this week in art

NORTHSIDE FESTIVAL: DAY THREE

Eleanor Friedberger will preview songs from her upcoming solo album tonight at Europa as part of the Northside Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Northside Festival
Multiple venues in Greenpoint and Williamsburg
June 16-19
www.northsidefestival.com

The Northside Festival is back June 16-19 following an outstanding launch last year. The festival features four days of indie music at venues all over Greenpoint and Williamsburg, in addition to film screenings and open art studios. There are hundreds of bands, so don’t get too frustrated if one of the shows you wanted to see is already sold out; festival badges are gone as well, but there’s still lots to choose from. We’ll be featuring highlights and recommendations every day of the festival; here are today’s:

East River Ferry, East 34th St. and the East River to North Eighth St. in North Williamsburg, approximately every twenty minutes from 9:00 am to 8:30 pm, free through June 24

The Whatever Blog presents Small Mountain Path (3:00), Hooray for Goodbye (4:00), Little Wolf (5:00), the Senors of Marseille (6:00), and Nico Blues (7:00), with DJ Jesse Elliott of These United States, Red Star Bar, 37 Greenpoint Ave., $8

Smorgasburg, Brooklyn Flea food vendors including Queen’s Dahn Tu, Shorty Tang & Sons, La Buena, King’s Crumb, Nana’s, Tin Mustard, Speedy Romeo, and more, 27 North Sixth St., free admission, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm

Ground Control presents the Babies (4:00), Surfer Blood (5:00), Wavves (6:00), Guided by Voices (7:00), McCarren Park, the Steve Madden Stage, $35

Sundance Selects presents Tabloid (Errol Morris, 2010), IndieScreen, 289 Kent Ave., $10, 8:00

Tell All Your Friends presents Emil & Friends, the Yellow Dows, Thee Oh Sees album release show for Castlemania, plus surprise special guest, $10, doors at 6:00

Northside Open Studios Launch, with Crest Fest and Brooklyn Street Art, featuring Snowmine, Balún, Merrickans, DJ Liam Andrew, Walrus Ghost, Home Land installation by Sara Sun, Honesty Box Facebook confessional by Eva Navon, Metaforeign screening series curated by Sasha Summer, Rooftop Bikini Reading Series by Boomslang, and more, the End, 13 Greenpoint Ave., $7, 7:00 – 12 midnight

POP Montreal presents Spectre Folk (7:00), Rebecca Gates (7:40), Ida (8:20), special secret guest (9:00), Eleanor Friedberger (9:40), Europa, 98 Meserole Ave., $17

CREST FEST ’11

The Crest Hardware Art Show, which has quickly become a Williamsburg tradition, kicks off its fourth year with a bevy of special activities and live performances on June 18 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Crest Hardware
558 Metropolitan Ave. between Lorimer & Union
Saturday, June 18, free, 1:00 – 7:00
Exhibit runs through July 30
www.cresthardwareartshow.com
2010 slideshow

You don’t have to know anything about hammers and nails, buzz saws and socket wrenches, to love the Crest Hardware Art Show. For the fourth year, the Brooklyn hardware store has invited more than one hundred artists to fill the fifteen-thousand-square-foot indoor and outdoor space with site-specific works, many of which use the tools of the trade in their compositions. So before reaching for that room freshener, lightbulb, or toilet seat, you better look twice, because it might not be your standard model; it could be a work of art. It’s a blast walking up and down the aisles and through the back garden, finding all the specially created pieces that appear on the shelves and on the walls like regular merchandise and are for sale, at relatively affordable prices. Curated by store manager Joe Franquinha, the son of the original owner, Manny, the show, which runs through July 30, kicks off June 18 with Crest Fest ’11, an afternoon of live music, food and drink, and various activities that benefit the City Reliquary Museum. This year’s music lineup features the Suzan, Emefe, Little Victory, and Gunfight!

