9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

MONDAY, MARCH 21

Talk: Njideka Akunyili Crosby at Whitney Museum
Los Angeles–based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby will speak about her work for the current billboard on the façade of 95 Horatio Street, titled Before Now After (Mama, Mummy, and Mamma). Akunyili Crosby’s work, which often manifests as a large-scale mix of collage, drawing, painting, and printmaking, frequently deals with contemporary African family life, as well as her experience living as an expat in the U.S. (She was born in Nigeria.) In this talk, Akunyili Crosby will discuss her sources for the work, as well as her process and her experience working with associate curator Jane Panetta.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 7 p.m. Tickets $8/6

Screening: “Anger: Four Films” at Metrograph
The newly-opened art house theater will be screening four of Kenneth Anger’s greatest short films on 35mm film: Fireworks (1947), Rabbit’s Moon (1950), Scorpio Rising (1964), and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1970). Not to be missed.
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, 5:45 p.m. (also screens at 9:15 p.m.)

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23

Opening: Tom Sachs at Noguchi Museum
In what may be the season’s most unlikely and most intriguing show, Tom Sachs will be one of two artists ever to have a solo exhibition at the Noguchi Museum. (The other is Isamu Noguchi himself.) For his show, Sachs will debut an installation about Japanese tea ceremonies, and even conduct a tea ceremony himself two times over the exhibition’s run. Sachs’s teahouse will be set in a garden, and here’s what it’s going to feature, according to a release: “lanterns, gates, a wash basin, a plywood airplane lavatory, a koi pond, an ultra HD video wall with the sublime hyper-presence of Mt. Fuji, a bronze bonsai made of over 3,600 individually welded parts, and other objects of use and contemplation.” There will also be three other installations, one of which is a mini-retrospective of Sachs’s work over the years.
Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Queens, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

THURSDAY, MARCH 24

Opening: Rashaad Newsome at Studio Museum in Harlem
Rashaad Newsome’s collages, performances, and videos feature voguing, rap songs, twerking, showers of dollar bills, strippers, tricked-out cars, digitally manipulated limbs, and shiny jewelry. They’re visual overload, but it’s hard to stop watching them, and it’s even harder to say what makes them so successful. Like Kehinde Wiley’s glitzy paintings, Newsome’s work marries high and low, placing appropriated footage of Nicki Minaj videos on the same footing as images of saints and royalty. Campy yet still genuine, Newsome’s videos bring African-American LGBTQ culture into the gallery space, making the white cube reflective of real life. This show, Newsome’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, surveys the artist’s delightfully over-the-top videos and works on paper. —Alex Greenberger
Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, 12–9 p.m.

Opening: Bracha L. Ettinger at Callicoon Fine Arts
Bracha L. Ettinger’s show at Callicoon Fine Arts marks the abstract painter’s first show in New York since her “Eurydice” series was shown at the Drawing Center in 2001, and features oil paintings as well as works on paper and notebooks. Blues, reds, and violets are crosshatched to reveal the same images of genocide that appeared in her “Eurydice” series at the Drawing Center, now printed directly onto canvases. According to Ettinger, “Abstraction that begins from the mind enacts from the painting itself a healing transformation that confronts the most difficult atrocities in reality.”
Callicoon Fine Arts, 49 Delancey Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, MARCH 25

Opening: Omer Fast at James Cohan Gallery
Multiple-screen video installations have become clichéd—they seem to be everywhere, and rarely ever are they put to good—yet Omer Fast puts them to good use. Rather than settling for several screens showing different scenes, Fast combines different perspectives on the same event and exhibits them together. One screen won’t do it for Fast, whose work deals with how there is no singular viewpoint on an event, and how, by extension, there can’t be one version of reality. Fast usually applies this idea to war, showing how there are, sometimes even quite literally, two sides to all political matters. In his newest video installation, Spring (2016), Fast pits several narratives in a German suburb against each other. They culminate in violence, as they often do in Fast’s work, but we can never tell what truly led to a teenager, a male prostitute, and a couple coming together. —Alex Greenberger
James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Performance: Extra Shapes at The Kitchen
Extra Shapes, created by D.D. Dorvillier, Thomas Dunn, Sébastien Roux, Katerina Andreou, and Walter Dundervill, is described in a press release as “a dance event, a musical concert, and a light show—laid out like a giant slice of Neapolitan ice cream.” The 17-minute performance, featuring autonomous dance scores and light shows, is repeated three times, each iteration exploring the similarities and differences between sound (strawberry), light (vanilla), and movement (chocolate). Audience members, who will change seats each time the piece repeats, also play a crucial role via their shifts in perception.
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 8 p.m. Tickets $15

SATURDAY, MARCH 26

Opening: “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” at Museum of Modern Art
Edgar Degas is primarily known for his paintings of ballerinas at work, but he, in fact, created his most dynamic pieces as a printmaker. Introduced to the monotype process in the 1870s, Degas was fascinated by the potential to create a textured drawing, and his subjects also expanded beyond dancers to electric light, women in intimate settings, and meteorological phenomena. Degas also used the monotype as an undertaking in revisionism, during which he could study form more extensively. The show comprises 120 of these rarely-seen monotypes, in addition to 50 paintings, drawings, pastels, sketchbooks, and prints that were in some way a byproduct of Degas’s experimentation with modern technology.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Screening: Weekend at Brooklyn Academy of Music
In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend, a young bourgeois couple’s car explodes into a fiery mess because the film strip tears and skips a few frames. This scene is a footnote, and one that happens over the course of a few shots—the rest of the film continues on as if this didn’t happen. So if that’s any proof, Weekend is one of Godard’s craziest, brashest works. It’s loosely about a couple trying and failing to go on vacation. The mob is involved somehow, and traffic jams keep them from getting anywhere. Violence and Godardian hijinks (read: long takes, intertitles, fourth-wall-breaking scenes) ensue as they travel the French countryside, where the couple begins to abandon society all together. Weekend remains one of Godard’s most potent works about a French culture obsessed with commercial objects and conservative politics. The way out, Godard proposes, is to destroy it all and start over again: burn the cars, kill the characters, destroy cinema, end capitalism. Fittingly, Weekend screens, with the short Zuckerland!, as part of a series at BAM about the Evergreen Review, a countercultural American publication active during the ’60s and ’70s. —Alex Greenberger
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, 2 p.m. (also screens at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.). Tickets $14/$7