this week in art

EXISTENCE AS RESISTANCE: ART AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT

Abigail DeVille’s Libertas (Study in Blue) asks, “How have we fought for the proliferation of truths, not the lies that frame the history and governance of this great republic?” (photo courtesy of the artist and Art at a Time Like This)

DON’T LOOK NOW: A DEFENSE OF FREE EXPRESSION
127 Elizabeth St. between Broome & Grand Sts.
Opening reception Friday, October 10, free, 6:00
Exhibition continues Tuesday – Saturday through October 25, free, noon – 6:00 pm
artatatimelikethis.com

Founded by Anne Verhallen and Barbara Pollack as an immediate response to the pandemic lockdown, the nonprofit Art at a Time Like This is dedicated to the idea that “art can make a difference and that artists and curators can be thought-leaders, envisioning alternative futures for humanity.” Art at a Time Like This has presented nearly two dozen online and in-person exhibitions and programs since March 2020, such as “Dangerous Art, Endangered Artists,” “First Responders,” and “Restoration: Now or Never.”

The organization’s latest is “Don’t Look Now: A Defense of Free Expression,” opening October 10 at 127 Elizabeth St. The show consists of “25 Artists Exercising Their First Amendment Rights,” from Marilyn Minter’s Plush #5, Sari Nordman’s Anxiety River, and Martha Wilson’s Martha Does Donald to Yvonne Iten-Scott’s Origin, Shepard Fairey’s My Florist Is a Dick, and Clarity Haynes’s Big Birth, all of which have been censored in some way.

For example, Jean-Paul Mallozzi’s Ansiedad: I Can’t Get Off had to be partially modified in order to remain in South Florida Cultural Consortium’s “Mangroves to Masterpieces” at Florida Atlantic University, Jessica (Mehta) Doe’s 500 Years Ago was moved to a closed-off room at the University of Notre Dame, and Shey “Ri Acu” Rivera Ríos (Prayers to Nana Buruku) was to be included in the three-artist exhibition “Nothing Living Lives Alone” at Providence College in March 2024, but the exhibit was canceled by the administration, which decided that pieces by Rios (that were not in the Providence presentation) “show contempt for the Catholic faith.”

I recently asked three of the “Don’t Look Now” participants when they became personally aware of censorship and the importance of the First Amendment; below are their responses.

Susan Silas
Honestly, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about censorship and the First Amendment. That may have been part and parcel of growing up in an immigrant household with Holocaust survivor parents.

As for my own direct personal experience with Instagram and Facebook, so much of my work contains nudity, it was inevitable. I was already aware that others were being censored, and also of the arbitrary nature of that censorship based on how algorithms search. For example, I had an image from my series “love in the ruins; sex over 50” that depicted actual intercourse stay up because we were one on top of the other, so nipples weren’t exposed, while an image like the one in the exhibition, which is not dissimilar to depictions of Adam and Eve in sixteenth-century paintings, was taken down in twenty seconds for “offending community standards.”

I guess I also object to these platforms deciding who my community is. My community is not offended.

Spencer Tunick
My art censorship started in the mid-’90s when my friend Michael Weiner and I were arrested at Rockefeller Center. My idea was to have him pose nude draped, facedown, on top of the oversized outdoor red Christmas balls. I did get the shot, but we were held afterwards in a jail cell inside 30 Rock. Ron Kuby and William Kunstler represented us and the charges were dismissed.

It’s legal to be nude for art in New York within a time, space, and manner. We were making art before sunrise in the twilight hours on a weekend, when no one was on the street. We were exercising our (visual) First Amendment rights, plus there were no signs that explicitly stated, “Don’t climb the balls.”

This arrest was the beginning of five arrests and a future case that made its way up to the US Supreme Court, where I won and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was reprimanded by the federal judges.

As for the present, my work has been censored on social media since 2012, even though I am adhering to their nudity rules, which includes self-censoring frontal nudity and close-ups of buttocks. So even though I am still following their nudity rules, they still find ways to threaten deletion of my accounts and make my accounts unrecommendable. This suppression is too harsh.

In response to social media and online censorship, I helped found the website Don’t Delete Art. I am the cofounding curator; it’s a collaboration with artists and free speech organizations. My recent contribution was the idea of a “tips” page to help artists avoid suppression and deletion.