NORTHSIDE FESTIVAL: DAY ONE

Eternal Summers headlines NYC Popfest show at Bruar Falls June 16 at Northside Festival

Northside Festival
Multiple venues in Greenpoint and Williamsburg
June 16-19
www.northsidefestival.com

Tiger Mountain presents Hospitality (7:30), Lady Lamb the Beekeeper (8:20), Indian Rebound (9:10), Radical Dads album release show for Mega Rama (10:00), and Pursesnatchers (10:50), Union Pool, $8

Rooftop Films Presents: This Point in Time, including the short films Broad Channel (Sarah J. Christman), Train (Darius Clarke Munroe), The Voyagers (Penny Lane), Block (Chadd Harbold), Door Man (Andrew Goldman & Andrew Blackwell), Love Lockdown (Nadia Hallgren), and Welcome to Pine Point (Paul Shoebridge), followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, IndieScreen, $10, 6:00

NYC Popfest presents Seapony (8:30), the Secret History (9:15), Reading Rainbow (10:00), and Eternal Summers (11:00), Bruar Falls, $10

Art & Real Estate: The Love/Hate Relationship, panel discussion about North Brooklyn arts community, with District Councilmember Stephen Levin, Hrag Vartanian, Marisa Sage, Jackie Moynahan, Ryan Kuonen, and David Pincus, Causey Contemporary, free, 7:00

HoZac Records presents Making Friendz (9:30), My Teenage Stride (10:30), Xray Eyeballs (11:30), K-Holes (12:30), Shea Stadium, $8

MUSEUM MILE FESTIVAL

Multiple locations on Fifth Ave. between 82nd & 105th Sts.
Tuesday, June 14, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Admission: free
www.museummilefestival.org

Once again, many of the city’s finest art institutions will open their doors for free for the thirty-third annual Museum Mile Festival, from 6:00 to 9:00 on Tuesday night, June 14. The participating museums (with one of their current shows listed here) include El Museo del Barrio (“El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files 2011”), the Museum of the City of New York (“Joel Grey / A New York Life”), the Jewish Museum (“Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore”), the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (“Color Moves: Art & Fashion by Sonia Delaunay”), the Guggenheim (“The Hugo Boss Prize 2010: Hans-Peter Feldmann”), the Neue Galerie (“Vienna 1900: Style and Identity”), and the Met (“Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective”), along with the Goethe-Institut (which has moved downtown), Museum for African Art (which is opening later this year), and the National Academy (which is currently undergoing renovation). Fifth Ave. will be closed to vehicular traffic and instead will be filled with art activities (chalk drawing with De La Vega, live model drawing), street performances (clowns, jugglers, magicians), and live music and dance featuring P-STAR: the ABAKUÁ Afro-Latin Dance Company, the Folkloric Ballet of New York: Estampas Negras, Johnny Colón and His Orchestra, Paul Labarbera and Rockbeat Music Group, Quarteto Rodriguez Cuban Jewish Allstars, Kim Smith, and the Hayes Greenfield Jazz Duo. Don’t try to do too much; just pick one or two exhibitions in one or two museums and enjoy.

JAUME PLENSA: ECHO / ANONYMOUS

Jaume Plensa’s dazzling white “Echo” stands tall in the midst of the greenery of Madison Square Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th St., Tuesday – Saturday through June 18
Madison Square Park, Oval Lawn, through August 14 [extended through September 11]
Admission: free
www.galerielelong.com
www.madisonsquarepark.org

Barcelona artist Jaume Plensa, who has installed large-scale public sculptures in London, Zaragosa, Canada, Antibes, Chicago, Grand Rapids, Dubai, and Des Moines, at last makes his New York City debut with the intoxicating “Echo.” The forty-four-foot-high work, composed of marble, plastic, fiberglass, and white pigment and dusted in white marble, depicts the seven-layered elongated head of a nine-year-old girl, rising in the middle of Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn, mimicking the surrounding buildings. Her eyes closed, the girl appears to be meditating, dreaming, or lost in deep thought, her whiteness in stark contrast to the lush greenery of the grass and trees around her. Plensa has carefully crafter her face, from the nose and full lips to the ears and even the braid in the back of her head. She adds to the peaceful respite the Oval Lawn offers, as people congregate around her, lie down on the grass, and nap in the sun. And at night she glows, with lights shining on her in the darkness. “Echo” will remain in the park through August 14. [Note: The installation has been extended through September 11.]

