What Events You Can Visit in New York City This Week
MONDAY, JULY 10
Opening: James Welling at David Zwirner
Hot off a major survey at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent, Belgium, James Welling will debut a new film called Seascape. As in much of Welling’s photographic work, the process behind the film is intense and intricate. The making of the film began with William C. Welling, the artist’s father, who had an interest in American Impressionist painting, and who himself shot seascapes using black-and-white film. Welling, the Pictures Generation photographer, then took those films and colorized them using After Effects and Photoshop. The resulting film piece, which includes a score from the artist’s brother, is a meditation on how film history and personal histories combine.
David Zwirner, 519 19th Street, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
Opening: Mary Heilmann at Craig F. Starr Gallery
“We all hated painting,” Mary Heilmann said, speaking to Linda Yablonsky for ARTnews in 2015. “Even me. So I started making paintings that sort of dissed painting.” Heilmann’s early works are critical reflections on what painting had become by the 1970s: staid, formulaic, plain. Often relying on sloppy geometries and deliberately slapdash techniques, Heilmann parodied Minimalism’s obsession with perfection. Those early paintings are the subject of this show, a survey of pieces made between 1975 and 1978. Titled “RYB,” in reference to the bright reds, yellows, and blues that define the works, the exhibition includes loans from such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art.
Craig F. Starr Gallery, 5 East 73rd Street, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
TUESDAY, JULY 11
Screening: “The Film Sense and the Painting Sense” at Light Industry
This screening program takes its name from a Parker Tyler essay first published in 1954, a time when most critics had yet to widely accept cinema as an art form. In that essay, Tyler asserted that this was a misunderstanding—film could have similar visually properties to painting and therefore should be considered an artistic medium. Curated by Ann Reynolds, an art history and gender studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin, this program assembles a group of works that Tyler mentions in his essay. Among them is Stan Brakhage’s Desistfilm (1954), an expressionistic short featuring a group of teens partying. Films by Maya Deren and Jean Cocteau will also be shown in this two-part screening.
Light Industry, 155 Freeman Street, 7 and 9 p.m. Tickets $8
Talk: Vijay Iyer and Ruth Ben-Ghiat at Guggenheim Museum
As part of the Guggenheim Museum’s “Summer of Know” conversations series, composer Vijay Iyer and NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat will discuss what they’re calling the “ ‘strongman’ state.” Ben-Ghiat is hardly unfamiliar with the subject—she wrote a book about Benito Mussolino, and last year, she noted parallels between the Fascist leader and the rise of Donald Trump. Here, she will talk with Iyer, whose experimental piano music earned him a residency at the Met Breuer in 2016, about how artists can hold onto creative freedom during the beginnings of a Fascist society.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, 6:30 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 12
Opening: Naama Tsabar at Paul Kasmin Gallery
For her first outing with Paul Kasmin Gallery, Israeli-born musician and artist Naama Tsabar will debut new works from her ongoing series of felt sculptures and perform new compositions. Tsabar’s felt pieces suggest Ellsworth Kelly’s shaped paintings redone as sound sculptures—they are bare and still, and they produce sound if the strings that run through them are plucked. In that sense, her sculptures must be heard to be fully seen. At the opening for her Paul Kasmin exhibition, visitors will have a chance to see her sculptures activated by a group of musicians. Tsbar herself will perform that night at 6:45 and 7:30 p.m.
Paul Kasmin Gallery, 297 10th Avenue, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: “I. Summer (after the Great Game)” at Miguel Abreu Gallery
Curated by Andrea Neustein, the director of Miguel Abreu Gallery, this strangely named group show brings together a crew of artists whose work engages with the “Great Game,” or a conceptual space where there are many questions and no answers. Included in the exhibition will be works by Paris-based sculptor Jean-Luc Moulène, Puerto Rican–born video artist Juan Antonio Olivares, and French minimalist Absalon. Also on view will be works by Ernest Trova, who is most famous for his sculptures and paintings of genderless, anatomically incorrect people who appear to fall or become like machines. Nina Canell and Jean Dupuy will also have work in this show.
Miguel Abreu Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, 6–8 p.m.
THURSDAY, JULY 13
Talk: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Massimiliano Gioni at New Museum
With a show currently on view at the New Museum, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye will discuss her portraits of black youths with Massimiliano Gioni, the exhibition’s curator. The Ghanaian-born, London-based artist has, over the past two decades, become known for her Manet-like paintings of sitters who exist largely in worlds of tan colors. Her characters are deeply psychologized; even without many background details, it’s easy to get a sense for what her subjects might be thinking. “They are character studies of people who don’t exist,” Zadie Smith recently wrote in The New Yorker.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Tickets $10/$15
THURSDAY, JULY 13
Talk: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Massimiliano Gioni at New Museum
With a show currently on view at the New Museum, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye will discuss her portraits of black youths with Massimiliano Gioni, the exhibition’s curator. The Ghanaian-born, London-based artist has, over the past two decades, become known for her Manet-like paintings of sitters who exist largely in worlds of tan colors. Her characters are deeply psychologized; even without many background details, it’s easy to get a sense for what her subjects might be thinking. “They are character studies of people who don’t exist,” Zadie Smith recently wrote in The New Yorker.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Tickets $10/$15
FRIDAY, JULY 14Party: “The John Giorno Band Record Release Celebration” at Red Bull Arts
As part of a New York City–wide survey devoted to John Giorno put on by the artist’s husband, Ugo Rondinone, Red Bull Arts will host a record release party for the John Giorno Band, which is releasing an artist edition of I’m Rock Hard. The album features nine unreleased songs, all recorded during the 1980s. And what is a party without a DJ set? Matthew Higgs, the director of the art space White Columns, will provide the music while visitors experience Janani Balasubramanian’s sound installation iOS-A-Poem, an update of Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem piece for the age of the iPhone.
Red Bull Arts, 220 West 18th Street, 7–10 p.m.
Opening: Hélio Oiticica at Whitney Museum
Hélio Oiticica may have died at the young age of 42, in 1987, but the Brazilian artist made a mark on art history over the course of his short career. From abstract paintings that moved into the third dimension to ephemeral gestures that often literally turned the viewer into an art object, Oiticica’s work remains influential for the way it broke down boundaries between art and life. His 1967 installation Tropicália, for example, offered a makeshift neighborhood complete with plants and a housing structure that could be lived in, if viewers so desired. It’s a high time that Oiticica got a major retrospective at an American museum, and thankfully the Whitney delivers with this show, which traveled from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.