Danielle SeeWalker
It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact moment or instance that I became aware of censorship and the importance of the First Amendment, but through lived experience and witnessing the silence surrounding my people’s stories it became clear that I was born into a sort of censorship. Growing up Native, I noticed early on how little of our truth was ever told — in school the narrative being taught was very different than what I was being told at home and by my elders. Our languages, our ceremonies, our ways of seeing the world were pushed aside or erased completely through boarding school and colonization. From an early age, I had the realization that what I was being taught in the mainstream world didn’t match what my family and community had lived. That silence — that absence — was/is censorship.

For my people, this isn’t something that happened long ago; it’s something we still live with. Our voices are still dismissed, our issues ignored, our history rewritten. We’ve been fighting for the right to speak, to pray, to tell our own stories since time immemorial. When my grandmother was born, she wasn’t even considered an American citizen, yet she and our ancestors have been on these lands since time immemorial. My father grew up in a time when not all Native Americans were able to legally vote. The First Amendment, to me, isn’t just about freedom of speech — it’s about the right to exist and to be heard in a country that has tried over and over again to silence us (and get rid of us).

When I think about it, I realize how powerful it is just to speak our truth. Every time a Native person shares their story, teaches their language, or corrects a false history, it’s an act of resistance. It’s reclaiming space in a world that once told us we didn’t belong. That’s what the First Amendment means to me — not just words on paper, but a promise we keep alive every time we refuse to be silent. Our existence is our resistance.

On October 18 at 2:00, Art at a Time Like This will host the free panel discussion “Censorship Now: Who Fears Free Expression?” with National Coalition Against Censorship’s Arts/Advocacy Program director Elizabeth Larison, Artnet contributor Brian Boucher, and former Whitney Independent Studies Program associate director Sara Nadal-Melsió, addressing the questions “What’s so scary about freedom of expression? And what do we fear will happen if we fail to respond to the latest challenges?”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ROOFTOP MUSIC: JENNIE C. JONES AND ICE AT THE MET

Jennie C. Jones celebrates the opening of Ensemble on Met roof (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Who: International Contemporary Ensemble, Jennie C. Jones, George Lewis
What: Live performance and discussion
Where: The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, the Met Fifth Ave., 1000 Fifth Ave. at Eighty-Second St.
When: Sunday, October 5, $35-$70 (use discount code ENSEMBLE20 to save 20%), 2:00
Why: “What I hope for this work is that it ignites the sonic imagination. The pieces are not always singing, they’re not always performing, they’re not always activated. I think for me that’s also a tremendous part of the work, the way to hold space, and nuance, not always full of an outward expression but to hold a rich, interior imagination, and to hold a rich sonic imagination,” Jennie C. Jones said at the opening of Ensemble, her stunning installation on the Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. On view through October 19, Ensemble consists of three large-scale pieces inspired by a few of Jones’s previous works, the extraordinary skyline of the buildings surrounding the roof, and the Met’s musical instruments collection and use of travertine; one recalls a zither, another an Aeolian harp, and the third a one-string, in addition to a red path that expands in one corner.

The Roof Garden Commission rewards the viewer’s attention through close contemplation and intimate enjoyment; if you’re lucky, you might even hear the wind gently playing the strings.

On October 5 at 2:00, you’ll be able to hear the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) play their strings in the Met’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, as the Brooklyn-based collective performs Jones’s 2022 Oxide Score and 2024 Met Color Study, featuring Emmalie Tello on clarinet, Mike Lormand on trombone, Nuiko Wadden on harp, Clara Warnaar on percussion, Modney on violin, Kyle Armbrust on viola, and Brandon Lopez on bass. The Cincinnati-born, Hudson-based Jones will be on hand for a discussion with ICE artistic director George Lewis.

“This is one of Jennie’s things, right? The sculpture changes the sound. See, you stick your head in here, it kind of echoes,” composer, musicologist, and trombonist Lewis says in a video of him walking around Ensemble. “My first encounter with Jennie’s work was probably around 2015. She was finding all these incredible parallels between visual art and music. Jennie taught me a lot about graphic scores. You could say they’re open-ended, but she is definitely weighing in on what she feels could be a perspective. . . How do we transmit these energies to everyone around us, and how do we make these scores part of a larger listening and visual environment? Jennie engages sound as a medium and as a subject. . . . One of the great parts about this work is that it’s not telling you what or how to think or how to hear or how to feel or any of that. You have a lot of agency to decide that for yourself. And once you do, there’s discovery there.”

