9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

TUESDAY, JANUARY 23

Talk: Zach Blas at School of Visual Arts
Ahead of the opening of his first New York solo exhibition on Friday at Brooklyn’s Art in General, Zach Blas will give a talk at the School of Visual Art. Known for his work addressing the intersection of digital technology and queer and feminist subcultures, Blas will bring his new video Jubilee 2033, which previously showed at Gasworks in London, to New York. Starring the artist Cassils, it envisions a future in which the internet has collapsed and the world’s inhabitants must reimagine their lives. Surveillance, control of information, and big data are also explored. In addition to his SVA talk, Blas will stage a performance-lecture at E-flux called “Metric Mysticism” on Saturday.
School of Visual Arts, 214 East 21st Street, Room 120, 7–9 p.m. Free with RSVP

THURSDAY, JANUARY 25

Exhibition: Derrick Adams at Museum of Arts and Design
Much of Derrick Adams’s work has dealt with reanimating black history by finding ways to revise and remake it via performances, collages, videos, and sound pieces. His Museum of Arts and Design exhibition, titled “Sanctuary,” looks back to the mid-20th century. With The Negro Motorist Green Book, a guidebook intended to help black American travelers find safe spaces, in mind, Adams has created a new series of mixed-media collages, sculptures, and assemblages. Though the book was initially written for a Jim Crow–era audience, Adams sees it as having importance today, when laws and regulations continue to affect the everyday lives of black Americans.
Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, 10 a.m.–9 p.m.

Opening: Thornton Dial at David Lewis
Thornton Dial has been termed an outsider artist, a vernacular artist, and a folk artist—but any of those labels might be a misnomer, since the late painter’s work has been gradually moving into the mainstream art world’s view in the past few years. This week, Dial’s work will be the subject of a survey at David Lewis. Titled “Mr. Dial’s America,” the show focuses on the various ways Dial portrayed historical events in his work, tackling the O.J. Simpson trial as well as more personal struggles. Among the works on view will be a painting of Ground Zero that renders the aftermath of 9/11 in bursts of blood-red and fiery orange.
David Lewis, 88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Fabio Mauri at Hauser & Wirth
The late Italian artist Fabio Mauri spent more than five decades exploring power, media, and politics—in particular, the atrocities of World War II—through an eclectic variety of approaches including painting, sculpture, performance, film, and installation. Mauri’s inclusion in the 2015 Venice Biennale helped shed new light on a body of work that during the artist’s lifetime was relatively obscure outside of his home country. As part of this posthumous exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, the gallery will re-stage some of Mauri’s performances. Notably included in this show is 1971’s Ebrea, a powerful study of identity and perhaps the artist’s most famous work.
Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Amy Sillman at Gladstone Gallery
To call “Mostly Drawing”—Amy Sillman’s varied show of works on paper at Gladstone Gallery’s uptown outpost—a provocative title might be a reach, but at the very least it invites discussion. Works in the show blur disciplinary contours; in any given piece, you might find printed, drawn, and painted elements. They suggest narratives and pure abstraction simultaneously. The influential artist has been playing with these poles for decades, and the show comes on the heels of Sillman’s 2017 book The ALL-OVER, released in celebration of an exhibition staged at the Portikus exhibition hall in Frankfurt, Germany.
Gladstone Gallery, 130 East 64th Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 26

Exhibition: Jean-Michel Basquiat at Brooklyn Museum
Last spring at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa purchased the Jean-Michel Basquiat painting Untitled for a record-setting $110.5 million. Less than a year later, the collector is bringing the painting back to the artist’s home turf of Brooklyn for a single-work exhibition, which also counts as the painting’s first institutional showing. “It is my hope that through the exhibition and extensive programming accompanying it, the young people of the borough will be inspired by their local hero, just as he has inspired so many of us around the world,” Maezawa said in a statement.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 27

Symposium: “Collecting Medieval Art: Past, Present, and Future” at School of Visual Arts and Luhring Augustine
Maybe you’ve always wanted to buy medieval tapestries, stained glass pieces, icons, manuscripts, and artifacts, but you weren’t sure how to start. Thankfully, there’s a symposium for that. Luhring Augustine and the School of Visual Arts will co-host this event in Chelsea, which features talks from experts about displaying medieval objects and respecting their heritage. Curators from the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries are among those expected to talk at the event. In between their presentations, visitors are invited to walk a couple blocks west and visit Luhring Augustine’s exhibition “Of Earth and Heaven,” which brings together privately owned medieval works.
School of Visual Arts Theater and Luhring Augustine, 333 West 23rd Street and 531 West 24th Street, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m. Free with RSVP to rsvp@luhringaugustine.com

SUNDAY, JANUARY 28

Performance: “Anti Bodies” at MoMA PS1
The website and curatorial platform Topical Cream presents a packed Sunday afternoon program of performances, readings, and installations inside of and around the VW Dome at MoMA PS1. Topical Cream provides voices for female-identifying and gender non-conforming persons; the show will take a look at various forms of resistance through creative expression and collective action. Highlights include video screenings presented by Jacksonville artist Redeem Pettaway, poetry from Natasha Stagg, and a live performance from the electronic punk band Deli Girls.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, 2–6 p.m. Tickets $13/$15

Opening: Carissa Rodridguez at SculptureCenter
Between 2004 and 2015, the artist Carissa Rodriguez was a director at the Lower East Side gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art, the elusive Chinatown gallery that has at times questioned issues related to creative agency, market value, and labor within the art world. For her first solo institutional show in New York, Rodriguez will present a new video work that continues these investigations by following the lives of “related” artworks. In broad strokes, the piece takes a look at artistic reproduction and technology through the lens of familial dynamics.
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Queens, 5-7 p.m.