New Museum will be hosting annual block party Saturday in Sara D. Roosevelt Park
Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Houston & Chrystie Sts.
New Museum, 235 Bowery at Prince St.
Saturday, July 24, free, 12 noon – 5:00 pm
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org
This Saturday, the New Museum will be hosting its annual block party, an afternoon of art and family activities held in Sara D. Roosevelt Park and the museum theater on the Lower East Side. There will be live performances by poet and storyteller Pappa Susso, beatboxer Adam Matta, dance company LoVid, and Hisham Akira Bharoocha in addition to workshops, a walking tour of the neighborhood focusing on art and architecture, screenings presented by the REDCAT International Children’s Film Festival, and more. Free passes to the museum will be given out in the park, good for that day only, so you can head over to the Bowery and check out the current exhibits, including “Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other,” “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine,” and “Amy Granat: Light 3 Ways.”
Director Tamra Davis (GUNCRAZY) transports viewers back to the 1980s New York art scene in the intimate documentary JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD. In 1986, just as the career of street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was exploding, Davis filmed him being interviewed by designer Becky Johnson, a revealing portrait that she put away in a drawer for more than twenty years. Davis finally brings out that footage, making it the centerpiece of this new examination of the ambitious, influential artist and musician who experienced massive success before falling hard and fast and dying of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven in 1988. Davis, a friend of Basquiat’s, conducts new interviews with many of the people from his inner circle, including art dealers Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian, Annina Nosei, Tony Shafrazi, and Bruno Bischofberger; Basquiat’s girlfriends Suzanne Mallouk and Kelle Inman; close Basquiat friends Diego Cortez and Fab 5 Freddy; NEW YORK BEAT cable TV host Glenn O’Brien; and fellow artist Julian Schnabel, who directed Basquiat in DOWNTOWN 81. Davis has also dug up amazing footage from the 1980s of Basquiat that shows him to be a unique, driven figure who used whatever he could — from broken windowframes and doors he’d find on the street to immense canvases — to spread his art and world view, which began with drawings in which he identified himself as Samo, criticizing contemporary art as “the same old shit.” Ultimately, though, it was his relationship with Andy Warhol that was the beginning of the end. JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD is a dazzling document of a fascinating time and a cautionary tale of success that comes too fast, too soon. Davis will be at Film Forum for the 8:00 shows on July 21-22, with Fab 5 Freddy appearing at the 8:00 screening on July 23.
“Life is not easy for everyone,” Olga Bowman says about midway through Andrew Jacobs’s spectacular cinéma vérité documentary, FOUR SEASONS LODGE. “But life can be beautiful even when it’s not so easy.” For twenty-five summers, a group of Holocaust survivors, mostly Polish Jews, would meet at the Four Seasons Lodge in the Catskills, where they would talk, dance, argue, eat, hug, discuss their latest aches and pains, and primarily revel in life despite the horrific things they suffered through and witnessed at such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Jacobs discovered this heartwarming community while researching a series of articles for the New York Times; when he heard that the lodge was being sold and that the 2006 season might be the group’s last, he decided to make a movie about it. Seeking advice from the legendary Albert Maysles, Jacobs actually landed the master documentarian as his chief cameraman, giving FOUR SEASONS LODGE the feel of such classic Maysles brothers’ works as SALESMAN and GREY GARDENS.