this week in art

IMMIGRANT HERITAGE WEEK

immigration

Multiple locations
Most events free
Through April 21
www.nyc.gov/immigrants

The seventh annual Immigrant Heritage Week continues through April 21 with numerous, mostly free events across the city. Art exhibitions include “Our Heritage Through Fashion: A Showcase of NYC’s Russian-Speaking Designers” at the Russian American Foundation, “Photographs of the Mexican Immigrant Community of Staten Island” at Snug Harbor, “Art Without Borders” at El Taller Latino Americano, “Immigrant Women United in Art” at Centro Civico Cultural Dominicano, “Impractical Hats: Indie Crafts Reinvent Everyday Gear” at the Bronx Council on the Arts, “LibertyNeighborhoodStory” at the A.I.R. Gallery, “Immigrant Trail Painting” at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, and a photo exhibit of “Non-Native New Yorkers” at the Statue of Liberty. On April 20 at 6:00 at the International Center in New York, a group of Tibetan immigrants will discuss their work in “Ancient Art in a Modern City,” while on April 21 at 6:00, the Greek Museum will host “In Search of the American Dream: The Greeks of New York.” Also on Wednesday, “Voices of Liberty” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage invites visitors to share their own personal stories. In addition, there will be family programs at several branches of the New York Public Library.

At NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, the Havana Film Festival will feature New York and U.S. premieres (April 19-20), DCTV will present the Oscar-nominated documentary THE BETRAYAL (April 19), and the Turkish Cultural Center will celebrate “New York Sufi Night with Rumi” through film, performance, and poetry readings (April 20). There will also be film screenings and/or theatrical productions at the YMCA, the Maysles Cinema, the Alwan Foundation, and the CUNY Graduate Center and live dance and/or music at Michael Mao Dance, the American Composers Orchestra’s Langston Hughes Branch, and the Djoniba Dance and Drum Centre as well as a host of walking tours.

NY’s GREENEST

Rod Tryon and Anthony Cappetto will create one of their “Koi Pond” 3-D paintings as part of downtown Earth Day celebration Rod Tryon and Anthony Cappetto will create one of their “Koi Pond” 3-D paintings as part of downtown Earth Day celebration

BATTERY PARK CITY CELEBRATES THE 40th ANNIVERSARY OF EARTH DAY
Multiple locations
Through April 25
Most events free
www.batteryparkcity.org

Battery Park City is honoring the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day with a battery of special events at numerous downtown locations through April 25, with many of the events free. There will be climate change workshops at the Mercy Corps Action Center, bird watching and drawing at the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy, U.S. Children’s Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman reading at Poets House, family programming at the Skyscraper Museum, and arts and crafts and more at the Battery Park City branch of the New York Public Library. The World Financial Center will be home to a pair of Earth Day-related exhibitions, Suzanne and Mathilde Husky’s “Forest” (through May 12) and Rod Tryon and Anthony Cappetto’s “Koi Pond” (April 20-25), in addition to daily 3-D drawing programs and open houses and workshops. The National Museum of the American Indian will feature daily film screenings and a “Native Views on Sustainable Foods” lecture on April 22, while on April 25 the Museum of Jewish Heritage will host “The Earth Day Worm Disco” children’s concert with ShirLaLa and a series of earth-friendly workshops.

EARTH DAY NY 2010

Grand Central Terminal
42nd St. between Lexington & Vanderbilt Aves.
April 19-25
Admission: free
www.grandcentralterminal.com
www.earthdayny.ning.com

Grand Central Terminal is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day with a week of special events, beginning April 19 with its annual projection of Earth Day Images in the main concourse, featuring quotes and images from such artists as Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and others. In addition, the GreenShows EcoLux boutique will fill Vanderbilt Hall with ecofriendly clothing and accessories from such designers as Bahar Shahpar, Joanne Berman, Nixxi, Samantha Pleet, and House of Organic, with free food and drink provided by Divine Chocolate and Sambazon. And the EarthFair Outdoors festival will take place April 23-24 on Vanderbilt Ave., with interactive displays, booths of environnmentally friendly businesses and organizations, live performances from such groups as Metrosonics, BuzzUniverse, Devi Lim, Judah Tribe, the London Souls, and Grace Potter & the Nocturnals.

