This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Live From Grand Rapids!

Get ready for some heated art criticism! Tonight, Art F City’s Paddy Johnson will weigh in on the finalists for 3D and time-based works at Artprize, the massive open-call art event in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Finalists were selected by a mix of public vote and experts including Hyperallergic’s Hrag Vartanian; since Grand Prize winners stand to win $200,000, the pressure is on to choose wisely. Paddy will add to that pressure by criticizing their decisions.

Whatever mixed feelings one might have about the idea of holding a show themed around “makers” (maker movement, *shihihiver*)—the Museum of Art and Design has hosted some great resident artists. Here’s a video of Martha Wilson performing there as Barbara Bush. Help them keep bringing this wide range of work, and pick up some jewelry at their benefit.

A fond farewell to Hudson, the founder of beloved Lower East Side gallery Feature Inc. For just a week, envoy enterprises holds a memorial exhibition of works from Hudson’s personal art collection. The exhibition will be held in conjunction with Tuesday’s public ceremony for Hudson at the Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, at 7 pm.
The artists include: Anonymous Tantra, Joe Brainard, Jeff Burton, Larry Clark, Arnold Fern, Tom of Finland, Jason Fox, Chris Hammerlein, Martin of Holland, Peter Huttinger, Tyler Ingolia, Jim Isermann, G.B. Jones, Richard Kern, Kinke Kooi, Sean Landers, Kevin Larmon, Judy Linn, Raymond Pettibon, Kay Rosen, Rene Santos, Lily van der Stokker, Gary Winogrand, and B. Wurtz.

Who can forget that scathing Slate piece “Why the Art World Is So Loathsome”? If his writing is any indication, Simon Doonan will probably be a scream– or, at least, no boring lecture. Tonight, he’ll be discussing the difference between good and bad taste in menswear. As a blog whose branding dabbles in meats, dicks, and cat hair, the subject is of particular interest to us.

The New York Film Festival enters its second week, albeit on a slower note. Last week we saw more in the way of art programming; this week goes the feature-length film route. So grab some popcorn and sit down with classics like Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953), or newer releases like Albert Maysle’s Iris (2014), a documentary following around 94-year-old interior designer Iris Apfel.

We don’t typically list LA events, but we like this artist list— probably not surprising, since Martos is a New York-based gallery which just opened its new LA branch. Anyway, Bushwickians and Red Hookers will probably know the name of painter Michael Assiff who’s been emerging on the scene. We’re also, of course, always on the lookout for new work by past IMG MGMT authors like Kevin Zucker and Jon Rafman.

Now, after that pleasant admission, we submit our complaints about gender bias. This is a sausagefest, guys.

The full artist list here: Michael Assiff, David Brooks, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, David Detrich, Chris Dorland, Hoël Duret, Adam Helms, Joseph Kendrick, Servane Mary, Ben Noam, Garrett Pruter, Jon Rafman, and Kevin Zucker.
Curated by Cecelia Stucker.

Whoever’s behind Pratt’s guest speakers has been killing it. (See our write-up of Simon Doonan on Monday.) Unfortunately, only the students will probably get to see Jon Kessler, as the talk runs midday. But this should be on the radar of anybody who’s interested in extravagant complex mechanical systems used for anticlimactic purposes. I just want to hear about how Kessler got from a blinking doll machine to an interactive app-based selfie network.

Can wigs and Hello Kitty overcome the noise of Union Square? On Friday night, poet and wig-lover Kate Durbin, along with her troupe of female performers, will take selfies for an hour straight without interacting with passersby.

If the recent climate march in New York, with hundreds of thousands of people pouring down Sixth Ave for hours on end, wasn’t a reminder of our tentative fate on this planet—then I don’t know what is. Along with the usual hippies, I saw everybody from hotel workers’ unions to people waving signs of solidarity from their Central Park-facing condos. Everybody’s got a stake in this. So a talk by climate scientists shouldn’t really be out of place at the ICP; Robin E. Bell will discuss her experience working as a polar scientist with Columbia University.

AFC’s Whitney Kimball has curated a series of events in Philadelphia of artists who work collaboratively against traditional art market formulas.

What better example of this than the Videofreex, a group of video artists some of whom met at Woodstock, and others who joined from technical jobs at CBS. After documenting events like Woodstock, Black Panthers, and the Vietnam War Protests, the group founded the country’s first (and possibly, only) pirate TV station. Throughout the 1970s, the Videofreex broadcast as “Lanesville TV” from a farmhouse in their small Catskills town.

The group was also instrumental in getting public access broadcasting stations set up in many colleges across the Northeast. The Videofreex are getting a lot of new attention in museums and activist circles lately (there’s a documentary coming out about them next year, to screen in Philly, and an upcoming exhibition at SUNY New Paltz), but their history is still being written. Come see a selection of video art, guerilla documentation, and Lanesville TV broadcasts on Friday, followed by a Q&A with Nancy Cain and Skip Blumberg.

For Michael Bell-Smith’s fourth solo exhibition at Foxy, we don’t know what to expect. The gallery press release features a still from what looks like an episode of Looney Tunes with Elmer Fudd hunting for wabbits. Knowing Bell-Smith’s work, no matter his source material, it’ll be covered with HD gloss.

One more plug: Whitney Kimball has also curated back-to-back artist lectures by fearless females Jeanine Oleson and Jaimie Warren. I can’t wait to see both of these amazing performers in the same room.

Both artists are very conscious of audiences in their work, in similar, but different ways. Oleson, for example, imagines Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer critique Womanhouse’s “Tampon Bathroom” based on light and space and volume. In a more recent opera at the New Museum, she orchestrated a performance of paradoxical instruments (like an ear-shaped trumpet), and arias sung in jibberish.
Warren is known as both a photographer and performance artist in her own right, and co-founder of Whoop Dee Doo: a travelling variety show combining everything from the gruesome, to queer, to heavy metal, before an audience of children.
I can’t tell you what’s in store for Saturday. But I will say this: The last time I saw Warren lecture at the Hole, she ripped off her all-black suit to reveal a nude body suit, a karaoke routine, and a candy shower. Anybody’s guess what this slideshow will look like.

I can’t think of an illustrator or comic artist as unpredictable as Saul Steinberg. This is evident from his current show at Adam Baumgold Gallery: the show includes a range from bizarre, childlike maps, to absurdly-ornate fake diplomas and money, to elegant, paired-down caricatures. All of them read like puzzles, without a clear punchline.

Steinberg worked for the New Yorker for nearly sixty years; in honor of what would be his hundredth birthday, the New Yorker Festival holds a panel on his work followed by a small exhibition.

Panelists include political cartoonist and illustrator Barry Blitt, author and comic artist Richard McGuire, independent curator Melissa Renn, and Joel Smith, Richard L. Menschel curator of photography at the Morgan Library & Museum. Staff writer Ian Frazier moderates.