this week in art

FIRST SATURDAY: INTERNATIONAL LGBTQ PRIDE

Zanele Muholi (South African, b. 1972). Faces and Phases installed at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 2012. (Photo: © Anders Sune Berg)

Zanele Muholi, “Faces and Phases,” installed at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 2012 (photo © Anders Sune Berg)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, June 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The June installment of the Brooklyn Museum’s free First Saturday program celebrates LGBTQ Pride, with live performances by the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, Aye Nako, DJ Lynnee Denise, DJ Ilsa, and Junglepussy with DJ Joey Labeija; an exhibition talk by Jess Wilcox on “Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence” and ten-minute pop-up gallery talks about “Diverse Works: Director’s Choice, 1997–2015”; a flag-making workshop; a poetry performance by Dark Matter (Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian); a literary workshop with bklyn boihood, focusing on its upcoming publication, Outside the XY; screenings of Seyi Adebanjo’s 2013 documentary, Trans Lives Matter! Justice for Islan Nettles, followed by a talkback with the director, and Dan Sickles & Antonio Santini’s 2014 film, Mala Mala, followed by a talkback with the directors and cast memebers Paxx and Joyce Puty; and a tribute to retiring museum director Arnold Lehman, with reflections and performances by DapperQ, Visual Aids, Harriett’s Apothecary, Haiti Cultural Exchange, CaribBEING, Afrika 21/Harriet’s Alter Ego, and Balmir Latin Dance. In addition, you can check out such exhibitions as “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks,” “Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic,” “Kara Walker: ‘African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas),’” and “Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time.”

LIFE OF CATS: SELECTIONS FROM THE HIRAKI UKIYO-E COLLECTION

Takahashi Hiroaki (Shotei), “Nude Playing with a Cat,” color woodblock print, ca. 1927-30 (courtesy Private Collection, New York and Tokyo)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Through Sunday, June 7, $12 (free Friday 6:00 – 9:00)
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

“Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose),” Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami said in an interview about his 2002 book, Kafka on the Shore, which features a character who has a rather unique rapport with felines. (It’s not a coincidence that we named one of our cats Haruki.) Japan’s relationship with cats goes back some fifteen hundred years, when it is believed that cats came to the islands on ships carrying Buddhist scriptures from China. Cats do more than just naturally slip in in the Japan Society exhibit “Life of Cats: Selections from the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Collection,” a claw-some gathering of more than 120 color woodblock prints, hanging scrolls, paintings, and sculptures. Each work contains a cat in one form or another, sometimes hovering in the background, other times front and center, for both good and evil purposes. Dating from the Edo Period (1615-1867), the works are divided into five groups: “Cats and People,” “Cats as People,” “Cats versus People,” “Cats Transformed,” and “Cats and Play,” depicting the diverse relationship between humans and felines. “A cat is just a cat, but the cat motif contains many nuances and connotations,” the catalog points out, and indeed, the nuances and connotations are many in the exhibition. Sometimes the cat is hovering in the background, barely visible, or on the pattern of a kimono, while at other times it’s front and center, providing loving warmth or performing a dastardly dance of death. People become anthropomorphized cats, with claws, whiskers, and not-so-cute ears. Housecats turn into demonic figures, while tigers and lions lurk threateningly. A cat sits on a man’s back or cuddles at a woman’s neck. Some works are tantalizing and sexy, like Takashi Hiroaki’s “Nude Playing with a Cat,” while others, known as omocha-e, or “toy pictures,” provide moral lessons for children, like “Newly Published Scenes of Good and Evil Cats,” by an unknown artist. There are works by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Kanagaki Robun, Utagawa Hiroshige, Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Kunisada, Katsushika Hokusai, and even Édouard Manet, depicting cats in a multitude of ways, not always as adorable as they are in online videos. (If you saw the show prior to the end of April, you might want to go back, as nearly fifty pieces were rotated in on April 29.) Essentially, the exhibition reveals what we already know: that cats rule, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

SHANNON EBNER WITH DAVID REINFURT: A HUDSON YARD

Shannon Ebner and David Reinfurt’s “A Hudson Yard” public art collaboration will be celebrated on June 4 on the High Line (photo by Timothy Schenck)

