This Week’s Must See Events: Bad Girls and Chatbots

This is unorthodox: The Chashama Gala will kick off at NASDAQ where Founder and Artistic Director Anita Durst will ring the closing bell, thus launching their PSA campaign on the NASDAQ Tower and Reuters digital screens. The actual event will take place at Anita’s Way from 6:00 – 9:00 PM.

We recommend attending this event. Chashama provides workspace to thousands of performing and visual artists through New York at free or low-cost rates. At a time when real estate costs are skyrocketing, this couldn’t be more necessary.

Not one, but five new exhibitions open in one night at White Columns. Let’s be honest: that sounds painful for any curator. With this night of many exhibitions we’ll see whimsically bright collages by Norwegian artists Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen; a show of paintings by Daniel Heidkamp, a painter of the lighter side of life, like picnics and pre-teen baseball players; Jennifer Nichols’s radiant, splotchy abstract canvases; and works by self-taught artist Ray Hamilton who constantly invented new approaches to making art throughout his life. After a stroke left him partially paralyzed, he would take objects lying around him (Oreo cookies, bananas, et cetera) and outline them with his non-dominant hand, then color them in with rich, yet flat colors. So expect some fancifully colored works.

Artists: Patrick Berran, Ray Hamilton, Daniel Heidkamp, Jennifer Nichols, ALBUM / Primary Information

Martos gallery offers up a show title more woo-woo than we normally like, but the artist list is good, so it gets a recommendation regardless. Nicole Eisenman and John Giorno gotta add something good to the mix.

Participating artists: Irina Arnaut, Vittorio Brodmann, Nicole Eisenman, John Giorno, Fabian Marti, Dave Miko
Curated by Ebony L. Haynes, Taylor Trabulus

An exhibition with no press release and an image of a vase with eyes. Basically, this gets a listing because it promises chatbots and we’re an Internet publication.

Artists include: Ian Cheng, Melanie Gilligan, Carissa Rodriguez, Anicka Yi

Artist Jonathan Horowitz convinced 402 artists to paint a black circle in the center of a 12-inch square canvas. Put together in a grid, those individual paintings form Horowitz’s gesamtkunstwerk “402 Dots.” Come on down to KARMA and find the answer to the question of whether all dots are the same.

Back in 1994 we saw the opening of Bad Girls, a now historic exhibition of feminist art from the 90s. This breed of critical art was funny, sexy, and pretty much threw modesty out the window. Klaus revisits the Bad Girls ethos with artists today. From mining chat rooms for adolescent sexuality (Hirsch) to uncertain sexual motives (Simmons), these artists might be following in the steps of their elders.

What if corporate funding saved NASA? I can visualize it now: Toyota-branded space rovers. In Glenelg, Mars this could all be true. And though we can’t say with any certainty what’ll be on view at Glenelg Toyota, it all relates to this city called Glenelg, a product of some corporate sci-fi future.

Thanks to VICE Photo Editor and AFC contributor Matthew Leifheit for introducing us to the photography magazine MOSSLESS; the third issue drops this Friday. The issue consists of over 500 photos taken by over 100 photographers; a sampling of that work will be on view for the exhibition, too.