This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Brooklyn Is America Too

Fuck waiting in line all day trying to nab a ticket to Shakespeare in the Park when you can see Hamlet at Bridget Donahue’s gallery in the LES.

Like a watching someone’s home video series set to a stonewashed acid soundtrack (maybe), Sam Ashby’s films made during the 2014 Fire Island Artist Residency will play with a live synth soundtrack by Ginger Brooks Takahashi.

$10 suggested donation

It’s a whole lot of painting by Yale’s graduating class. Catch these recent students here before you start seeing them in shows all over the LES in the fall.

Artists: Henry Chapman, Brandon Coley Cox, Katherine Davis, Maria De Los Angeles, Sarah Faux, Sean Fitzgerald, Marcela Florido, H. Friedman, Patrick Groth, Camille Hoffman, Fox Hysen, Marisa Manso, Johanna Povirk-Znoy, Luke Rogers, Tschabalala Self, Martha Tuttle, Sam Vernon, David Walsh, William Warden, Kyle Williams, and Luyi Xu

This show gets a nod because curator Aspen Mays is a super-talented photographer (I once bid on her work at an auction in Chicago at Roots & Culture and I *almost* won it), so I’m down to see who she’s selected as choice photographers, both past and present.

Artists:  Ben Alper, Molly Brandt, Ellen Carey, Lynne Cohen, Linda Connor, AnnieLaurie Erickson, Ben Fain, Jackie Furtado, Nick George, Ann Hamilton, Peter Happel Christian, Whitney Hubbs, Lowey & Puiseux, Jessica Mallios, Man Ray, Casey McGonagle, Eileen Mueller, John Opera, Gina Osterloh, Justin James Reed, Meghann Riepenhoff, Melanie Schiff, Adam Schreiber, Frederick Sommer, Sonja Thomsen, Minor White, Jeff Whetstone, and Anonymous.

Stephen Vitiello is so punk rock. So is Leah Beeferman. They released a 7” record together of atmospheric noise/sound on indie label Textual Records. A preview of what to expect from their performance on Thursday can be found here.

What the hey is a virtual fashion show? I sure hope it’s like this unofficial Barbie fashion show game…with a booming soundtrack! Anyway, celebrate the release of Coven with some art, zines, and DJs because it’s practically the holiday weekend.

There will be kooky, pink cat paintings and broken piggy banks that look like chopped-off, manicured fingernails above a cat flap on a wooden door. For those who appreciate a bountiful, rhythmic application of color and materials—and, of course, for the cat lurvers.

The artists in this show take a comical approach to “uncanny connectivity” or what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at distance.” There might be a lot of theory and quantum physics behind the curatorial intent here, but the work itself is pretty fun. Ben Pederson’s rainbow-hued mobiles connect various art-making strategies and seemingly random objects into psychedelic kitsch (in a good way). Jennifer Grimyser’s photographs are a bit like still lifes and a bit like flatbed scans of collages—indexing objects and images of objects in an impossibly collapsed field of depth. It’s harder to see how Todd Kelly’s saccharine-hued, cartoony paintings relate to theoretical physics, but there is something about them that is definitely spooky.

In the same building at the same time, curators Naomi Reis with Heidi Lau bring together ten foreign-born artists who live and work in the United States. The show offers personal, identity-informed perspectives on issues like globalization and the value of labor. The exhibition features work by Nicole Awai, Jenny Cho, Ignacio González-Lang, Christopher K. Ho, Daisuke Kiyomiya, Heidi Lau, Esperanza Mayobre, Mónica Palma Narváez, Armita Raafat, and Arthur Simms.