Who: Shannon Ebner, David Reinfurt, Alex Waterman
What: Launch of art-project pamphlet with live music
Where: 14th Street Passage on the High Line at 14th Street
When: Thursday, June 4, free, 6:00 – 8:00
Why: From May 2014 to April 2015, New Jersey-born artist Shannon Ebner, who lives and works in Los Angeles and specializes in combining sculpture, photography, and language, added a four-by-six-foot wheat-pasted poster of different versions of the capital letter “A” in Chelsea and the Meatpacking District, giving odd, mysterious ratings to street corners, construction sites, and random walls, one at the beginning of each month, in collaboration with New York City-based graphic designer and writer David Reinfurt. Once put up, the posters remained for between one day and one week, depending on the weather or someone taking it down. On June 4 at 6:00, the work, known as “A Hudson Yard,” will be celebrated with the release of a pamphlet containing photographs and text by the artists, who will be on the High Line, at the 14th Street Passage, for its public unveiling, accompanied by “Clouds and Crowds for 12 Singers,” a new composition by Alex Waterman that will be performed at 6:30.

BROOKLYN SPACES BOOK LAUNCH

Who: Oriana Leckert, Hungry March Band, Morgan O’Kane, Batala NYC, Stefan Zeniuk, DJ Dirtyfinger, the Artist Formerly Known as Anya Sapozhnikova and others from House of YES, Dani Leigh & Demi Fyrce of Big Sky Works
What: Book party celebrating the launch of Brooklyn Spaces: 50 Hubs of Culture and Creativity (Monacelli Press, May 19, $29.95)
Where: Gowanus Ballroom, 55 Ninth St.
When: Saturday, May 30, free (suggested donation $10), 7:00 – late
Why: In her new book expanded from her popular website, Brooklyn Spaces, Oriana Leckert selects fifty of the most unusual and fascinating places in Brooklyn, documenting, as she writes in the introduction, “the Brooklyn I know, the Brooklyn that is mine, the Brooklyn that endlessly inspires me with its passion, innovation, and experimentation.” On May 30, Leckert will host a crazy-mad book party at the Gowanus Ballroom, one of the locations detailed in the book. “One of the most perfect representations of a Brooklyn underground arts space, the Gowanus Ballroom succeeds beautifully at artistic exhibition, cultural advancement, and creative commerce, all within a gorgeously strange historic building,” Leckert writes. (Other spots included in the book are Brooklyn Brainery, Flux Factory, the Invisible Dog, the Morbid Anatomy Museum, the Schoolhouse, Superhero Supply Co., and the Swamp.) The all-night book launch will feature art, music, dance, photography, and lots of unpredictable goings-on, selected from other cultural institutions and artist houses singled out in the book.

CELEBRATE ISRAEL: ISRAEL IMAGINES

Bikers join with marchers and floats in Celebrate Israel Parade (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

CELEBRATE ISRAEL PARADE AND OTHER EVENTS
57th to 74th St. up Fifth Ave.
Sunday, May 31, free, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
celebrateisraelny.org

On May 14, 1948, “The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel” proclaimed, “The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” Israel’s existence has been fraught with controversy since the very beginning, but the nation perseveres, and on May 31 its sixty-seventh birthday will be honored with the annual Celebrate Israel Parade. This year’s theme is “Israel Imagines,” a tribute to the ideal of Israel upon its creation. As the official parade website explains, “The founders of Israel had a dream. They imagined a vibrant, independent and Jewish state that would not only be a haven for Jews from all over the world but also one that would incorporate the best characteristics of its citizens: brains and brawn, creativity, determination, fairness, and imagination — a state whose greatest natural resource is its people who could imagine that future — one that would benefit the whole world!” On Sunday, some thirty thousand marchers are expected to make their way from Fifty-Seventh to Seventy-Fourth St. up Fifth Ave. Among the performers will be Miri Ben-Ari, Golem, SOULFARM, Peri Smilow, SHI 360, the Israel Dance Institute, and Areyvut Mitzvah Clowns. Special guests include David Blu, Derrick Sharp, Steve Lacey, Becky Griffin, Robert Moses, Deputy Minister Danny Danon, Ambassadors Ido Aharoni and Ron Prosor, and members of the Israeli Knesset. The day begins with the one-mile Celebrate Israel Fun Run up Fifth Ave. and continues with the Celebrate Israel Festival on Pier 94 ($5-$15), with live performances by Rita and Rinat Gabay, a kosher marketplace, a Technology Pavilion, an “Israel 24/7” Instagram Photography Competition, the CreateLAB, the “Ahava” Art Installation, an Art4Israel community mural, and more; this year’s theme is “Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Cities of Light.”

