this week in art

RADAMÉS “JUNI” FIGUEROA, “LA DELICIOSA SHOW”: LOS VIGILANTES

Los Vigilantes (photo by Timothy Schenck)

Los Vigilantes will activate Radamés “Juni” Figueroa’s “La Deliciosa Show” on the High Line with a free concert on July 12 (photo by Timothy Schenck)

Who: Los Vigilantes
What: Free live performance presented by High Line Art
Where: On the High Line at Thirtieth St.
When: Wednesday, July 12, free (advance RSVP recommended), 6:00
Why: For the current High Line Art group exhibition “Mutations,” which continues through next March, Puerto Rican artist Radamés “Juni” Figueroa contributed “La Deliciosa Show,” a funky open-air nightclub in a construction shed on the High Line at Thirtieth St. On July 12 at 6:00, San Juan garage band Los Vigilantes will take the stage there, playing a free set in conjunction with the exhibition, which focuses on the relationship between humanity and nature. Since 2012, Los Vigilantes — consisting of Javier Garrote, Pepe Carballido, Jota Mundo, and Rafael Díaz — have released such albums and EPs as Al Fin, the eponymous Los Vigilantes, and Viento, sereno y el mar, featuring such songs as “Un Dia Nada Mas,” “Un Tono Mas Siniestro” (“Paint It Black”), “Me Siento Azul,” and “Mi Mami Dijo.” Figueroa, who had a solo show at Taymour Grahne on Hudson St. in 2015, has invited Puerto Rican punksters Reanimadores to play the space on September 27.

UP CLOSE: MICHELANGELO’S SISTINE CHAPEL

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes are brought down to earth in temporary exhibition in the Oculus (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Oculus at Westfield World Trade Center
33-69 Vesey St.
Daily through July 23, $20, 10:00 am – 9:00 pm
www.westfield.com/upclose
up close slideshow

In 2010 at the Park Avenue Armory, iconoclastic auteur and art historian Peter Greenaway used cutting-edge digital technology to explore, in great detail, Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and Paolo Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana.” Now Westfield is offering a decidedly more analog examination of Michelangelo’s frescoes that adorn the interior of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, including the barrel-vault ceiling, one of the most famous, and most seen, works in history, dating from 1508 to 1512 and 1535 to 1541. Michelangelo might have needed special scaffolding to get up there, and visitors must climb nearly five hundred steps to reach the top of the dome, but creative designers Susan Holland & Company and construction firm Atomic have brought it all down to earth in Santiago Calatrava’s white-winged Oculus, placing nearly three dozen large-scale photographs of sections of Michelangelo’s masterpiece on freestanding blocks, accompanied by brief text and an audio tour. Standing above it all in the back is a giant reproduction of Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment,” which was commissioned by Pope Paul III. (All works are near original size.)

Display offers close-up look at Michelangelo’s extraordinary masterpiece (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

As the name of the show promises, people can get up close to the photos to gain insight about the work. Among the sections on display are “God Separates Water from the Heavens,” “The Fall of Man and Expulsion from Paradise,” “The Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Earth,” “The Great Flood,” “Haman’s Punishment,” and “The Creation of Adam,” in which God reaches his finger out to the first man. As visitors walk through the space, they will come upon classic Italian Renaissance portrayals of such biblical figures as David and Goliath, Noah, the five Sibyls, Judith and Holofernes, the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zachariah, Jonah, and Daniel, and such ancestors of Christ as Jesse, Zerubbabel, and Uzziah. “The painting depicts God from below and by choosing to do so, Michelangelo violated all image conventions at the time,” the text notes about “The Separation of Light and Darkness.” Although you can see much of the exhibition by walking outside the roped-off area on the main floor of the Oculus, admission to the central part is twenty dollars, which includes access to the audio tour as well. The exhibition runs daily from 10:00 am to 9:00 pm through July 23, after which it will travel to New Jersey, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Chicago, and Annapolis.

NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM VINTAGE BUS BASH, FULL MOON FESTIVAL, IT’S YOUR TERN! AND MORE ON GOVERNORS ISLAND

New York Transit Museum Vintage Bus Bash pulls into Governors Island on Saturday (photo by Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