There’s lots to discover with Ensemble, but you’ll need to get to the Met fast, before the installation closes and the museum begins a five-year renovation of the roof.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

EDWARD BURTYNSKY’S GREAT ACCELERATION AT ICP

Installation view, “Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration,” 2025 (courtesy the artist and International Center of Photography)

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: THE GREAT ACCELERATION
ICP
84 Ludlow St. between Delancey & Broome Sts.
Through Sunday, September 28, $3-$18, 10:30 – 6:30
www.icp.org
www.edwardburtynsky.com

The eye-opening exhibition “Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration” has been wowing ICP visitors since June 19, with two floors of wide-ranging photographs by the Canadian artist. While he is best known for large-scale pictures of natural landscapes and manufacturing settings, the show, which closes September 28, also features much smaller, intimate posed portraits of individual workers.

“ICP has long championed ‘concerned photography’ — imagery that informs and inspires action — which aligns deeply with my own practice,” Burtynsky said in a statement. “At such a critical moment in time, I hope this work sparks meaningful dialogue about our relationship with the planet and brings more people to this awareness.” The exhibit is named for the term given to the dramatic negative impact humanity is having on the environment.

Burtynsky’s concerned photography takes viewers around the world, from Talladega Speedway in Alabama, an Ivory burn in Nairobi, and a food processing plant in Ontario to oilfields in California, an industrial park in Ethiopia, and the Uralkali Potash Mine in
Berezniki, Russia. Using several different cameras — a revealing section takes visitors behind the scenes of his methods — Burtynsky captures glorious sites in remarkable detail and exploding with surprising shapes and colors. Be on the lookout for two nickel tailings photos from Sudbury, a gorgeous shot of downtown Breezewood, Pennsylvania, and a stunning picture of a rows of employees in the Cankun Factory in Xiamen City, China. Look closely at “Dry Tailings #1, Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of Congo” to see people nearly lost in the composition, and take your time delving into the details of the twenty-eight-foot-high “Pivot Irrigation #8, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA.”

Among the potent portraits are “Recycling Yard Worker, Fengjiang, Near Wenling, Zhejuang Province, 2004” and “China Recycling #22, Portrait of a Woman in Blue Zeguo, Zhejiang Province, China, 2004.”

“Conceived especially for our largest galleries, ‘The Great Acceleration’ presents suites of monumental images that draw attention to the severity of the impact we are having on the planet while also offering a contemplative space for reflecting upon photography’s role and potential today,” curator and ICP creative director David Campany said.

See it while we still have a planet to marvel at.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

GENIUS STROKES: HIRSCHFELD AND SONDHEIM AT THE ALGONQUIN

“Strokes of Genius: Hirschfeld at the Algonquin” continues through September 20 at historic hotel (photo © the Al Hirschfeld Foundation)

STROKES OF GENIUS: HIRSCHFELD AT THE ALGONQUIN
The Algonquin Hotel Oak Room
59 West 44th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through September 20, free, noon – 7:00 pm
www.alhirschfeldfoundation.org
www.algonquinhotel.com

On September 9, theater stars came out of the woodwork — or, actually, their framed caricatures on the walls of the Alqonquin’s famed Oak Room — to celebrate the opening of the new exhibition “Strokes of Genius: Hirschfeld at the Algonquin” as well as the launch of the oversize poster book Hirschfeld’s Sondheim (Abrams ComicArts, $29.99).

Among those on hand to share their stories about being drawn by Al Hirschfeld, the St. Louis–born artist who spent decades making black-and-white portraits of Broadway celebrities, writers, and other famous names, were Tony winners Danny Burstein, John Leguizamo, and Len Cariou, Emmy winner and Tony nominee Lonny Price, Tony nominee and Obie winner Charles Busch, Obie winner Jackie Hoffman, Tony nominee Veanne Cox, and Broadway stalwart Jim Walton. Al Hirschfeld Foundation creative director David Leopold presented several of them with reproductions of the images they are in.

As you walk around the space, you’ll see Cathy Rigby in Peter Pan, Yul Brynner in The King and I, Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in Star Trek, and Liza Minnelli, George Gershwin, Carol Burnett, Zero Mostel, Katharine Hepburn, Leonard Bernstein, Whoopi Goldberg, Stephen Sondheim, Barbra Streisand, Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, the Grateful Dead, the casts of The Phantom of the Opera, The Sopranos, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the Algonquin Round Table, and a few self-portraits.

Meanwhile, Hirschfeld’s Sondheim consists of ready-to-frame posters of drawings from West Side Story, Passion, Company, Getting Away with Murder, Assassins, Into the Woods, and many more in addition to a graphic timeline; each drawing is accompanied by a brief anecdote. “I can hardly think of a better way to memorialize Steve and his art other than actually watching his shows or listening to his songs,” Bernadette Peters writes in the introduction. “Al, in a single image, captures a memorable emotion, indelibly etching out hearts and memories with Steve’s artistic contributions.”

