This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Performa Alternatives

by The AFC Staff on November 4, 2013 Events

Architectural rendering of the "new" Queens Museum of Art. Courtesy Eric Owen Moss Architects.

It doesn’t matter that Performa’s started last week—pssst, here’s our handy Performa guide—there’s still plenty of everything to do in the city. From artsy karaoke to the long-awaited opening of the Queens Museum of Art, you shall be busy if you so desire.

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Wed

apexart

291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013
8:00 PM to 1:00 AMWebsite

SCARYOKE!!!

Halloween will never end. This Wednesday apexart opens its show SCARYOKE, with the promise of a performance by acclaimed karaoke jock, John Brophy of Baby Ketten. The gallery promises a six-week joy factory, with three unique singing environments.

Eyebeam

540 West 21st Street
New York, New York 10011
6:00 - 8:00 PMWebsite

Software Takes Command

There’s seemingly something for everyone with Eyebeam’s latest roundtable (Lev Manovich, Christiane Paul, Paul Miller, and Katie Torn), a discussion about the history, aesthetics, and poetics of software. Or all the divergent voices will give off a patchwork vibe; regardless, there’s some brilliant people on this panel.

The Hole

312 Bowery
New York, NY 10012
All day; 12:00 PM to 7:00 PMWebsite

AREA, Curated by Jeffrey Deitch, Serge Becker, Eric Goode, Jennifer Goode and Glenn O'Brien

Partying never goes out of style. This exhibition revisits AREA, a nightclub that defined the concept of “nightclub as art.” True to 2013 culture, this exhibition comes with 387-page book published by Abrams, an AREA-themed window at Bergdorf Goodman, and a vodka sponsor.

47 Canal

47 Canal, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10002
6:00 - 8:00 PMWebsite

Ajay Kurian: Proleptic

We cannot figure out what’s going on in this press release for Ajay Kurian—something about nuclear waste?—though we plan on seeing some literal and metaphorical waste with this one. From what we know about Kurian’s work, it doesn’t shy away from prettiness or muckiness; in this work featured to the left, “Spiegel Leben 2,” he combined candy and sea shells with waste from the sewer—“vitrified slag from municipal waste.”

Gitterman Gallery

41 East 57th Street, Suite 1103
New York, NY 10022
Website

Allen Frame: Dialogue with Bolaño

New Directions, a publishing company based in New York, has used nine of photographer Allen Frame’s pictures as book covers for the late Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño. A native of Mississippi, Frame depicts a community of bohemians, employing grain, blur, and inky, capacious shadows to convey a threatening kind of intimacy.

Allen Frame is a photographer’s photographer, an organizer and a teacher. He is the driving force behind the Camera Club of New York, and teaches at SVA, Pratt, and ICP. This kind of photography may seem out of style, but in the midst of an epidemic of studio photography and a need for sharpness and digital precision, Frame’s murky Southern Gothic style is a welcome reminder of photography’s potential for humanism.

 

Thu

EAI

535 West 22nd Street # 5
New York, NY 10011
6:30 PMWebsite

Squat Theatre

If you’re having trouble booking or affording Performa tickets this year, then good news: groundbreaking performance art will be taking place for free at Electronic Arts Intermix. The radical performance group Squat Theatre was founded in Hungary in the sixties, and emigrated to New York in the late seventies to become a hub for radical New York performance and music in the eighties. EAI will screen a few key works, followed by a conversation with Squat Theater members Eva Buchmuller and Anna Koos. So effing excited.

Park Avenue Armory

643 Park Avenue at 67th Street
New York, NY 10065
Thursday through Saturday, 12:00 - 8:00 PM; Sunday, 12 - 6 pmWebsite

IFPDA Print Art Fair

Prints: They’re affordable, and with some older works, there’s plenty of them. We expect this fair to be popular with collectors just starting out, and those that are just really into the Old Masters; there’s only a handful of contemporary galleries showing.