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

Banksy reveals only so much of himself in new documentary

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (A Banksy Movie, 2010)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema, 143 East Houston St.
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway
Opens Friday, April 16
www.banksyfilm.com
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.lincolnplazacinema.com

In 1999, L.A.-based French shopkeeper and amateur videographer Thierry Guetta discovered that he was related to street artist Invader and began filming his cousin putting up his tile works. Guetta, who did not know much about art, soon found himself immersed in the underground graffiti scene. On adventures with such famed street artists as Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Ron English, and Borf, Guetta took thousands of hours of much-sought-after video. The amateur videographer was determined to meet Banksy, the anarchic satirist who has been confounding authorities around the world with his striking, politically sensitive works perpetrated right under their noses, from England to New Orleans to the West Bank. Guetta finally gets his wish and begins filming the seemingly unfilmable as Banksy, whose identity has been a source of controversy for more than a decade, allows Guetta to follow him on the streets and invites him into his studio. But as he states at the beginning of his brilliant documentary, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, Banksy—who hides his face from the camera in new interviews and blurs it in older footage—turns the tables on Guetta, making him the subject of this wildly entertaining film.

Guetta is a hysterical character, a hairy man with a thick accent who plays the jester in Banksy’s insightful comedy of errors. Billed as “the world’s first Street Art disaster movie,” EXIT, which is narrated by Welsh actor Rhys Ifans (DANNY DECKCHAIR) and features a soundtrack by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow sandwiched in between Richard Hawley’s declaratory “Tonight the Streets Are Ours,” is all the more exciting and intriguing because the audience doesn’t know what is actually true and what might be staged; although the film could be one hundred percent real and utterly authentic, significant parts of it could also be completely made up. Who’s to say that’s even Banksy underneath the black hood, talking about Guetta, who absurdly rechristens himself Mr. Brainwash? It could very well be Banksy’s F FOR FAKE, Orson Welles’s marvelous 1974 pseudo-documentary about art forger Elmyr de Hory, or it could be on the straight and narrow from start to finish. No matter. EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP is riotously funny, regardless of how you feel about street art, Banksy, and especially the art market itself (as the title so wryly implies).

For information on Banksy’s sole New York City exhibition, held in fall 2008, visit here.

MR. BRAINWASH: ICONS

Banksy protege Mr. Brainwash invites art lovers -- and collectors -- to his show in the Meatpacking District (photo by twi-my/mdr)

Banksy protégé Mr. Brainwash invites art lovers — and especially collectors — to his show in the Meatpacking District (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

415 West 13th St. at Washington St.
Through April 30
Monday – Thursday 12 noon – 9:00 pm, Friday – Saturday 12 noon – 12 midnight, Sunday 12 noon – 7:00 pm
www.mrbrainwash.com
icons slideshow

SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU ARE PLANNING ON SEEING THE NEW BANKSY MOVIE, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, WHICH OPENS APRIL 16

In EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, the British street artist known as Banksy challenges amateur French videographer Thierry Guetta to become an artist instead of just taping others putting up their pieces. As depicted in the brilliant documentary, Thierry turns himself into Mr. Brainwash, staging a huge show in Los Angeles called “Life Is Beautiful.” In February he opened his first East Coast exhibit, “Icons,” covering some fifteen thousand square feet in a vast space in the Meatpacking District. Whereas Banksy has great skill, a vast imagination, and a unique sense of humor, Mr. Brainwash has, well, Banksy. There is not one shred of an original idea in the two-floor “Icons”; Mr. Brainwash blatantly borrows and steals from such giants as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Claes Oldenburg, and, of course, Andy Warhol (and Banksy as well), some of whom show up in places of honor on silk-screened canvases. At least his art is environmentally friendly, recycling used tires, paint cans, and vinyl records (even if he did break the black discs himself). Like Warhol, Mr. Brainwash has his own factory of workers repurpose pop culture images, from Michael Jackson and Madonna to John Lennon and Charlie Chaplin, from enormous Campbell’s Soup cans to a giant Starbucks cup, from the Statue of Liberty and Albert Einstein to Bruce Springsteen and Warhol himself. With prices ranging from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands, Guetta is making out quite well for himself. There are all sorts of debates over whether any of this is really art, whether Guetta is in fact Banksy, and whether it’s just one big practical joke by one of the world’s great practical jokers. We guess that the unanswered questions, the whole mystery surrounding Banksy, “Icons,” and Mr. Brainwash, are what makes it all so much fun, regardless of what it is or if it means anything. We’d like to think that it’s all a stunt perpetrated beautifully by Banksy, pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, including Mr. Brainwash’s, commenting yet again on the absurd state of the art market.