Longtime theater critic Ben Brantley explains in his foreword, “In these drawings, I have found something like a past-recapturing, Proustian madeleine, made of ink instead of flour and sugar. These seemingly simple pen strokes — and the ellipsis of the white space, which your own, happily collaborative mind fills in — are anything but static. They tremble with energy, tension, and, above all, character, as it is conjured in real time on a stage.”

The exhibit at the Algonquin continues through September 20; an online companion show runs at Helicline Fine Art until November 2.

“It’s hard to imagine twentieth-century Broadway without either Hirschfeld or Sondheim,” Leopold writes in the book’s afterword. “Both men admired each other’s work, and both loved the theater, their legacies strengthened by remaining a presence on the Great White Way with two Broadway houses named in their honor.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

RESTORING CHAOS: JAPAN SOCIETY CELEBRATES YUKIO MISHIMA CENTENNIAL

YUKIO MISHIMA CENTENNIAL SERIES: EMERGENCES
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
September 11 – December 6
japansociety.org

“Only art makes human beauty endure,” Yukio Mishima wrote in his 1959 novel Kyoko’s House.

In his short life — Mishima died by suicide in 1970 at the age of forty-five — the Japanese author and political activist penned approximately three dozen novels, four dozen plays, five dozen story and essay collections, ten literary adaptations, and a libretto, a ballet, and a film.

Japan Society is celebrating the hundredth year of his birth — he was born Kimitake Hiraoka in Tokyo in January 1925 — with “Yukio Mishima Centennial Series: Emergences,” comprising six events through December 6. The festival begins September 11–20 with Kinkakuji, SITI company cofounder Leon Ingulsrud and Korean American actor Major Curda’s theatrical adaptation of Mishima’s intense 1956 psychological novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, based on the true story of extreme postwar actions taken by a young Buddhist monk. Creator and director Ingulsrud cowrote the script with Curda, who stars in the play. The stage design is by Japanese visual artist Chiharu Shiota, whose international installations, featuring red and black yarn structures, include “In the Light,” “My House Is Your House,” and “Memory of Lines.” Her latest, “Two Home Countries,” runs September 12 through January 11 in the Japan Society gallery, consisting of immersive, site-specific works created in commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of the end of WWII.

There are unlikely to be many empty seats at Japan Society for Kinkakuji and other Mishima events (photo © Ayako Moriyama)

There will be eleven performances of Kinkakuji, with a gallery-opening reception following the September 11 show, a separate gallery talk on September 12, a lecture preceding the September 16 show, and an artist Q&A on September 17. Each ticket comes with free same-day admission to “Two Home Countries.”

On September 27, Japan Society, as part of the John and Miyoko Davey Classics series, will screen Kon Ichikawa’s 1958 film, Conflagration, based on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and starring Raizo Ichikawa, Tatsuya Nakadai, and Ganjiro Nakamura.

In conjunction with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival, Japan Society will present Le Tambour de Soie (The Silk Drum) on October 24 and 25, Yoshi Oida and Kaori Ito’s adaptation of Mishima’s 1957 Noh play Aya no Tsuzumi, a dance-theater piece about love and aging featuring downtown legend Paul Lazar and choreographer Ito, with music by Makoto Yabuki. The second show will be followed by an artist Q&A. On November 6, Japanese novelist and cultural ambassador Keiichiro Hirano (Nisshoku, Dawn) and Tufts University Mishima scholar Dr. Susan J. Napier will sit down for a conversation discussing Mishima’s life and legacy.

Le Tambour de Soie (The Silk Drum) will be performed October 24 and 25 at Japan Society (photo © courtesy of the Maison de la Culture d’Amiens)

On November 15 and 16, the Tokyo-based company CHAiroiPLIN brings The Seven Bridges (Hashi-zukushi) to Japan Society, a visually arresting adaptation for all ages of Mishima’s short story about four women seeking wishes during a full moon. The series concludes December 4–6 with the US debut of Hosho Noh School and Mishima’s Muse – Noh Theater, three unique programs of noh and kyogen theater comprising performances of works that inspired Mishima: Shishi (Lion Dance), Busu (Poison), Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), Kantan, and Yoroboshi. The December 4 performance will be followed by a ticketed soirée, and there will be an artist Q&A after the December 5 show with Kazufusa Hosho, the twentieth grand master of Hosho Noh School, which dates back to the early fifteenth century. In addition, members of Hosho Noh School lead a workshop on December 6.