Jaume Plensa’s “Humming” is part of outstanding show at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Downtown in Chelsea, more of Plensa’s work is on view in the Galerie Lelong show “ANONYMOUS” (through June 18). In a small room in the front, “Humming” is another elongated sculpture of a female’s head, this one of an older woman and standing a mere eight feet high atop a small base, allowing visitors to get right in her face and examine every detail. As with “Echo,” it was created using a real model and 3D technology, although lead was added to the process here. The clearly delineated layers represent the different parts of the woman’s inner self, her divided psyche for all to see. In the main gallery, Plensa focuses on more faces, but in this case it is a collection of photographic works on paper that pair each image with a word, many of which are charged with meaning, such as “Beauty,” “Dread,” “Innocence,” “War,” “Spirit,” “Disease,” and “Humiliation” along with such “tamer” words as “Door,” “Night,” and the questions “Who?” and “When?” The italicization of the NY in the show’s name implies that these mixed-media portraits represent the melting pot that is New York, but the inclusion of the words and dirty, vertical brown stains that run down the paper and often across the faces plays off the idea of stereotyping, imbuing each image with mixed messages amid complex states of consciousness. It’s a powerful installation that works on several levels and an intriguing counterpoint to the sheer white beauty of “Humming” and “Echo.”

RICHARD SERRA DRAWINGS: A RETROSPECTIVE

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Tisch Galleries, second floor
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 28, $20
212-570-3949
www.metmuseum.org

San Francisco-born conceptual artist Richard Serra does things in a big way. Based in New York City and Nova Scotia, Serra is justly celebrated for his enormous Cor-Ten steel curved plates that have been shown at the Gagosian in Chelsea and, most dramatically, at the Museum of Modern Art as the centerpiece of the 2007 retrospective “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years.” But “Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 28, sheds a whole new light on his creative thought process and working methods. In 1977, he famously said, “There is no way to make a drawing — there is only drawing.” But he’s more recently said of drawing, “It’s just another way of thinking.” Comprising nearly eighty works, this first-ever retrospective of Serra’s drawings, which is arranged more or less chronologically from a charcoal-on-paper drawing from 1971 to a site-specific piece commissioned for this exhibition, reveals how Serra once again re-creates and reimagines an artistic medium, taking it to new heights, both literally and figuratively. The majority of works were made using paintstick on such materials as Belgian linen, forged steel, and handmade paper. “I’d melt down paintstick, then flood a board or a table with the liquid paintstick and then lay down the screen on top of the heated material, lay the paper over that and work on the reverse side of the paper by applying pressure with a hard tool, usually a piece of metal,” Serra describes on the accompanying audio guide. “The drawings assume a variable density of the material through the liquid suction coming up through the screen, as a way of making a continuous repetitive mark without seeing what I was doing.” The resulting drawings emit a physicality that echoes much of his sculptural work, from “Heir,” which recalls one of his wall-leaning pieces, to “Blank,” an intriguing space in which a pair of ten-foot-by-ten-foot black squares, stapled to the wall, face each other, making the viewer feel like he or she is standing in between two of Serra’s huge plates.