Governors Island
Saturday, July 8, most events free
govisland.com/events

Tomorrow is a busy day on Governors Island, one of the city’s genuine summer treasures. The New York Transit Museum Vintage Bus Bash (11:00 am – 4:00 pm, free) pulls into Colonels Row, four classic old vehicles that used to shuttle passengers around the city. You’ll be able to check out 1956’s Bus 3100, 1958’s Bus 9098, 1959’s Bus 100, and 1971’s Bus 5227. The seventh annual Full Moon Festival takes place from 12 noon to 2:00 ($50-$61) on the Play Lawn, with Vic Mensa, Larry Heard a.k.a. Mr. Fingers, Kelela, DJ Harvey, Connan Mockasin, Abra, Jeremy Underground, Axel Boman, Tops, Awesome Tapes from Africa, Selvagem, Donna Leake, and Mass Meditation by the Big Quiet. The fourth annual It’s Your Tern! Festival (12 noon – 4:00, free) celebrates the threatened common tern, many of which have been nesting on Tango Pier. There will be games, arts and crafts, a scavenger hunt, a special spotting scope viewing, and bird tours led by Annie Barry and Kellie Quinones. The free Rite of Summer Music Festival in Nolan Park presents “Pamela Z — Works for Voice and Electronics” at 1:00 and 3:00, a live performance by the San Francisco-based composer and media artist. In addition, you can visit such free continuing exhibitions and programs as “The Public Works Department Presents: Sanctuary City,” “Christodora: Nature, Learning, Leadership,” “New York Electronic Art Festival,” “Art of Intuitive Photography,” a family-friendly literary party at “The Empire State Center for the Book,” the NYC Audubon Summer Residency, “Escaping Time: Art from U.S. Prisons,” “Billion Oyster Project Exhibit,” “Sculptors Guild Presents: Currently 80,” A.I.R. Gallery’s “Taken on Trust,” the Children’s Museum of Manhattan’s Island Outpost, LMCC’s “A Supple Perimeter” by Kameela Janan Rasheed, the Woolgatherers’ “Genesis 22,” and the Dysfunctional Theatre Company’s “Dancing with Light.”

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: WE WANTED A REVOLUTION

Jan van Raay, “Faith Ringgold (right) and Michelle Wallace (left) at Art Workers Coalition Protest, Whitney Museum,” digital C-print, 1971 (© Jan van Raay)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, July 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

For July, the free First Saturday program at the Brooklyn Museum is zeroing in on its current exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85.” There will be pop-up teen apprentice gallery discussions about the show in addition to a tour led by Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art curatorial assistant Allie Rickard; a hands-on workshop in which you can create your own silkscreened political messages; live performances by Tamara Renée (music inspired by collages by Romare Bearden), Billy Dean Thomas, and DJ Reborn; a screening of Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras’s Flag Wars, about gentrification in Ohio, followed by a talkback with Goode Bryant; BUFU Presents Us: A Convening on Collective Action, with workshops by Yellow Jackets Collective, Sisters Circle Collective, Artrepreneurship, QTPOC Mental Health Initiative, and others; a community resource fair with G!rl Be Heard, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, Voices of Women Organizing Project, and the Black Girl Project; a reading and signing by Morgan Parker for her latest book, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé; and the Black Lunch Table Edit-a-Thon, in which participants can work on Wikipedia articles on artists in the “We Wanted a Revolution” exhibition and get their Wiki portrait taken by Noelle Theard. In addition, you can check out such other exhibits as “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and, at a discounted admission price of $12, “Georgia O’Keefe: Living Modern.”

JEFF KOONS: SEATED BALLERINA

Jeff Koons’s “Seated Ballerina” has extended her stay at Rockefeller Center through July 5 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

30 Rockefeller Plaza
49th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Extended through July 5, free
www.rockefellercenter.com
seated ballerina slideshow
www.artproductionfund.org

In 2000, controversial American artist Jeff Koons placed “Puppy,” a forty-three-foot-high stainless-steel sculpture of a dog covered in tens of thousands of flowering plants, in the plaza at Rockefeller Center, a work that Koons called a symbol of “love, warmth, and happiness.” In 2014, he installed at the same spot the thirty-seven-foot-high stainless-steel “Split-Rocker,” part toy pony, part dinosaur, also covered in flowering plants. And now Koons, who also had a major retrospective at the Whitney in 2014, has brought “Seated Ballerina” to Rockefeller Plaza, a forty-five-foot-high inflatable tchotchke that would feel at home in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Inspired by a smaller piece from his “Antiquity” series, the sculpture, which recalls his balloon dogs and is sponsored by the Art Production Fund and Kiehl’s, is based on a porcelain figure by Oksana Zhnikrup, who created statuettes for the Kiev Experimental Ceramic-Art Factory beginning in 1955. Koons’s nylon ballerina, which is supposed to reference a modern-day Venus while also raising awareness for the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, is sitting on a tuffet, leaning over to her left and adjusting one of her ballet slippers. In the wind, she slowly rocks back and forth, her left arm in motion, strings holding her in place. (On days with severe weather she is deflated, only to rise up again on balmier times in shining gold, silver, red, and blue.) Although the signs say she will remain in Rockefeller Center through June 5, her stay has been extended until July 5, so there’s still time to catch her. As with so much of Koons’s oeuvre, what you see is pretty much what you get; some people love it, some hate it; some find it plagiaristic art lacking originality, while others consider it an entertaining bit of artistic appropriation, one of the foundations of Koons’s practice. In any case, it certainly attracts attention, both up close as well as from a distance, where “Seated Ballerina” hovers over Paul Manship’s monumental sculpture of Prometheus in the light-up fountain below. “I hope the installation of ‘Seated Ballerina’ at Rockefeller Center offers a sense of affirmation and excitement to the viewer to reach their potential,” Koons said in a statement. “The aspect of reflectivity emulates life’s energy; it’s about contemplation and what it means to be a human being. It’s a very hopeful piece.”