Finally, the unaffiliated Israel Day Concert in the Park is a free show in Rumsey Playfield (2:30 – 7:30) with Gad Elbaz, LIPA, Alex Clare, Tal Vaknin, Shloime Dachs, Mati Shriki, Avraham Rosenblum (accompanied by Ruby Harris, Izzy Kieffer, Heshy R, and Sam Ramras) Shloime Dachs Orchestra & Singers, Shlomi Aharoni, Broadway Youth Ensemble, Steve Lucas, Chaim Kiss, Israel Alliel, Born Kids, Aryeh Pollack, Jerry Markovitz singing Hatikva and the National Anthem, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Helen Freedman, Assemblyman David Weprin, and others. The special guest speakers are Governor Mike Huckabee, Ambassador John Bolton, and Science Minister Danny Danon.

IDEAS CITY: THE INVISIBLE CITY

Drone painting is part of three-day Ideas City festival on the Lower East Side

NEW YORK CITY FESTIVAL FOR THE FUTURE
New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Aula, Sara D. Roosevelt Park, the Cooper Union, and other Lower East Side locations
May 28-30, free – $50
www.ideas-city.org

In his 1972 novel Invisible Cities, Cuban-born Italian journalist and author Italo Calvino wrote, “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” That quote is the inspiration for this year’s Ideas City festival, three days of panel discussions, debates, lectures, interactive art projects, music and theater, and other special presentations about the future of New York and other cosmopolitan areas. Founded by the New Museum, the festival begins on May 28 with an all-day ticketed conference, but most everything else is free, with many events requiring advance registration. On Friday, “A Performative Conference in Nine Acts” ($20) consists of nine performances at the Aula on Mulberry St. by such artists as Jordi Enrich Jorba, Penny Arcade, and Danny Hoch, while Saturday’s Street Program features outdoor projects in and around Sara D. Roosevelt Park. Below are only some of the highlights of what should be an intriguing and fascinating look at civic responsibility and how you can make a difference.

Thursday, May 28
Ideas City Conference, with screening by Rivane Neuenschwander, welcome address by Lisa Phillips and Joseph Grima, “Seeing through the Noise” keynote by Lawrence Lessig, “Hope and Unrest in the Invisible City” panel discussion with Jonathas de Andrade, Rosanne Haggerty, Yto Barrada, Micah White, and moderator Jonathan Bowles, “Make No Little Plans: Towards a Plausible Utopia” conversation with Bjarke Ingels and Kim Stanley Robinson, screening of Joshua Frankel’s Mannahatta: Studies for an Opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, “Make No Little Plans: Policy and the Invisible City” conversation with Rohit Aggarwala and Connie Hedegaard, “Full Disclosure and the Morality of Information” panel discussion with Trevor Paglen, Christopher Soghoian, Jillian C. York, and moderator Gabriella Coleman, screening of OpenStreetMap’s 2008, a Year of Edits, “Maps for the Invisible City” panel discussion with Steve Coast, William Rankin, and moderator Laura Kurgan, screening of Adam Magyar’s Stainless, 42 Street, introduction by Richard Flood, and “Finding the Invisible City” mayoral panel discussion with Annise Parker, Carmen Yulín Cruz, Svante Myrick, and moderator Kurt Andersen, Great Hall, the Cooper Union, 7 East Seventh St., free – $50, 9:30 am – 7:30 pm

ETH Zurich, Block Research Group, and others: Pop-Up Workshop + Gallery, ETH Zurich Future Garden and Pavilion, 34 East First St., 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

ETH Zurich Alumni — New York Chapter: The Invisible Feedback Loop: Architects, Infrastructure, and Public Space, ETH Zurich Future Garden and Pavilion, First Street Garden, 6:30

NEW INC and Deep Lab: Drone Painting Performance, 231 Bowery, 8:00

Social Innovation in the Data Age: Inventing a Truly Smart City takes place May 29 in the First Street Garden

Friday, May 29
PareUp, miLES, and others — Wasted Food x Wasted Space: A Morning Dialogue over Breakfast, ETH Zurich Future Garden and Pavilion, First Street Garden, yoga at 8:00, roundtable dialogues at 9:00

Swiss Think Tank W.I.R.E., SAVIDA, and others — Social Innovation in the Data Age: Inventing a Truly Smart City, ETH Zurich Future Garden and Pavilion, First Street Garden, 12 noon

Jordi Enrich Jorba: Nomadic Place, A Performative Conference in Nine Acts, the Aula, 268 Mulberry St., 7:30

