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Still from John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet (1984).
COURTESY PHOTOFEST
MONDAY, JULY 17
Screening: The Brother from Another Planet at Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art kicks off its expansive summer of sci-fi cinema with this screening of John Sayles’s 1984 film The Brother from Another Planet. Drawing on earlier Afrofuturist films like John Coney’s Space Is the Place (1974), Sayles’s film features a character known only as the Brother who comes to New York from a place far, far away from the center of Manhattan: the uptown world known as Harlem. He travels around the Big Apple and observes various instances of prejudice and racism, and over the course of the film, he doesn’t say much. Sayles will be present at this screening to introduce the film.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 7 p.m. Tickets $8/$10/$12
Screening: Ko Nakajima at Microscope Gallery
You might know Japan’s Mt. Fuji from Hokusai’s famed ukiyo-e prints, but you’ve probably never seen the Japanese destination quite the way it appears in Ko Nakajima’s 1984 video Mt. Fuji. The 90-minute video’s premise is simple: Nakajima took various images and photographs of the mountain and manipulated them using video technology until they appear flattened or warped. Couched in a statement about the way that digital culture has changed our relationship to nature, Nakajima’s rarely screened video is part of a trilogy of works rooted in Taoist philosophy. Mio Nakai, a curator of Japanese experimental film from the 1970s, will introduce the screening.
Microscope Gallery, 1329 Willoughby Avenue, #3B, 7:30 p.m. Tickets $6/$8
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Still from Lucy Raven’s Subterrestrial Cinema (2017).
COURTESY THE ARTIST
TUESDAY, JULY 18
Lecture: Lucy Raven at Guggenheim Museum
The Guggenheim Museum was long ago known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, with a purpose to showcase abstraction in all its many forms. With a new lecture-performance-screening hybrid called Subterrestrial Cinema, Lucy Raven will summon the museum’s early years with a work that intermingles materials from the Guggenheim’s archives and her own abstract animations. The work doubles as an ode to art and film history, and it will include science-fictional elements.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, 6:30 p.m. Tickets $5/$10/$15
Launch: The People’s Cultural Plan at Artists Space
With New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs kicking off a new plan called CreateNYC, which will significantly reshape neighborhoods occupied mainly by minority groups, activist Mychal Johnson and artist Chloë Bass have united to launch the People’s Cultural Plan, an organization aimed at fighting gentrification. This introductory event will feature a conversation with Johnson and Bass about the new group. “To be truly relevant, no cultural plan can fail to address this crisis,” the two note in a statement. Audience members will be invited to brainstorm ways of addressing cultural gentrification and its effects.
Artists Space, 55 Walker Street, 7 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 19
Opening: Heidi Lau at Bronx Museum of the Arts
At first glance, Heidi Lau’s ceramic sculptures are not especially becoming—they often look like decomposing objects or ruins—but this is very much by Lau’s design. The young Macao-born, Brooklyn-based artist explores in her work the passage of time, often with mythological elements involved, so no wonder her sculptures look like relics from long ago. Her Bronx Museum of the Arts, staged on the institution’s terrace, will incorporate elements of Taoism. A new body of work titled The Primordial Molder will draw inspiration from Nüwa, a snake goddess who, according to the belief system’s mythology, began humanity by blocking a hole in heaven.
Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
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Rachel Rossin, Scrubbing 1, Maquette, 2017, virtual reality installation.
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND POSTMASTERS GALLERY, NEW YORK
Talk: Rachel Rossin at Postmasters Gallery
Currently on view in Postmasters Gallery’s “alt-facts” show is Rachel Rossin’s Scrubbing 1, Maquette (2017). In typical form for the New Yorker artist, it’s a virtual-reality work. Viewers who don VR headsets can see explosions that appear to scatter various computer-generated objects around a nondescript space. The work loosely alludes to Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970), which memorably culminates in a montage of explosions, as a way of reflecting its protagonists’ anti-capitalist spirit. At this viewing event, Rossin will discuss Scrubbing 1, Maquette with gallery director Kerry Doran.
Postmasters Gallery, 54 Franklin Street, 6–8 p.m.
THURSDAY, JULY 20
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Meschac Gaba, Lipstick Building, 2004, braided artificial hair and mixed media, with coins and wood on pedestal.
Opening: “Their Own Harlems” at the Studio Museum in Harlem
On the occasion of the centennial of Jacob Lawrence’s birth, the Studio Museum in Harlem will reflect on one of the central factors in the museum’s mission: Harlem itself. This show features more than 15 artists who, in their paintings, drawings, and photographs, depict the neighborhood and its inhabitants. Lawrence, who, in the mid-20th century, painted naturalistic images of black Americans as they dealt with poverty and prejudice, will have work in the show alongside artists from a newer generation, among them Dawoud Bey and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Also on view will be Julie Mehretu’s abstractions, which reimagine cities as spiraling layers of lines and forms.
The Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, 12–9 p.m.
Book Signing: Seth Price at Petzel
With a Stedelijk Museum mid-career survey now under his belt, Seth Price will be present at Petzel gallery this week to sign copies of that exhibition’s catalogue, Seth Price: Social Synthetic. Featuring essays by Cory Arcangel, Ed Halter, John Kelsey, and Michelle Kuo, the catalogue provides a comprehensive view of Price’s diverse output, much of which focuses on image production in a digital age. Whether in the form of sculptures or as essays, Price’s work shows that pictures and ideas don’t stay stable for long when the internet is involved—they mutate and, in the process, become entirely unlike their originals.
Petzel, 456 West 18th Street, 4–6 p.m.
SATURDAY, JULY 22
Screening: Beneath the Veil at Anthology Film Archives
Most might know Eve Arnold as a photographer of celebrities—particularly of Marilyn Monroe, who, in some of the Magnum artist’s most unforgettable black-and-white images, appears to be performing for the camera and playing it natural at the same time. Yet, for Beneath the Veil (1969), Arnold went in a very different direction. For her only known film, Arnold traveled to Dubai, where she filmed women in a harem. According to some, the film provides a three-dimensional portrait of Arab women, who Arnold managed to humanize in this documentary.
Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, 5:45 p.m. Tickets $7/$9/$11