COURTESY ESTATE OF ANTONIO LOPEZ & JUAN RAMOS
TUESDAY, JUNE 14
Opening: “Antonio Lopez: Future Funk Fashion” at El Museo del Barrio
This exhibition celebrates the life and work of fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, who was born in Utuado, Puerto Rico, in 1943 and died of AIDS complications in 1987. After his family arrived in New York City, his mother, a seamstress, would insist that Lopez draw the flowers for her embroidery work to help keep him off of the streets. Lopez also assisted his father, a maker of mannequins, with the application of makeup to his creations. After graduating high school, Lopez attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, and later began to create illustrations for Women’s Wear Daily and the New York Times, eventually becoming a freelance artist for magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Interview. Later in life, Lopez moved to Paris with his business partner Juan Ramos in order to work for Karl Lagerfeld and other notable designers. As a press release states, “Lopez made great strides in exploring and representing the ethnic or racialized body within the world of high fashion. His imagery helped to develop and underscore a new canon of beauty throughout the 1970s and 1980s.”
El Museo del Barrio, 1230 5th Avenue, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15
COURTESY THE ARTISTS AND METROGRAPH
Who better to play a deranged therapist than the experimental filmmaker Jack Smith? He finally got to act that part in Beth B and Scott B’s 1980 film The Trap Door, in which a man (John Ahearn) is fired by his boss (Jenny Holzer) and then has a series of strange adventures. Richard Prince, Gary Indiana, and Bill Rice all make appearances at some point, playing characters who are determined to ruin this poor man’s life. In that sense, the film is like many others by Beth B and Scott B, who focused on violence and power systems in their films. Three other short films—all “quintessential, assaultive,” per a summary—will screen with The Trap Door at this showing.
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, 8:30 p.m. Tickets $15
Opening: K8 Hardy at Strap-On Projects
No press release is available at this time of writing for this show, which is called “Aunt Margie,” but you can expect that it’ll include more of the mixed and matched photographs that K8 Hardy has been known for. Combining punk and advertising aesthetics, Hardy’s work is distinguished by images of women that are distorted, interrupted, and edited, in ways that are sometimes literal. In the process, Hardy exposes how women have been objectified and commodified, and proves that there are sometimes ways of getting around the male gaze.
Strap-On Projects, 255 Canal Street, 2nd Floor, 7–9 p.m.
THURSDAY, JUNE 16
COURTESY ELECTRONIC ARTS INTERMIX (EAI), NEW YORK
Like any other critic or artist, René Ricard was a fantastic doodler. His notebooks are filled with scribbled ideas and half-sentences, many of which are barely even legible, but are still a fascinating insight into his process no less. Now Mörel Books has published a volume that collects his notebook written toward the end of Ricard’s life, from 2010 to 2012. (He died in 2014.) To celebrate the release of the book, Glenn O’Brien and Luc Sante will be doing readings at Mast Books.
Mast Books, 66 Avenue A, 6–8 p.m.
Screening and Discussion: “ ‘Edited at EAI’: Artist to Artist” at Electronic Arts Intermix
This screening emphasizes the importance of the relationship between artists and their editors at EAI’s editing lab. Dated from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, video works by Cheryl Donegan, Ursula Hodel, Carolee Schneemann, and Michael Smith—all of which were edited at EAI—will be shown alongside works by former EAI editors Robert Beck, Seth Price, and Trevor Shimizu. Following the screening, Robert Buck and Cheryl Donegan will be present for a conversation.
Electronic Arts Intermix, 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor, 6:30 p.m. Tickets $7/5/free for members
FRIDAY, JUNE 17
©DANNY LYON/COURTESY EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY, NEW YORK/COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST
Originally curated by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, this Danny Lyon retrospective—the first in 25 years—will debut at the Whitney Museum before opening in San Francisco. Comprised of 175 photographs, films, and related objects, this show dives deeply into the social and political focuses of one of the leading American street photographers in the 1960s. As a press release states, “With his ability to find beauty in the starkest reality, Lyon has through his work provided a charged alternative to the bland vision of American life often depicted in the mass media.”
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.
SATURDAY, JUNE 18
Opening: “Tony Oursler: Imponderable” at Museum of Modern Art
Tony Oursler’s Imponderable will be presented in “5-D,” which, for most other artists, would seem like a farce, but, for Oursler, makes a lot of sense. Oursler’s video work is in dialogue with the history of film—and also, bizarrely, with the occult, sideshows, and magic. Mining those topics for all they’re worth, Oursler combines them with new technology, showing how the digital has made images of bodies even stranger since the advent of video. Imponderable (2015–16) is being billed as “immersive feature-length film” that involves a modern-day form of a Pepper’s ghost, an illusion technique in which it seems as a ghost is really present, thanks to mirrors. With a cast of characters that includes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, and a cast of performers that includes Kim Gordon and Keith Sanborn, Imponderable should be very, very weird and well worth a look. —Alex Greenberger
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Screening: Maya Deren at Anthology Film Archives
Born Eleanora Derenkowskaia in Kiev, Ukraine in 1917, Deren’s family fled to the United States due to the emergence of anti-Semitic pogroms in her homeland. Here, she would earn a degree in journalism from Syracuse University and later move to Greenwich Village in New York, where she became an editorial assistant and photographer. While working as the personal assistant of dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, Deren ended up in Hollywood, where she purchased a camera—a 16mm Bolex—with money inherited from her father’s death. This is the camera with which she would make her first and most iconic film, Meshes of the Afternoon, in 1943. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp, among others, Deren is regarded as one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s. This mini-retrospective at Anthology also includes her short films At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946).
Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, 4 p.m.
SUNDAY, JUNE 19
COURTESY SONNABEND GALLERY, NEW YORK
This show is named for Where Are We Now (Who Are We Anyway?), a sculpture in which a long wood plank extends through a window, acting a diving board from which viewers can jump into traffic. Arranged around its sides are a set of stools—do you sit, jump, or stand there? How do you act? Acconci’s work is concerned with how bodies move through space, and this show surveys his early experiments with that subject. Featuring films, photographs, and other documentary materials, the show looks performances Acconci did during the late ’60s and ’70s—notable among them Seedbed (1972), in which the artist lay under the floor of Sonnabend Gallery and masturbated while fantasizing about gallery visitors. —Alex Greenberger
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, 12–6 p.m.