TWO BY KUROSAWA: DERSU UZALA

Maxim Munzuk stars as the remarkable title character in Kurosawa classic (courtesy Kino International)

DERSU UZALA (Akira Kurosawa, 1975)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
April 14-22
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

In this stunning film, director-cowriter Akira Kurosawa has fashioned one of cinema’s greatest characters, a worldly wise, deceptively simple charming man who understands life, nature, responsibility, and helping others. Maksim Munzuk gives a marvelously understated performance as the title character, who is suddenly taken out of his quiet life of solitude when a Russian army troop comes to Siberia. Film Forum is screening the film as part of its continuing celebration of the centennial of Kurosawa’s birth; it will be followed April 23-29 by his 1970 epic DODES’KA-DEN, in a new 35mm print.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: FIVE THEMES

William Kentridge, from “7 Fragments for Georges Méliès,” 35mm and 16 mm animated film transferred to video, 2003 (courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery)

Museum of Modern Art
West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through May 17 (closed Tuesdays; Fridays free from 4:00 to 8:00)
Admission: $20 (includes same-day film screening)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In 2001, William Kentridge burst onto the New York art scene with an awe-inspiring show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo, introducing to many the unique style employed by this South African artist who creates remarkable films made from charcoal drawings. Nearly ten years later, Kentridge is back with a bang, as multiple exhibits and special events have displayed the breadth of his work and his ingenuity, from his production of Shostakovich’s THE NOSE at the Met and his book of watermarks at Dieu Donné to screenings of his films with live music at the World Financial Center to a quartet of his “Drawings for Projection” series opening at the Jewish Museum on May 2. The centerpiece is the sensational display at MoMA, which continues through May 17. Arranged in a beautifully “generous layout,” as curator Klaus Biesenbach noted at the opening, “William Kentridge: Five Themes” features a bevy of rooms dedicated to the many worlds the artist has created via drawing, film, and a pair of model theaters. Kentridge himself is evident in much of his work, either as a character in his films or through the smudges, erasures, and new markings visible in his animation as he moves from page to page, revealing his unique and fascinating methods, laying himself—Jewish, white, a descendant of a well-known legal family in Johannesburg—bare. “The studio is an enclosed space, not just physically but also psychically, like an enlarged head; the pacing in the studio is the equivalent of ideas spinning around in one’s head, as if the brain is a muscle and can be exercised into fitness, into clarity,” he writes in the exhibition catalog, to which he has contributed several essays alongside a major examination by Mark Rosenthal, who organized the show at its first stop, SFMoMA.

William Kentridge, “Man with Megaphone Cluster,” “Untitled (Man with Megaphone),” etching, aquatint, drypoint, and engraving with roulette and crayon additions, 1998, and “Drawing for the film ‘Stereoscope,’” charcoal and pastel on paper, 1998-99 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

William Kentridge, “Untitled (Man with Megaphone),” “Man with Megaphone Cluster,” etching, aquatint, drypoint, and engraving with roulette and crayon additions, 1998, and “Drawing for the film ‘Stereoscope,’” charcoal and pastel on paper, 1998-99 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

At the heart of Kentridge’s oeuvre is his series of films depicting wealthy industrialist Soho Eckstein, naked dreamer Felix Teitlebaum, and the woman caught in between, Mrs. Eckstein. In such short films as “Stereoscope,” “Monument,” “History of the Main Complaint,” and “Mine,” all made without a script or a storyboard, Kentridge relates their continuing tale in an abstract narrative bursting with emotion, incorporating greed and loneliness, love and loss, and the division of the self. (It is not a coincidence that both Soho and Felix resemble the artist himself.) But “Thick Time: Soho and Felix” is only one of the themes that runs through the exhibit. “Ubu and the Procession” includes two films that harken back to Alfred Jarry’s Ubu character, reimagining him in South Africa; “The Magic Flute” and “The Nose” take visitors behind the scenes of Kentridge’s recent productions of the two operas, the first held at BAM in 2007, the latter at the Met in March. “Artist in the Studio” consists of “7 Fragments for Georges Méliès,” seven films on view together in one room, all of which reveal the artist at work. The excellent catalog contains a must-have DVD that goes even further into Kentridge’s process, presenting discarded snippets, fascinating revelations about his method, and complete versions of his first experimental short as well as the full-length “Tide Table.” “I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing—the contingent way that images arrive in the work—lies some kind of model of how we live our lives,” Kentridge has said. “The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world.” This exciting survey at MoMA is all that and more.