This Week’s Must-see Events: From Graveyard Poets to Star Wars Scholars

This show mostly gets a listing so we can ask why many portrait shows get titled “About Face”. Check out the google results for the search term “About Face exhibition.” There are 46 million. This one includes Charles Le Brun’s 17th century “Expressions of the Passions”—a bunch of drawings of people’s contorted faces and Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne and Adrien Tournachon’s photographic series The Workings of Human Physiognomy. The series captures people’s expressions as they receive electrical shock therapy and is disturbing as fuck. Things to think about this summer I guess.

Here’s what we know about the Lucy Beech exhibition: It’s a solo show that will include two videos, “Results That Move You” and “Cannibals”. Both works explore how women support one another. Exactly how the videos are structured and what’s in the them is never explained in the five paragraph long press release, so that’s a bit of a black hole. Guess we’ll have to go see the exhibition and report back.

Get ready for some combo action at the Studio Museum’s satellite exhibition at the Greene Space. Tuesday night we will see an opening reception for for the museum’s current artists in residence, Sadie Barnette, Lauren Halsey and Eric Mack, as well as a talk between the artists and former Studio Museum artists in residence, Xenobia Bailey, Leslie Hewitt, and Sanford Biggers.

Wow, this talk by Romany Reagan looks really great. Reagan will track the evolution of the “Gothic Sensibility” from 18th century Graveyard Poets and ‘Gloomths’, to the music and fashion goth revival of the late 20th century. She’ll also talk about the “Death Positive” a contemporary movement we didn’t even know existed. Find out what defines this movement at the talk.

Get a little bit of NY underground history with Participant Inc.’s exhibition revisiting the Clit Club. What was the Clit Club? It was a roving party with a sex-positive vibe for lesbians of all ages. The pop-up event lasted from 1990 to 2002. On Thursday, attendees will have a chance to see Clit Club-related ephemera, as well as see a screening of short videos chosen by Kun Young Kang and Vivian Crockett, the event’s curators, that reflect the club’s legacy.

Featuring videos:

House of Color (Robert Garcia, Wellington Love, Robert Mignott, Jeff Nunokawa, Pamela Sneed, Jocelyn Taylor, Julie Tolentino), “I Object, video,” 5min., 1990

Nguyen Tan Hoang, “Maybe Never (But I’m Counting the Days),” video, 15min., 1996

Curated by Leeroy Kun Young Kang + Vivian Crockett

Gamergate. Cosbygate. Any gate you look at, it’s a shitty situation for women. Artists like Katya Grokhovsky, founder of the group Feminist Urgent, believe that now is the time to speak up. Thursday’s open roundtable discussion will focus on speaking up, and the “issues of focusing on the personal, often silent protests women carry out in their daily lives.”

If you live in Bushwick, you know rental prices have been escalating on what seems like a daily basis. Learn more about the specifics of what’s happening with the former Rheingold Brewery, which will be developed into condos. In 2013, DNA Info reported that “The developer promised the group to make 30 percent of its units affordable, up from 20 percent.” And now, that promise is being broken, according to the activist group the Rheingold Construction Committee. They’re pissed.

Hurry! Tickets are selling out fast on Eventbrite for this informal talk by artist and writer John Powers. All we know about the talk so far is from a tweet by John Powers saying it will be “about modernity, architecture, futurism, and of course, Star Wars.” Expect Star Wars Modern Live!

Tired of reading on backlit devices? The Small Press Flea’s got your back. Take a walk through this market filled with the wares of Independent presses and non-profits. It will make you happy.

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