In fact, winding through the exhibit as a whole mimics the feeling of moving through Serra’s sculptural installations, only in black and white, but with a new surprise around every corner. A series of Robert Smithson-esque circular drawings, including “Black Tracks” and “September,” feature thick globs of paintstick. Such charcoals as “Giza Pyramids, Egypt” and “Le Corbusier, Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France” offer a much lighter touch. The round “Institutionalized Abstract Art” sits high on the wall like a black sun or black hole. The short 1968 videos Hands Scraping, Hand Catching Lead, Hand Lead Fulcrum, and Hands Tied predict the unusual function of the hand in Serra’s future oeuvre. The diptychs “The United States Courts Are Partial to Government” and “No Mandatory Patriotism” comment on Serra’s emotional reaction to the abrupt removal of the 1981 public art installation “Tilted Arc” from Federal Plaza downtown. And “Union,” commissioned for the retrospective, is composed of two floor-to-ceiling black rectangles that occupy their own room, a white wall between them, forming their own fascinating alley. Clearly, Serra likes doing things in a big way, and the Met Museum is indeed big, in more ways than one. In conjunction with the retrospective, the Met will host gallery talks with special consultant Magdalena Dabrowski on June 14 and 29 at 10:00 and with Ian Alteveer on July 12 & 27 and August 10 & 18. The films Art21: Richard Serra and Richard Serra: To See Is to Think will be screened on June 28 & 30 at 2:00, Judith Wechsler’s Drawing the Thinking the Hand will be shown July 26 & 28 at 2:00, and Serra’s Frame (1969), Railroad Turnbridge (1976), and Steelmill/Stahlwerke (1979) will be presented August 23 & 24 at 2:00, all free with museum admission. In addition, Serra will be at the Strand at 828 Broadway on June 14 at 7:00 talking about his work and signing copies of the exhibition catalog.

TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY: ROOF PIECE

Trisha Brown Dance Company, “Roof Piece,” 1971 (photo by Babette Mangolte)

The High Line
Enter at 13th St. & Gansevoort
June 9-10, 7:00 pm
June 11, 5:00 & 7:00 pm
Admission: free
www.thehighline.org
www.trishabrowncompany.org
twi-ny slideshow

The Trisha Brown Dance Company has had quite a fortieth anniversary year, performing old and new works all over the world, including special shows at the Whitney and MoMA. They are concluding the celebration with a re-creation of their seminal 1971 dance “Roof Piece,” which will take place June 9-11 on rooftops surrounding the south end of the High Line. Unseen on outdoor rooftops since 1973, the piece, which is part of the High Line Art program, will feature the dancers — Neal Beasley, Elena Demyanenko, Dai Jian, Leah Morrison, Tamara Riewe, Nicholas Strafaccia, Laurel Tentindo, Samuel von Wentz, and Lee Serle — reacting to one another’s movement with improvisation. Admission is free and no RSVP is required, but be prepared for long lines to witness this wholly unique and exciting experience. The High Line is also likely to be crowded now that section two just opened, extending the former abandoned railway, which has been turned into a beautiful park, all the way to Thirtieth St. And keep a look-out for the various art projects along the High Line, including Kim Beck’s “Space Available,” which can also be found on surrounding rooftops; Julianne Swartz’s “Digital Empathy” sound pieces; Sarah Sze’s “Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat)”; Stephen Vitiello’s “A Bell for Every Minute” installation; Spencer Finch’s “The River That Flows Both Ways,” about the Hudson; and official High Line photographer Joel Sternfeld’s “A Railroad Artifact, 30th St., May 2000.”

Trisha Brown Dance Company triumphantly re-creates seminal “Roof Piece” along the High Line to conclude fortieth anniversary (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Update: On a beautiful early Friday evening on the High Line, Trisha Brown re-created her thrilling “Roof Piece” as hundreds of visitors lined the southern end of the High Line. Nine dancers wearing bold red outfits were spaced around the elevated park, two on the High Line itself, seven others scattered on surrounding rooftops, one dancer nearly within arm’s reach, another far off in the distance, barely visible. Improvised within a set dance vocabulary, the work begins as one dancer improvises the first move, which is then repeated as it travels from dancer to dancer in a specific order that recalls a visual game of telephone (and is then reversed), only without any mangling of the words. Although they’re all performing the same slow movements, they each come off in different manners, one dancer seen against the blue sky, another against a white brick wall, a third against the Jersey skyline, a fourth in a rectangular doorway that resembles a framed work of art. In an odd way, they recall Antony Gormley’s life-size, rooftop statues (“Event Horizon”) that filled Madison Square Park and the Flatiron District last year. There is no single place to be able to see all the dancers at once, so make your way around the area to catch each one. The thirty-minute performance, which concludes TBDC’s fortieth anniversary year, will be repeated Saturday at 5:00 and 7:00, with Sunday as a rain date in case one of the shows is canceled because of bad weather.