this week in art

FIRST SATURDAYS: LATINO HERITAGE

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, “Marta Moreno Vega,” pigmented ink-jet print, 2011 (© Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, October 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum will be celebrating Latino heritage at its October First Saturday program, centered on the exhibition “Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: The Latino List,” in which the photographer behind “The Black List” turns his camera on such Latino figures as Marta Moreno Vega, Pitbull, Eva Longoria, Cesar Conde, Robert Menendez, and John Leguizamo. Greenfield-Sanders will screen the HBO documentary The Latino List at 7:30 and participate in a discussion following the film. The evening will also include live performances by ABAKUÁ Afro-Latin Dance Company, Jerry Hernandez y La Orquesta Dee Jay, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jose Conde, a book-club talk by Moreno Vega about her memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo, a curator talk on “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk — An Introspective,” an art workshop, and more. Also on view are such exhibits as “Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior,” “Raw/Cooked: Kristof Wickman,” “Eva Hesse Spectres 1960,” “Matthew Buckingham: ‘The Spirit and the Letter,’” “reOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio,” and “Ten Years Later: Ground Zero Remembered.”

THIRTYNOTHING

Dan Fishback looks back at his childhood and the AIDS epidemic in multidisciplinary THIRTYNOTHING at Dixon Place

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Pl. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
Fridays & Saturdays, September 30 – October 22, $15-$20, 7:30 or 9:30
212-219-0736
www.dixonplace.org

A few years ago, we caught Dan Fishback’s outrageously funny You Will Experience Silence at Dixon Place, one of the truly great works about Chanukah. Fishback, who has also presented such shows as The Material World, Absentia Dementia, Waiting for Barbara, and Please Let Me Love You, which take on politics, celebrity, religion, gay culture, and other themes, is staging the solo performance project thirtynothing at Dixon Place on Fridays & Saturdays through October 22. Directed by Stephen Brackett, thirtynothing pulls together stories from Fishback’s childhood along with tales from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, weaving in work by such seminal artists as Mark Morrisroe and David Wojnarowicz. In conjunction with thirtynothing, Dixon Place will be holding special Sunday conversations ($5 suggested donation, 5:00) on the cultural legacy of AIDS, beginning October 2 with “The Queer Generation Gap” (with Ira Sachs, Jack “Mother Flawless Sabrina” Doroshow, and Carlos Motta) and continuing October 9 with “The Gentrification Age” (with Sarah Schulman), October 16 with “The Films of Mark Morrisroe” (including screenings of Hello from Bertha, The Laziest Girl in Town, and Nymph-O-Maniac), and October 23 with “THIRTYEVERYTHING.” The talks will take place in the lounge, where Fishback has installed a site-specific piece honoring artists who died of AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s. “There is no ritualized means for my generation to mourn our predecessors who were lost to AIDS,” Fishback explains in an online program note. “As a Jew, trained from birth to mourn the obliteration of my ancestors, I feel the impulse to gather my community together, to speak of the dead, to celebrate the triumphs of the past and integrate that history into a sense of who I am. That is the impulse behind this project.”

DAVID BYRNE: TIGHT SPOT / SOCIAL MEDIA

David Byrne, “Tight Spot,” cold air inflatable with audio, 2011 (photo by twi-ny.mdr)

Pace Gallery
510 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
“Tight Spot” through October 1
“Social Media” through October 15
www.thepacegallery.com
tight spot slideshow

In 1983, David Byrne wore a really big suit on the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense tour. In the summer of 2008, he wired the cavernous Battery Maritime Building for “Playing the Building,” in which visitors could sit down at a specially programmed organ and, essentially, play the building. Size is at the center of his latest performance installation as well, “Tight Spot,” a 19.5′ x 46′ x 46′ inflatable globe squeezed into a former garage on West 25th St., directly under the High Line. In fact, sections of the oval orb spill out against the High Line beams, stretching the names of geographic locations featured on the three-dimensional map, from North and South America to Europe and Africa. Meanwhile, a vibrating chant emanates from inside the globe, Byrne’s voice filtered through a computer program to make it sound, among other things, nonhuman. The closer you get to the work, commissioned by the Pace Gallery, the more powerful the sounds, until you can feel it humming in your ear if you place your head against it. Yes, the world has got itself in one tight spot right now, and Byrne makes that abundantly clear in this crowd pleaser, which remains on view through October 1. Meanwhile, Byrne has two pieces next door inside Pace, where “Social Media” continues through October 15. In addition to works by Miranda July, Penelope Umbrico, Christopher Baker, and others that incorporate elements from YouTube, Craigslist, Twitter, Flickr, Google, QR codes, and other forms of computer interactivity, Byrne has contributed “Democracy in Action,” a wall hanging in which twenty digital frames show video of parliamentarians around the world engaging in physical altercations, and four of his Apps, large-scale vertical advertisements for humorous fake apps he made up, including Coverup, which claims to be able to put clothes on you; Buzzclip, which purports to remove body hair by using smartphone vibrations; Weaselface, which promises to “add snark and satire to any text”; and Bigamist, which helps people cheat on their spouse.