LAST CHANCE — A WORLD OF EMOTIONS: ANCIENT GREECE, 700 BC – 200 AD

“A World of Emotions” takes a unique approach to Greek antiquities (photo courtesy the Onassis Cultural Center)

Onassis Cultural Center
Olympic Tower
645 Fifth Ave. at 51st St.
Saturday, June 24, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
onassisusa.org

Saturday is the last day to see the outstanding exhibition “A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 BC – 200 AD,” at the Onassis Cultural Center in Olympic Tower in Midtown. “The Greeks were not the first people who felt something; they were not the first who wrote literature or created art because they felt something. But they were the first who made emotions the subject of their literature and their art,” curator Angelos Chaniotis says on the audio tour. The show consists of more than 125 archaic and classical works dating back nearly three thousand years, from statues, coins, and vases to masks, amulets, and a painting that portrays a surprising depth of field. The exhibition is divided into ten categories and subcategories, including “The Art of Emotions,” “Spaces of Emotions,” “Enslaved by Emotions,” “The Battlefield,” “The Cemetery: Space of Grief and Hope,” and “Medea,” and features small monitors with excerpts from mythological poems and tales. The works depict romance and murder, joy and sorrow, relating stories about Apollo, Artemis, Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Zeus, Herakles, Leda and the Swan, Penthesileia, and others. There’s also a clip from Yukio Ninagawa’s modern all-male staging of Euripides’ Medea. Looking at ancient Greek artworks can be cold and distant, but Chaniotis’s approach brings a warmth and sense of humor to a collection that boasts numerous treasures from the Onassis Cultural Center, the Acropolis Museum, the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Vatican Museums, among others. Be sure not to miss the stele of the man and his beloved pig.

PERFORMANCES AND ACTIVATIONS FOR “CALDER: HYPERMOBILITY”

Christian Marclay will perform Alexander Calder’s “Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere” July 19-23 at the Whitney (photograph © Jerry L. Thompson. Calder Foundation, New York; Mary Calder Rower Bequest, 2011. © 2017 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Wednesday – Monday through October 23, $17-$22
212-570-3600
whitney.org

Alexander Calder, kineticism, and the Whitney have been inextricably linked since the institution acquired in May 1982 the Pennsylvania-born artist’s delightful “Calder’s Circus,” which, when on view, is always accompanied by a video showing the work in action. In addition, on rare occasions, it is activated live. The Whitney will be activating many of Calder’s other works in the new exhibition “Calder: Hypermobility,” set in motion at specific times to a specially commissioned sound walk by Jim O’Rourke. Activations, by motor or air, will take place multiple times each day (Monday to Thursday at 12 noon, 2:00, and 4:00; Friday at 12 noon, 2:00, 4:00, 7:30, 8:00, and 9:00; and Saturday and Sunday on the hour from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm). In addition, the Calder Foundation will activate the rarely exhibited “Object with Red Ball” on June 21 at 2:00, “Boomerangs” on June 28 at 2:00, “Tightrope” on July 9 at 4:00, “Goldfish Bowl” on July 12 at 2:00, and two untitled pieces on July 18 and 26 at 2:00, with more to come in August, September, and October. Below is a list of special performances by other artists during the run of the show, some of which require advance tickets.

Wednesday, July 19
through
Sunday, July 23
Christian Marclay performs Calder’s “Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere” (Calder’s first suspended mobile), with cellist Okkyung Lee, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Saturday, August 5
and
Sunday, August 6
Jack Quartet, music by Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and others, Hurst Family Galleries

Thursday, September 7
through
Sunday, September 10
Arto Lindsay, noisemakers and rattles, in conjunction with the exhibition “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Thursday, September 28
Jill Magid, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Friday, September 29
through
Sunday, October 1
Math Bass and Lauren Davis Fisher perform “Quiet Work in Session,” Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Thursday, October 5
and
Friday, October 6
C. Spencer Yeh, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Saturday, October 7
A screening of films commissioned by the Calder Foundation by artists Ephraim Asili, Rosa Barba, Lucy Raven, Agnès Varda, and others, followed by a conversation moderated by Victoria Brooks, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Friday, October 13
through
Sunday, October 15
Empire State Works in Progress, with artist Abigail DeVille and director Charlotte Brathwaite, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Friday, October 20
through
Sunday, October 22
Nora Schultz, Susan and John Hess Family Theater