COURTESY THE ARTIST
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1
Talk: David Salle at Brooklyn Academy of Music
You probably know David Salle better as a painter, but that may change this month with the release of Salle’s new book How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art. At this talk, Salle (an ARTnews contributor) will discuss the book, the ideas leading up to it, and his writing process with Lorin Stein, the editor of the Paris Review. Salle will also talk about the art and lives of Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, and John Baldessari, among others, and how they can help us understand today’s art world.
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 7 p.m. Tickets $15
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2
Opening: Sondra Perry at the Kitchen
After a recent strong showing at MoMA PS1’s 2015 edition of “Greater New York,” Sondra Perry will finally get her first New York solo show. On view will be a new video installation that will use the Alien franchise and other horror movies as its inspiration. (The show’s title is, appropriately, “Resident Evil,” in reference to the video game and film series about surviving a zombie apocalypse.) Viewing these movies as allegories for colonialism, Perry will explore how blackness functions in white culture. In fictional worlds where black characters (or metaphors for black characters) are expected to be nice, what happens when they rebel?
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 6–8 p.m.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3
Opening: Jacob Kassay at 303 Gallery
After becoming one of the most successful young artists in America, and then after being accused of creating zombie formalist canvases, Jacob Kassay found himself in a predicament. Where to go next? For Kassay, the answer was to leave behind painting and instead start producing sculpture based on architecture. This show will feature more of these minimalist sculptures, three of which turn the gallery into something like a hedge maze, effectively creating passages with dead ends. Kassay’s sculptures are meant to disorient viewers, causing them to wonder what role, if any, they play within a gallery space. Also in this show will be new railing-like works that will be fixed to the gallery’s walls.
303 Gallery, 555 West 21st Street, 6–8 p.m.
Performance: “My Barbarian: Post-Party Dream State Caucus” at New Museum
According to a recent survey, about half of America is feeling election stress. This week, the collective My Barbarian will respond to the pervasive fear and division of the moment by ignoring those issues, in a sense. They will stage a performance of sorts at the New Museum called Post-Party Dream State Caucus, which will simulate a political convention in a world where parties no longer exist. Attendees will be asked to explore how groups form identities, and are then made to somehow find consensus. No small charge, indeed, but this free event promises to be a welcome reprieve from the fear-mongering surrounding this election season.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 6:30 p.m. RSVP to caucus@newmuseum.org
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4
COURTESY THE ARTIST, SALON 94, NEW YORK, AND REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES
Opening: “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty” at Brooklyn Museum
In Marilyn Minter’s photographs, women’s bodies are covered in haute couture, dirt, gloss, and hard-to-describe fluids. Are these images sexy or gross? They’re both—a parody of fashion photography that makes us aware of how women’s bodies can be packaged and sold as objects. Working in everything from a documentary tradition to appropriation, Minter’s work explores the connections between representations of women and photography. This retrospective, which was co-organized by the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, starts with Minter’s earliest work, from 1969, and continues to explore her work through the present. Of note are Minter’s recent photographs, some of which include the artist Wangechi Mutu posing with gold liquid dripping from her mouth.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Opening: Nan Goldin at Matthew Marks Gallery
Nan Goldin has been drawing in her diary since she was a child, but it wasn’t until recently that she began to consider these sketches as standalone works. This show, titled “Blood on My Hands,” will be the first exhibition dedicated mainly to Goldin’s drawings. Doing so might be a retort to the Museum of Modern Art recently showing The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), Goldin’s well-known slide show that captures several emotionally turbulent relationships, as if to let us all know that the New York–based artist does more than just photography. But, if Goldin’s photography is what you seek, Marks will have on view four photo-grids, arranged according to formal elements like color. The drawings and grids capture the crossover between the artist’s life and her art.
Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street, 6–8 p.m.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER NEW YORK/LONDON
Opening: Carol Bove at David Zwirner
Carol Bove’s latest show at David Zwirner focuses once again on her materials and their history. This exhibition, titled “Polka Dots,” will feature a new series of work that the American sculptor calls “collage sculptures”—assemblages of steel tubing and found scrap metal, along with what a release calls “shiny discs” that Bove created. With their all-over compositions and crushed forms, Bove’s new works recall Baroque art, Abstract Expressionism, John Chamberlain’s car sculptures, and Mark di Suvero’s translations of Abstract Expressionist gestures into the third dimension. The sculptures will be shown alongside “glyphs,” Bove’s word for the swooping, monumental works that she has become known for.
David Zwirner, 525 and 533 West 19th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: Kishio Suga at Dia Art Foundation
At a time when the Japanese neo-avant-garde is finally getting its critical due, with institutional surveys about Gutai and Japanese experimental photography, it is the perfect moment for Kishio Suga to have his first U.S. solo museum show. One of the leading members of the Mono-ha movement in Japan in the 1960s and ’70s, Suga’s work focuses on balancing acts—both formal ones, in which unlike objects are propped against each other, and more conceptual ones, in which nature and industrial objects are forced to coexist. This show, curated by Jessica Morgan and Alexis Lowry, will include a reconstructed version of Suga’s Placement of Condition (1973), an installation in which stones are linked together by wire. Alongside it will be newly commissioned works that combine metal rods and wood pieces.
Dia Art Foundation, 541 West 22nd Street, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
GAO YUAN/©AI WEIWEI/COURTESY LISSON GALLERY
Opening: Ai Weiwei at Mary Boone Gallery, Lisson Gallery, and Jeffrey Deitch
With not one, or two, or even three shows, but four, Ai Weiwei is yet again the center of attention in New York. This week, the Chinese artist will debut new works about trees and the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe. Trees are often regarded in Chinese culture as symbols of growth, and Ai, ever the prankster, will undermine that in two of these shows. At Mary Boone’s downtown space, alongside new Lego self-portraits, Ai will show a dead trees bolted together, a metaphor for a fractured modern-day China that tries too hard to be a cohesive whole; a similar work, featuring a tree with iron roots, will be on view at Lisson Gallery. Meanwhile, at Jeffrey Deitch, Ai will debut a project called Laundromat, for which he will exhibit cleaned clothes that once belonged to refugees.
Mary Boone Gallery, 541 West 24th Street and 745 Fifth Avenue, 5–7 p.m.; Lisson Gallery, 504 West 24th Street, 5–7 p.m.; Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, 6–9 p.m.