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.]
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.]
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 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.
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.”
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.]
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.]
“Diane Arbus: Constellation” continues at Park Avenue Armory through August 17 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
DIANE ARBUS: CONSTELLATION
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Daily through August 17, $25 www.armoryonpark.org
Don’t look too hard for a theme to “Constellation,” the exciting and dramatic Diane Arbus installation at Park Ave. Armory. “The connection is that there is no connection,” curator Matthieu Humery explained at a press preview.
The exhibition fills half of the armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, with a mylar mirror in the middle that makes it look like the entire space is populated by the seemingly endless parade of diverse people the New York City–born Arbus photographed during the course of her career, cut short by her suicide in 1971 at the age of forty-eight. There are 454 photos in all, arranged on gridlike beams that form a kind of maze, where visitors can take multiple paths, like walking through the streets of the metropolis that was her canvas; the setup also evokes an alternate subway map. The black frames match the black beams, giving it an organic feel.
The photos are placed at different heights, identified by small blocks on the floor and in a long list inside the official pamphlet; there are no detailed labels, making each photo, like each person she photographed, equal, whether a stripper, a drag performer, a political supporter, kids playing, a circus strongman, twins and triplets, a well-known artist, a corpse, a dominatrix, or swimmers at the beach. The only specific organization is the section that includes her breakthrough limited edition “box of ten,” which contains iconic, familiar images. Other favorites are scattered about in a colossal, inviting jumble. The lighting creates fascinating shadow patterns that have a ghostly presence on the floor.
“They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain,” Arbus wrote in a 1971 letter to Davis Pratt of Harvard’s Fogg Museum. “And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.” To take that philosophy to another level, numerous photos at the armory are backed by mirrors so visitors can imagine themselves being caught by Arbus’s lens and becoming part of the unique and welcoming community she built more than fifty years ago. “I would like to photograph everybody,” she wrote in the margin of a letter to photographer, graphic designer, and teacher Marvin Israel, seen in #120 in the show. Famous faces range from Tiny Tim, Jorge Luis Borges, Norman Mailer, and Roy Lichtenstein to James Brown, Charles Atlas, Peter Ustinov, and Jayne Mansfield, but Arbus treated all of her subjects as celebrities.
However, whereas we’re all taught to avoid making eye contact on New York City buses, subways, and sidewalks, you should take your time as you wander through the aisles, making friends with these hundreds of strangers, among them a young couple eating hot dogs in a park, an elderly gentleman apparently with three legs, a woman on a couch holding a baby monkey like an infant, a Jewish giant towering over his parents in their Bronx home, four members of the radical feminist group the Red Stockings, a transvestite on her bed with her birthday cake, a girl in a devil mask with a naked doll, a wax museum ax murderer, a boy clutching a toy grenade, a silhouetted couple watching a newsreel of a cross burning, kids playing baseball, two women at the Automat, and Ronald C. Harrison, the Human Pincushion. Most shots are posed, with many of the subjects looking directly into the camera.
“Constellation” offers a multitude of paths to take (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
I highly recommend not reading the titles of the works, at least not during your first trip around, to get the full impact of Arbus’s egalitarian view of humanity; each one of us is unique, yet we are also alike, and we basically all want the same thing out of life: happiness. Arbus’s photos inherently make us happy.
The prints were made by Neil Selkirk, a photographer who studied with Arbus and is the only person authorized by her estate to produce prints from the original negatives, using what he calls an “abstruse technical process.” He has cited A family one evening in a nudist camp as one of the works that stands out for him, holding a special place; it’s a 1965 gelatin print of a husband, wife, and child hanging out naked in a grassy field, the corner of a car’s tailfin visible on one side, all three people peering at us as if they have something better to do.
The display, sponsored by the LUMA Foundation, is supplemented with a short video of close-up eyes from Arbus’s photos, projected onto a freestanding wall in the drill hall, as well as, in the Board of Officers Room, two documentaries, including the ninety-minute What Diane Arbus Wasn’t Doing, and How She Wasn’t Doing It, a filmed conversation between Selkirk and Darius Himes from Christie’s.
“I have learned to get past the door, from the outside to the inside. One milieu leads to another,” Arbus wrote in her 1966 application for her second Guggenheim fellowship (which she received), “a certain group of young nihilists, a variety of menages, a retirement town in the Southwest, a new kind of Messiah, a particular Utopian cult who plan to establish themselves on a nearby island, Beauties of different ethnic groups, certain criminal types, a minority elite.”
Just another day in New York City, this time courtesy of Diane Arbus and Park Ave. Armory.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Henry Hintermeister, Retreat to Victory, oil on canvas (gift of Charles Lauriston Livingston, Jr. / courtesy of Fraunces Tavern Museum)
Who: Scott Dwyer, Lisa Goulet, Peter Hein, Seth Kaller, Charles (Chuck) Schwam, Lloyd S. Kramer, Louise M. Joy, George Bruton Delaney, Moses L. Delaney, Richard Sylla, more What: Independence Day open house and “The 1700s: The Path to Liberty” symposium Where:Fraunces Tavern Museum, 54 Pearl St. When: Friday, July 4, $1 in person, free virtually, 1:00 – 5:30 Why: The Lower Manhattan Historical Association’s It Happened Here turns to the founding of America on July 4 with an Independence Day open house and afternoon symposium at Fraunces Tavern Museum, home to a banquet on June 18, 1776, honoring General George Washington’s military victories. “The 1700s: The Path to Liberty,” which can be attended in person or online, features members of the Sons of the Revolution, the American Friends of Lafayette, history professors, collections managers, military veterans, descendants of James Armistead Lafayette, and others. Visitors can explore such exhibitions as “Path to Liberty: The Emergence of a Nation,” “Fraunces Tavern: Over 300 Years of Building History,” and “Lafayette: A Hero’s Return” before attending the symposium prelude “Liss and the Culper Spy Ring in Historic Lower Manhattan” at 1:00, followed at 1:30 by the symposium itself.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
