COURTESY THE ARTIST, FORTNIGHT INSTITUTE, AND BLUM & POE, LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK, AND TOKYO
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4
Talk: Panel Discussion on African Art Restitution at Albertine at the French Embassy
A panel discussion at the French Embassy will consider issues surrounding “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics,” a report written by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy at the request of French president Emmanuel Macron. The report has since become one of the most notable missives on the increasingly heated matter of repatriation, and Sarr will be joined here by illustrious company in the form of New York Times art critic Jason Farago and Cécile Fromont, an associate professor at Yale University with a specialty in the early modern visual, religious, and material cultures of Africa and Latin America.
Albertine at the French Embassy, 972 Fifth Avenue, 6:30 p.m. RSVP required
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6
Screening: Tongues Untied at Brooklyn Academy of Music
Marlon Riggs once said that his film Tongues Untied, which focuses on the experiences of black gay men in the United States, was meant to “shatter this nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” To many who have seen it, the lyrical documentary has done so in a lasting way. Part of a larger Riggs retrospective at BAM, the screening around the film’s 30th anniversary will be followed by a talk featuring historian Tavia Nyong’o with Riggs collaborator Vivian Kleiman and filmmakers Yance Ford and Thomas Allen Harris.
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m. Tickets $15
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7
Opening: Penny Slinger at Fortnight Institute
Organized in collaboration with the gallery Blum & Poe, this show, titled “Inside Out,” features a selection of films, photographs, and collages created by Penny Slinger during the 1960s and 1970s. The pieces are drawn from four bodies of work—“50% the Visible Woman,” “Bride’s Cake,” “Lilford Hall,” and “An Exorcism”—that explore the feminine subconscious and the destruction of patriarchal power structures. Also running in conjunction is a screening series at Anthology Film Archives under the title “Out of the Shadows: Experimental Feminist Films by Jane Arden, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Penny Slinger.”
Fortnight Institute, 60 East 4th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: David Byrd at Anton Kern Gallery
For its first exhibition since adding David Byrd’s estate to its roster, Anton Kern Gallery will offer up a selection of the artist’s portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings made between 1952 and 2009. With a palette of greens, grays, browns, and yellows, the artist constructed quiet and otherworldly environments through which he told stories of human activity and emotion. This exhibition will run concurrently with Byrd’s first solo show in New York, which opened at White Columns in January.
Anton Kern Gallery, 16 East 55th Street, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: Judy Pfaff at Miles McEnery Gallery
Judy Pfaff’s new exhibition will feature her latest enigmatic installations, which play on the line between two- and three-dimensionality and incorporate sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Among the highlights is “Quartet,” a set of works that the artist calls “wall installs.” These pieces comprise a range of disparate materials including aluminum disks, wire fencing, paper lanterns, fungus, and artificial flowers arranged into abstract patterns.
Miles McEnery Gallery, 520 West 21st Street, 6–8 p.m.
Performance: Robert Ashley at the Kitchen
Written in 1985 and first performed in 1991, Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), a newly revamped opera by the influential late composer Robert Ashley, fuses text, vocals, and the sounds of an electronic orchestra in service of an abstract narrative following a series of American people and places through time. Starting in 1492 and running to the late 1940s, the allegorical work explores the nation’s mindset as it changes across generations. The opera will be performed seven times on different nights through February 16.
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 8 p.m. Tickets $20/25
©2018 BANCO DE MÉXICO DIEGO RIVERA FRIDA KAHLO MUSEUMS TRUST, MEXICO, D.F. AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/THE JACQUES AND NATASHA GELMAN COLLECTION OF 20TH CENTURY MEXICAN ART AND THE VERGEL FOUNDATION
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8
Exhibition: Frida Kahlo at Brooklyn Museum
Adapted from a 2018 survey held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this show is the largest American exhibition in a decade focused on the art and life of Frida Kahlo. It will include the artist’s personal artifacts, among them her signature dresses and her jewelry, as well as paintings, drawings, and photographs culled from the Brooklyn Museum’s holdings of modern Mexican art. The show aims to shed light on Kahlo’s persona in relation to her surrealist art, much of which deals with themes related to femininity in early 20th-century Mexico.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Opening: Jasper Johns at Matthew Marks Gallery
Jasper Johns is showing 15 paintings and 40 works on paper that he made between 2012 and 2018. Included are two paintings and a suite of drawings inspired by a photo of a solider taken during the Vietnam War, as well as additions to previous series: “Regrets,” a series inspired by a photograph of artist Lucien Freud, and “Seasons,” a group of paintings and drawings that center on depictions of the artist’s shadow. Consider this exhibition a bit of a precursor to a Johns retrospective set to open in 2020 at the Whitney Museum.
Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street, 6–8 p.m.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9
Symposium: Nancy Holt at Dia Art Foundation
To coincide with its current Nancy Holt show, the Dia Art Foundation, which recently acquired the artist’s 1973–76 work Sun Tunnels in Utah, will host a daylong symposium moderated by Holt/Smithson Foundation executive director Lisa Le Feuvre and Dia deputy director Courtney J. Martin. Using Sun Tunnels as a jumping-off point, the event will connect scholars from the worlds of architecture, art history, astronomy, and geology to discuss some of the main concepts underpinning Holt’s body of work.
Dia:Chelsea, 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Tickets $5/8/10