medium—materiality and surfaces. Although that guiding idea sounds decidedly old school, the artist list is fairly exciting. The show includes work by Richard Aldrich, Ross Bleckner, Joe Bradley, Cecily Brown, George Condo, Martha Diamond, Lucy Dodd, Carroll Dunham, Louise Fishman, Rashid Johnson, Alex Katz, Shawn Kuruneru, Chris Martin, Albert Oehlen, Sterling Ruby, David Salle, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Gary Stephan, Blair Thurman, Patricia Treib, Rosemarie Trockel, Piotr Uklanski, Charline von Heyl, Mary Weatherford, Stanley Whitney, Terry Winters, and others. “Nice Weather” takes place at both Skarstedt locations, with the two openings happening simultaneously.
Skarstedt, 550 West 21st Street and 20 East 79th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening and Book Signing: Rosalind Fox Solomon at Bruce Silverstein
Rosalind Fox Solomon will debut a collection of 27 photographs that serve as a semi-fictional memoir. Using photos taken during various periods of her life, which she describes as a tragicomedy, Solomon resists the parameters imposed by society’s propensity for biography, including images that “reveal a wider vision of the world, one….[that] negotiates the cusp between lived life and her imagination,” according to a press release. “Got to Go” is both the name of the exhibition and the title of the artist’s monograph, which will be available for sale during the opening.
Bruce Silverstein Gallery, 535 West 24th Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26

Opening: Andrea Fraser at the Whitney Museum
It’s not every day we get a new piece by Andrea Fraser, the artist who may have coined the term “institutional critique” and who, in recent years, has worked somewhat sporadically. Her humorous, abrasive work has attacked various art-world structures, from the gallery system to museum audio guides, and so it’s only fitting that one of her biggest works in recent memory is going to take up the entirety of the Whitney’s fifth floor. For the first project in the museum’s “Open Plan” series, Fraser will debut a sound installation that features audio from a correctional facility. According to a release, the work, titled Down the River, is about the parallel between the growth of museums and prisons in America, and how, perhaps accidentally, we have had more of a hand in the rise of both than we know. —Alex Greenberger
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

Installation and Live Taping: E.S.P. TV at Swiss Institute
The blurb for this upcoming E.S.P. TV installation comes with a warning unusual for art events: if you go to the Swiss Institute that night, you might end up on television. Since 2011, the nomadic collective has been traveling across America, setting up green screens in museums and galleries, recording visitors as they walk onto these makeshift sets, and then broadcasting their image, as put through psychedelic video-editing effects, on public-access television. The analog becomes the digital, and the private gallery space becomes public. While a new episode is taping at the Swiss Institute, camera-shy visitors can see old episodes screening downstairs. —Alex Greenberger
Swiss Institute, 18 Wooster Street, 12–9 p.m. RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net

Opening: Glenn Ligon at Luhring Augustine 
Accompanying the current exhibition of work by Glenn Ligon at Luhring Augustine’s Bushwick space, this corresponding show of the artist’s work features a series of 17 ink-jet prints that showcase Ligon’s well-worn copy of James Baldwin’s 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village.” Ligon, who based his ongoing “Stranger” series around this essay, documents the smudges of paint, oil stains, and fingerprints that have accumulated on his copy throughout his career, which he considers a “palimpsest of accumulated personal histories that suggests…a new strategy in his ongoing exploration of the interplay between language and abstraction,” according to a press release.
Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 West 24th Street, 6–8 p.m.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 28

Opening: “I Pledge Allegiance” at On Stellar Rays
It’s pretty unclear what this group show is about, based on its cryptic release, which is just a quote from Marlene Dietrich and an extended excerpt from a Rene Ricard essay that appeared in Artforum. It seems, however, that it’s something about art and politics, and where the two intersect. The artist list is intriguing—it includes Kerstin Brätsch, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Jason Benson. Here’s the Dietrich quote, which may hint at what this show is like: “There’s a foreign legion of women, too. But we have no uniforms—no flags—and no medals when we are brave.”
On Stellar Rays, 1 Rivington Street, 6–8 p.m.