RISK + REWARD: PERFORMANCE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

John Kelly will welcome MAD visitors into open rehearsals of his updated version of FIND MY WAY HOME

Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Broadway
Through December 8
212-299-7777
www.madmuseum.org

The Museum of Art & Design’s extremely promising inaugural Risk + Reward performance series kicked off last Saturday with Sarah Maxfield’s all-day site-specific “Knowing the Score: An Investigation of Improvisational Structures” and continues this week with John Kelly presenting a work-in-progress reexamination of his 1988 piece Find My Way Home, which was previously revised in 1998. On September 28 from 3:00 to 6:00 and September 29 from 7:00 to 9:00, museumgoers will be able to watch Kelly conduct open rehearsals for the multimedia dance-theater project, which moves the Greek myth of Orpheus, the god of music, to the Great Depression. On September 30 at 7:00, Kelly will stage a ticketed ($15-$18) concert version of the production. Last December, Kelly, whose many risks always lead to myriad rewards, revisited his wonderful Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, at La MaMa, so we can’t wait to see what he does with Find My Way Home, which will be presented in full October 21-29 at New York Live Arts. Risk + Reward continues October 10 with the social-intervention-based performance “A New Discovery: Queer Immigration in Perspective”; on November 11-12 with Me, Michelle, a new duet about Cleopatra by choreographers Jack Ferver and Michelle Mola in conjunction with Performa 11; and concludes December 8 with “Benjamin Fredrickson, Artist,” a first-ever one-man show by the photographer dealing with his life and work.

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE MUSEUM DAY 2011

Multiple venues
Saturday, September 24
Admission: free with printed ticket
www.smithsonianmag.com/museumday

The seventh annual Free Museum Day, sponsored by Smithsonian magazine, takes place on Saturday, September 24, with institutions all over the country opening their doors to people who have downloaded a free ticket for two from the above website. There’s only one ticket allowed per household/e-mail address, so be careful before filling out the online form; some of the museums are free anyway, either all the time or on Saturdays, while others might be between exhibits so there won’t be all that much to see. The participating venues in the five boroughs include Asia Society Museum, the Bartow-Pell Mansion, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, the Children’s Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Fraunces Tavern Museum, the Hispanic Society, Historic Richmond Town, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, the Morgan Library, Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden, the Museum of American Finance, the Museum of Biblical Art, the Museum of Chinese in America, the New York City Fire Museum, the New-York Historical Society, the New York Transit Museum, the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, the Queens Historical Society, the Queens Museum of Art, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Skyscraper Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, the Society of Illustrators, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Ukrainian Museum, and the Vilcek Foundation. Of course, if you pair up with friends and relatives, you can get more tickets for different places.

DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL

Sean Boggs’s “Blue Monster” is among the many multimedia projects at this year’s DUMBO Arts Festival

Multiple venues in DUMBO
September 23-25, free
www.dumboartsfestival.com

The fifteenth annual DUMBO Arts Festival begins today, kicking off a weekend of live performances, art exhibitions, site-specific projections and installations, and just about anything else you can think of inside and outside of the thriving neighborhood Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Such locations as St. Ann’s Warehouse, Tobacco Warehouse, Smack Mellon, Superfine, and Brooklyn Bridge Park will host Tajna Tanovic, the Great Small Works Procession, the Jack Grace Band, a panel discussion on immersive surfaces, the White Wave Dance Company, the “Runaway Cape-Cart,” Janet Biggs’s “Wet Exit” multimedia presentation on the East River, “Kafkaesque Hammock,” the “Samsara” scroll, arm wrestling, a Mobile Tea Garden, “The Dumpster Project,” a series of virtual pavilions, Sean Boggs’s “Blue Monster,” the Fisher Ensemble’s Kocho, a steel cage Battle Royal, “Foop,” Carl Skelton and Luke DuBois’s interactive “Sweet Stream Love’s River,” readings by Sapphire and Samantha Thornhill, Bubby’s Pie Social, the newly moved and reopened Jane’s Carousel, and art projects just about everywhere you look, in stores, on street corners, in lobbies, and up in the sky.

CELEBRATE MEXICO NOW

Botellita de Jerez will rock out at SOB’s as part of annual celebration of Mexican art and culture

Multiple venues
September 21 – October 1
www.mexiconowfestival.org

The eighth annual Celebrate México Now festival celebrating Mexican culture begins tonight with the free panel discussion “México se escribe con J: A Celebration of Gay Culture in Mexico” at NYU’s King Juan Carlos 1 of Spain Center, with Nayar Rivera, Michael Schuessler, Alejandro Varderi, and Earl Dax talking about “The Famous 41” and other issues of sexual orientation in Mexico, and continues through October 1 with dance, music, theater, art, films, food, and parties. Anthology Film Archives will screen “Gen Mex: Recent Films from México,” the Queens Museum of Art will host the Trajinera Xochitl Project and the multimedia theatrical presentation “Hecho en Mexico: Estreno Nacional,” Mexican electronica band Sweet Electra will play the Church of All Nations, chef Daniel Ovadía will prepare special dishes for the panel demonstration “History and Traditions of Mexican Gastronomy” (yes, the audience will get to sample his food), Botellita de Jerez will rock out at SOB’s, the collective Rey Trueno will perform the multimedia Radio Soap Opera at the Bowery Poetry Club, and the folkloric Pasatono Orchestra will play a free show at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center and a ticketed show at Casa Mezcal.