NEW INC and Deep Lab: EMA Performance, 231 Bowery, 8:00

Urban Word, Ministry of Endangered Language, and others — The POEMobile: Quechua Poetry & Projections, with Doris Loayza, Inti Jimbo, and Inkarayku, Mulberry St. between Houston & Prince Sts., 8:00 pm – 12 midnight

United States Department of Arts and Culture — People’s State of the Union: “2015 Poetic Address to the Nation,” A Performative Conference in Nine Acts, the Aula, 268 Mulberry St., 8:10

Penny Arcade: Longing Lasts Longer, A Performative Conference in Nine Acts, the Aula, 268 Mulberry St., 8:40

Danny Hoch: Excerpt from Taking Over, A Performative Conference in Nine Acts, the Aula, 268 Mulberry St., 10:45

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Michael Henry Adams, and others: Last Dance, A Performative Conference in Nine Acts, the Aula, 268 Mulberry St., 11:00 pm

Ursula Scherrer with Brian Chase and Kato Hideki: afloat, A Performative Conference in Nine Acts, the Aula, 268 Mulberry St., 11:59 pm – 3:00 am

Abrons Arts Center invites The City of the Lost and Found (photo by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre)

Abrons Arts Center invites visitors to “re-create an item, a feeling, or an idea they have lost in the city” (photo by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre)

Saturday, May 30
Abrons Arts Center: The City of the Lost and Found, Street Program, Sara D. Roosevelt Park, 12 noon – 3:00 pm

Art in Odd Places: Recall, Street Program, Sara D. Roosevelt Park, 12 noon – 6:00 pm

Arte Institute, Albanian Institute New York: Surface Markers and I will play your soul, Street Program, Sara D. Roosevelt Park, 12 noon – 6:00 pm

Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP): Sewer in a Suitcase, Street Program, Bowery between Houston & Stanton Sts., 12 noon – 6:00 pm

Circus for Construction, Austin + Mergold: The Wall Inside, Street Program, Sara D. Roosevelt Park, 12 noon – 6:00 pm

Davidson Rafailidis: “MirrorMirror,” Street Program, Sara D. Roosevelt Park at Stanton St., 12 noon – 6:00 pm

Emily Johnson/Catalyst: Conjuring Future Joy, Street Program, Bowery between Stanton & Rivington Sts., 12 noon – 6:00 pm

Hester Street Fair: Ideas City Food Court, with Brooklyn Soda Works, Doughnut Plant, Khao Man Gai NY, Luke’s Lobster, Meat Hook Sandwich, Mindful Juice, Oddfellows Ice Cream, Petee’s Pies, Red Star Sandwich Shop, and
Roberta’s, 12 noon – 6:00 pm

US Department of Arts and Culture, Endangered Language Alliance, and others: Ministry of Endangered Language, Street Program, Stanton St. & Bowery, 12 noon – 6:00 pm

Wojciech Gilewicz, Artists Alliance Inc. — RRRC: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Compost, Street Program, multiple locations, 12 noon – 6:00 pm

SEBASTIAN MASUDA: TIME AFTER TIME CAPSULE IN NYC

A giant, translucent Hello Kitty is collecting objects made by children for special art project (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza
East 47th St. bet. First & Second Aves.
Through Sunday, September 13, free
www.facebook.com/sebastian.m.art
time after time slideshow

Every four years, athletes, tourists, and sports fans from around the world descend on a city for the Summer Olympics. The 2020 Games are being held in Tokyo, where artist Sebastian Masuda’s “Time After Time Capsule” will be shown, a participatory project involving large-scale translucent animal sculptures that are traveling the globe (Miami first, with Amsterdam, Beijing, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Kyoto also on the itinerary). In each city, they are being filled up with objects made by children during special family workshops. For New York City, Masuda has installed a nine-foot-tall Hello Kitty in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, just up the street from Japan Society, which is currently hosting “Life of Cats: Selections from the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Collection.” (Masuda was at Japan Society in March to talk about the work.) “‘Time After Time Capsule New York’ is a project where people’s memories — that is to say, the concept of ‘kawaii’ [cute] — is sent to the future,” Masuda recently said on Kickstarter. “I truly hope that everyone will collaborate with me and we can build our dreams together.” Be sure to get up close and personal with Hello Kitty, which was created back in 1974 by Sanrio as a marketing character and became a huge part of kawaii culture, to check out the goodies that are piling up inside, entering through the back of her head. Masuda has his own “cute” kawaii concept shop as well, 6%DOKIDOKI, in Tokyo’s Harajuku district. For the 2020 Olympics, all the objects will be placed in a super-large capsule, bringing together the hopes and dreams of children everywhere.