Lehmann Maupin

540 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10011
Website

Tim Rollins and KOS

It’s been 30 years since Tim Rollins starting collaborating with the collective Kids of Survival, at-risk students from the South Bronx. Together, the group (the same original students) used paintings as a way of probing literature, history, and politics—thinkers include Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, and Mark Twain, Schubert, and Shakespeare. At Lehmann Maupin, you can see where that long collaboration is in 2013. This show starts with Darwin.

Postmasters

54 Franklin Street
New York, NY 10013
7:00 PMWebsite

Mirage: A Residue of Corporeality

Representing the invisible is a popular topic these days thanks in no small part to the shady operations of the NSA. In conversation with film scholar Akira Lippit, architecture historian Spyros Papetros, curator Isin Onol and artist Serkan Ozkaya, Postmasters will use Serkan Ozkaya’s July 2013 installation as its departure point. Said installation featured shadow of a plane flying across the walls and floors of the galleries.

Fri

Terminal Gallery

67 West Street #320
Brooklyn, NY 11222
7:00 - 9:00 PMWebsite

TELL THEM I HATE THEM

We’re going to check out Greenpoint’s newest art gallery and the title “TELL THEM I HATE THEM” sounds like it might inject a little rage into the neighborhood. So the work is surprising; the only clear theme between artists Evie Falci, Samantha Bittman, Ryan Travis Christian, Eric Shaw, and Geoffrey Todd Smith seems to be optical patterns and mandalas. Maybe this is reactionary to the current trends?

Fowler Project Space

67 West Street, #216
Brooklyn, NY 11222
6:00 - 9:00 PMWebsite

Split Seven

Another laid-back painting show of loose abstraction is themed around the format of a Split Seven EP record. Similarly, we think this will be another smooth jazz-type painting show; very skilled mark-making which isn’t trying to rock the boat. Artists include: Yevgeniya Baras, Michael Kennedy Costa, Ariel Dill, Dana Frankfort, Sean Greene, Clare Grill,Jessie LeBaron, Russell Tyler, Keith J. Varadi, and Joel Werring.

Sat

Queens Museum of Art

New York City Building, Flushing Meadows
Corona Park Queens, NY 11368
All weekend-longWebsite

Queens Museum reopening and Queens International opening

Finally. After two years, the Queens Museum of Art will reopen its doors to a grand, $68 million-plus expansion. And now, they are just bursting at the seams with so many events. First up for the museum: the Queens International, a biennial for socially engaged artists (which should come as no surprise given the museum’s directorship under Tom Finkelpearl who writes about social activism and art all the time). Then all weekend-long, the museum will host events celebrating the spiffy new campus, and let you visit the open studios for its first-ever contemporary Artist Studios Program. We’ve listed some of these events below:

11:00 – 2:00 PM

Lynley Bernstein‘s “Fishing for the Elusive Snakehead” a 2.5-hour guided fishing trip in search of the infamous Snakehead fish identified by the city authority to inhabit waterways in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Gear and Bait provided, meets offsite, and ends at the Museum. For more information and to RSVP, please email: exhibitions@queensmuseum.org.

12:30 – 4:30 PM

Video screenings of works by Queens International‘s Taiwanese artists: CHANG Chien-Chi, CHEN Chieh-jen, HSU Chia-Wei, Jun YANG and YU Cheng-Ta.

3:00 – 5:00 PM

Welcoming and blessing Ceremonies including: Aztec Blessing by Calpulli Cetilitzi; Andean Ceremony by Estudiantina NY; Taiwanese artist Chin Chih Yang will perform as a master calligrapher, and QI artist Vlada Tomova’s New York Bulgarian Women’s Choir presenting a new piece A!Capella!Blessing!

3:00 – 6:00 PM

Queens Museum Studio Program Open Studios

 

A Loading Dock in an industrial building in Sunset Park

75 19th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11232 ‎
6:00 - 9:00 PM

President Clinton Projects: Location Two

Direct from the press release: Artists. We’re the calm before the storm of gentrification. We get in first, get priced out and repeat the cycle. Soho, Dumbo, Williamsburg and now Bushwick, Sunset Park, Long Island City, et cetera. Let’s celebrate (and mourn) these locations, communities, and artists. Let’s carry on our eternal conversations about real estate and how we can continue live and work in New York.

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