COURTESY ARTISTS SPACE
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11
Lecture: “ ‘Later the Atelier Ate Her’: Text and Image in the Art of Natalie Czech” at Company Gallery
Currently on view at Company Gallery’s show “Sought Poems,” Natalie Czech’s work looks at the connections between the everyday and the digital, often superimposing 3-D forms onto familiar photographs. All of the promising Berlin-based artist’s works involve text or references to writing, be it in the form of a quoted sentence of a Microsoft Word logo. This lecture by Paul Stephens, the editor of the journal Convolution, will focus on the use of words in Czech’s art, particularly in relation to writers like Robert Grenier, Aram Saroyan, and Gertrude Stein.
Company Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, 7 p.m.
Talk: “Decolonize This Museum” at Artists Space Books & Talks
Last year, at Tate Modern in Britain, protesters from Liberate Tate scrawled phrases about environmental destruction on the floor of the Turbine Hall for 25 hours, protesting the museum’s partnership with the oil company BP. Usually protests such as this don’t accomplish much, but in March of this year, BP did end its sponsorship with Tate. (BP cited reasons other than Liberate Tate’s activism for terminating the sponsorship, however.) This panel, which will include members of Liberate Tate as well as representatives from Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction and NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective, will look at techniques for intervening and creating change in museums—no small task, and no small ground to cover.
Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, 7 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12
Opening: Andrea Bowers and Andrea Aragón at Bronx Museum of the Arts
As part of the Bronx Museum of Arts’s ongoing “The Neighbors” series, which presents two concurrent and connected exhibitions, the Bronx Museum will show recent work by Andrea Bowers and Andrea Aragón. The focus in both shows is immigration and nationality. How can photographs, flags, and various markers capture the flow of people across borders? For her show “Sanctuary,” Bowers has created something of a memorial to those died coming into America from Mexico, while in her new series “Home,” Aragón photographs signs and symbols that refer to the emigration of people from Guatemala to the United States. Both artists suggest that we form our national identity through images, in particular photographs, that help situate people in a given place.
Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13
COURTESY THE ARTISTS
Opening: GCC at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
GCC’s sculptures and installations are unlike most art being shown in New York right now. They take as their inspiration a specific slice of the world—the Gulf—and subtly parody its obsession with consumer goods and becoming bigger, newer, and better. This show is titled “Positive Pathways (+),” and it takes its name from the eight-person collective’s 2016 Berlin Biennale installation, in which a sculpture of a woman performs touch therapy. The work, like the new sound pieces and wall sculptures, makes fun of and investigates the surge in interest in healing. Based on videos the collective’s members found on YouTube, the new work looks at how countries like the United Arab Emirates have coopted healing strategies and used them toward corporate and political ends.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: “Why I Want to Fuck Donald Trump” at Joshua Liner Gallery
After a pro–Donald Trump art show at Wallplay gallery, along comes a very much anti-Trump one. Named after J. G. Ballard’s essay “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” this group show features a number of young artists whose work parodies Trump’s more than occasionally offensive run for president. In the process, these artists look at American heroes, questioning what values and traits a person needs to be a model citizen in this country. Perhaps the most anticipated work in this show is Brian Andrew Whiteley’s The Legacy Stone Project (The Donald Trump Tombstone), a gravestone that ironically eulogizes the Republican candidate, and was notably removed from New York’s Central Park earlier this year.
Joshua Liner Gallery, 540 West 28th Street, 6–8 p.m.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND TEAM GALLERY
Opening: Sam McKinniss at Team Gallery
Sam McKinniss’s first show with Team Gallery has been publicized with a new painting of Prince riding on a motorcycle, an image that’s hard to resist. This work, like others in the show, is campy, deliberately over-the-top, and a little foreboding, and with it McKinniss hopes to create a picture that can inspire both dread and awe at the same time. (The title of the show, “Egyptian Violet,” refers to a shade of purple that, depending on its use, can denote royalty or horror.) Using the visual languages of the everyday and art-historical sources, like Henri Fantin-Latour’s still lifes, McKinniss aims to create a distinctly queer aesthetic that merges high and low, obscure and mainstream.
Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, 6–8 p.m.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14
Screening: Citizenfour at Anthology Film Archives
With Oliver Stone’s Snowden now in theaters, Anthology Film Archives is screening Laura Poitras’s 2014 documentary Citizenfour, which follows Edward Snowden as he prepares to expose the NSA’s programs designed to surveil American citizens. Showing here as part of the series “Voyeurism, Surveillance, and Identity in the Cinema,” the film mainly focuses on the time Poitras, Snowden, and Glenn Greenwald spent in a Hong Kong hotel in the days leading up to Greenwald’s story about Snowden for The Guardian. Poitras’s film was critically praised when it came out and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary. In light of Poitras’s recent Whitney Museum show, the film is worth a second look.
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, 6:45 p.m. Tickets $7/$9/$11
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15
Opening: “Making Faces: Images of Exploitation and Empowerment in Cinema” at Museum of Modern Art
This show focuses on how images of stereotypes on film can get appropriated by oppressed people and used toward more positive ends. Through a group of film stills, the museum traces the way Hollywood filmmakers portrayed characters through grossly caricatured means, and then how New Hollywood filmmakers used those same portrayals in their own movies, this time with a more critical eye. A perfect example here: acting in blackface, which was once a form of comedy in silent films like The Jazz Singer, but which, in Blaxploitation, became a way of questioning the hidden racism in filmmaking.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ALEXANDER AND BONIN
Opening: Ree Morton at Alexander and Bonin
Alexander and Bonin inaugurates its TriBeCa space this week with shows of work by Ree Morton, Mark Morrisroe, and Willie Doherty. The Chelsea transplant is giving Morton’s work the most amount of space, with an exhibition that includes rarely seen pieces. Before Morton died at 40 in 1977, she was on her way to becoming one of the most important artists to the feminist and Post-Minimalist movements. The subject of a retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid last year, Morton’s work typically includes forms made of industrial materials that are contrasted with frilly-looking fabrics. On view here will be several installations and sculptures, among them Column Piece (1972), in which a rectangle of bricks surrounds a painting on a platform.
Alexander and Bonin, 47 Walker Street, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.