“This series revitalizes Mishima’s contributions to the world of the arts through a slate of brand new commissions and premieres adapting his writings, as well as a historic US debut for a revered noh company,” Japan Society artistic director Yoko Shioya said in a statement. “This series recognizes not only Mishima’s critical legacy but the ongoing current influence of this essential postwar author on artists today.”

That legacy can be summed up in this line from his 1963 novel Gogo no Eikō (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea): “Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it’s a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored.”

A DIFFERENT WORLD: A CELEBRATION OF SONGS SHE WROTE

Who: Michael G. Garber, Miss Maybell, Charlie Judkins
What: Book talk with music
Where: Ceres Gallery, 547 West 27th St. between 10th & 11th Aves., #201
When: Thursday, September 11, free with advance RSVP (suggested donation $15), 6:30
Why: “This book celebrates women who wrote popular songs in the early twentieth century. These female composers and lyricists deserved greater opportunities and fame and to be more highly valued. Generations later, the same could be said for many of their sisters in songwriting in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Hopefully, looking at the past will inspire change in the future. To do this, we must travel in our minds back to what was, in effect, a different world.”

So begins historian, professor, scholar, and artist Michael G. Garber’s Songs She Wrote: 40 Hits by Pioneering Women of Popular Music (Rowman & Littlefield, March 2025, $36), an illustrated journey into that different world, focusing on women’s contributions to popular music, including ragtime, jazz, Broadway, and Hollywood. Featuring a foreword by Janie Bradford and Dr. Tish Oney, the book explores such tunes as Lucy Fletcher’s “Sugar Blues,” Lovie Austin and Alberta Hunter’s “The Down Hearted Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” Dorothy Parker’s “Serenade from The Student Prince,” and Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.”

Charlie Judkins and Miss Maybell will perform as part of book event at Ceres Gallery

On September 11 at 6:30, in conjunction with the Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project, Garber (My Melancholy Baby: The First Ballads of the Great American Songbook, 1902–1913) will be at the nonprofit feminist Ceres Gallery for a free book talk with live performances by Jazz Age artists Miss Maybell and Charlie Judkins, surrounded by Carlyle Upson’s nature-based “Submerged” watercolors and Marcy Bernstein’s “Evocative Abstractions” paintings, which Bernstein says “invite viewers to look inward. They’re filled with allusions to the raw energy of creation itself,” a fitting sentiment that applies to Garber’s book as well. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $15.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HIDDEN GEMS: BED-STUY STooPS SUMMER FESTIVAL

STooPS 2025 SUMMER FESTIVAL
Stuyvesant Ave. & Decatur St., Brooklyn
Saturday, July 26, free (advance registration recommended), 1:00 – 7:00
www.stoopsbedstuy.org
www.eventbrite.com

The twelfth annual STooPS Arts Crawl and Block Party takes place on July 26 on Decatur St. between Lewis and Stuyvesant Aves. in Brooklyn, with live music and dance, workshops, and visual art on the stoops and shared spaces of Bedford–Stuyvesant. This year’s theme is “Echoes of Greatness: Celebrating Bed-Stuy’s Hidden Gems,” honoring the lesser-known treasures in the neighborhood. The festivities begin at 1:00 with a block party lasting until 7:00, hosted by Koku with ToniBNYC, a Kiddie Korner by Bridges: A Pan-Afrikan Arts Movement, collaborative visual art by Ovila Lemon/Mut’Sun, and healing workshops by Akika Flower Essences & Apothecary and Essence of Ase. There will be art crawls at 1:30 and 4:00, led by Shanna Sabio of GrowHouse NYC, with Carmen Carriker, Courtney Cook, Ariana Carthan/Wukkout!, Brooklyn Ballet, Qu33n Louise, Nia Blue, and Púyaloahí. Kendra J. Ross Works and Soul Science Lab headline the show. This year’s awardees are Ovila Lemon, Richard Cummings, Valerie Ferguson, Monique Scott, Larry Weekes, and Damon Bolden.

“The summer festival is more than a celebration — it’s a bridge between Bed-Stuy’s past and its future,” STooPS founding director Kendra J. Ross said in a statement. “By bringing art to the stoops, we make space for neighbors to connect across generations and experiences. In a time of change, this is how we honor what’s been while shaping what’s next — together.”

All events are free but advance registration is recommended.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]