Every summer there’s a gallery that finds an occasion to launch a cat show, and this season is no different. Start the week off at Con Artist Collective, which will host a show demonstrating artists love for kitties. Consider that show a warm up for what’s to come. Thursday in Gowanus, we’ll see what happens when artists are given access to a treasure trove discarded electronics. We can’t wait. On Friday, head out to this week’s latest artist zine festival and wrap the week up Sunday with the 25 anniversary of Queens Pride at the Queens Museum. It’s a one day pop-up exhibition looking at the history of the event and bound to be both informative and joyful.
Tue
Museum Mile
Fifth Ave, 82nd - 105th Streets | Fifth Ave, 82nd - 105th StreetsNew York, NY
6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Website
Museum Mile Festival
The Upper East Side’s “Museum Mile” is one of the world’s most important and diverse collection of cultural institutions—from the Guggenheim to El Museo del Barrio. Designed to expose the city’s museum’s to a larger audience in the turbulent 1970’s, the festival is considered a huge success for raising awareness of what the institutions have to offer to a broader public.
Seven institutions will offer programming inside and out, rain or shine, in what’s described as “New York’s Biggest Block Party”.
Wed
God Hates Cats
In all honesty, we have pretty mixed expectations for the quality of the actual artwork here, but the sheer ridiculousness of this event makes it a Wednesday-night destination.
From the press release: “An art show celebrating 5000 years of feline-human interaction, with more than 10 artists depicting Cats, Egyptian, Asian and all kinds in between. Inclusive of all art forms, painting, drawings, sculpture and photography.
A celebration of cats. Art about cats. We love cats. Cats cats cats!”
Thu
VOICE=SURVIVAL
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and Visual AIDS are co-presenting this exhibition from curators Claudia Maria Carrera and Adrian Geraldo Saldaña. In an inversion of the “SILENCE=DEATH” slogan, VOICE=SURVIVAL brings together many of the most important artists who make/made work about the virus, from the 1980s to present. Don’t miss this one. Seriously.
Artists: ACT UP, Jordan Arseneault, PosterVirus, yann beauvais, Mikki Bianco, Adinah Dancyger, Chloe Dzubilo, Gran Fury, Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gustavo Vazquez, Shan Kelley, Audre Lorde, Donald Moffett, Pat Parker, Bob Rafsky, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Marlon Riggs, LJ Roberts, James Rombergerand Marguerite Van Cook, Vito Russo, Kiki Smith, Ultra-red, Rosa von Praunheim, David Wojnarowicz.
Monument
In a warehouse in Brooklyn, there’s a graveyard of consumer electronics. A project of the Lower East Side Ecology Center, the Gowanus E-Waste Warehouse remains one of the few places in the city to safely dispose of everything from obsolete iPhones to cracked TVs—for free!
Monument, a one-night pop-up organized by Yazmine Mihojevich and Penelope Umbrico, gives artists access to this treasure trove of one-man’s-junk for experimental electronic projects. Imagine archaic video or malfunctioning music equipment repurposed for site-specific interventions.
These artists include: Constant Dullaart, Motoko Fukuyama, Elana Herzog, Faith Holland, Charles Sainty, Jean Shin, and Penelope Umbrico.
The band Das Audit (Eve Essex, Craig Kalpakjian) will be on hand making music with electronic setups improvised from the heap, along with guests and an open mic opportunity. This should be a lot of fun.
First Look: Jordan Wolfson
There are few artists whose practice is as currently divisive as Jordan Wolfson. Some claim his experiments with the uncanny valley are genius. Paddy found his violent work in this year’s Whitney Biennial nearly impossible to watch. Whatever one’s feelings about Wolfson, there’s no denying that he’s brought a sense of the visceral and primal to the world of new media—from experiments with androids to virtual reality—and that’s something rare in the genre.
It makes sense, then, that Rhizome and the New Museum would pick Wolfson as their current “First Look” digital artist. Here, they’ll be screening three of the artist’s recent video works, followed by a talk with Aria Dean, Assistant Curator of Net Art and Digital Culture at Rhizome. The two will “discuss the artist’s relationship to technology, masculinity, and the spectacularization and banalization of violence in his work and in contemporary culture.” Sounds heady, but given what we know about Wolfson’s practice, will likely be a wild ride.
Fri
Rock Paper Scissors and a Three-Armed Shovel 7th Annual Zine and Self-Published Photo Book Fair
A few weeks ago I think I remarked that unlike art fairs, the world can not have enough zine and artist-book fests. I might be changing my mind, as there’s now one seemingly every weekend. Nevertheless, this one is a must-see, because like the Brown Paper fest I attended in Baltimore, it focuses on artists of color—who are inexplicably, erroneously absent from the stereotypical popular image of zine nerd culture.
The Korshak Collection: Illustrations Of Imaginative Literature
Speaking of nerd culture, we can’t wait to geek out about this one. The Korshak Collection contains decades of fantasy and sci-fi paperback illustrations. These are some of the trippiest images produced in all of the 20th Century, but they rarely receive serious critical attention. It’s good to see that changing.
Sat
The Silk Web the False Tower
In this show, two New York-based artists, Carlos Jaramillo and Tamara Santibañez, consider incarceration globally and at home. Jaramillo’s recent photographs were taken while visiting communities living around prisons in Peru, while Santibañez makes works inspired by discussions about tattoos she has conducted at Riker’s Island. These inform sculptures made from pedestrian personal effects. Expect this one to be a tear-jerker.
Sun
Queens Museum
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona ParkQueens, NY
11:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.Website
Queens Pride 25 Anniversary Celebration
Queens Pride started in Jackson Heights in 1990 in response to the homophobic murder of Julio Rivera. 25 years later, a lot of progress has been made. This one-day pop-up exhibition looks at the history of the festival through ephemera, documentation, and a panel discussion.
The documentary Julio of Jackson Heights (Dir. Richard Shpuntoff, 2016, 90min) will also be screened at 12:45 and followed by a talk.
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