this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

WONDROUS FASHIONS AND CURIOSITIES: FREE SYMPOSIUM AT FIT

WONDROUS OBJECTS SYMPOSIUM
The Museum at FIT
Katie Murphy Amphitheatre, Fred P. Pomerantz Art and Design Center
300 Seventh Ave. between Twenty-Sixth & Twenty-Seventh Sts.
Friday, March 28, free with advance RSVP, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Exhibition continues through April 20, free
www.fitnyc.edu

In conjunction with its current exhibition, “Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities,” the Museum at FIT is hosting the all-day symposium “Wondrous Objects” on March 28. Among the scholars, artists, and designers participating in the free event are associate lecturer in cultural and historical studies Jason Cyrus, FIT associate professor Hilary Davidson, visual artist Mark Dion, exhibition curator Dr. Colleen Hill, antiques dealer and collector Evan Michelson, jewelry and decorative objects designer Ted Muehling, artist Niio Perkins, Bard assistant professor Mei Mei Rado, and Peabody Essex Museum director of curatorial affairs Petra Slinkard.

The exhibit, on view through April 20, connects cabinets of curiosities with fashion through nearly two hundred garments and accessories, divided into “Specimens,” “Aviary,” “Artisanship,” “Kunstkammer,” “Reflections and Refractions,” “Vanitas,” “Illusions,” “The Senses,” and “What Is It?” Highlights include Sophia Webster’s Chiara sandals with multicolor embroidery and hand-painted heels,” Tom Ford’s sequined and beaded zebra-print dress with horsehair “mane,” specimen jars featuring earrings from major brands, and Comme des Garçons’ polyester, cotton, and nylon dress printed with Arcimboldo’s painting of Vertumnus.

Below is the full schedule; admission is free with advance registration.

Friday, March 28
Welcoming Remarks, by Dr. Joyce F. Brown, resident of FIT, 10:00

Introduction, by Dr. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT, 10:05

“Fashioning Wonder: A Cabinet of Curiosities,” with Dr. Colleen Hill, 10:15

“Shoes of Wonder: The Legacy of the Ruby Slippers,” with Hilary Davidson, 10:45

Audience Q&A, 11:15

“The Lady’s Fan: Accessorizing Modern Femininity in Republican China,” with Mei Mei Rado, 11:30

Dr. Colleen Hill in conversation with Niio Perkins and Ted Meuhling, noon

Audience Q&A, 12:30

Lunch break, 12:45 – 2:15

“Draping Innovation: Cristóbal Balenciaga and the Sari,” with Jason Cyrus, 2:15

“When Fashion and Design Are Your Life: The Stylings of Iris Apfel,” with Petra Slinkard, 2:45

Audience Q&A, 3:15

“Ephemeral Beauties: Wax Women and the Dawn of Consumer Culture,” with Evan Michelson, 3:30

“Wonder Rooms,” with Mark Dion, 4:00

Audience Q&A, 4:30

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

MARVELS AT MoMI: AUTISTIC MEDIA MAKERS FESTIVAL

Christina Phensy’s Elegy for the Future is part of opening night of Marvels of Media Festival at MoMI

MARVELS OF MEDIA FESTIVAL 2025
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
March 27-29, free with advance RSVP
movingimage.us

The Marvels of Media Festival returns to the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) for its fourth iteration, celebrating the work of autistic creators with film screenings, panel discussions, workshops, an exhibition, and satellite locations in Westchester, Long Island, and San Francisco.

“Marvels of Media has shown the brilliant work of neurodiverse media makers in clear evidence,” MoMI trustee and founder of Marvels of Media and Sapan Studio Josh Sapan said in a statement. Debut filmmaker and As We See It star Sue Ann Pien added, “Expanding the audience’s understanding of an autistic female’s reality is a perspective changer for those more accustomed to stereotypically male depictions in film and television history. It’s a culturally relevant reminder that no one person is meant to represent an entire spectrum (just like not everyone with blue eyes or brown hair is the same).”

The three-day festival features twenty-two films, five video games, and two virtual reality experiences focusing on the neurodivergent community. The opening-night selection is the East Coast premiere of Pien’s fifteen-minute short, Once More, Like Rain Man, which she explains “gives a voice to a young autistic teenage girl’s own experiences finding her creative empowerment through the casting process.” Also on the bill is Christina Phensy’s fourteen-minute Elegy for the Future; Pien appears in both works. The evening also includes a panel discussion on autistic representation, with Pien, actress Bella Zoe Martinez, and Phensy, moderated by filmmaker and playwright Jackson Tucker-Meyer, and will be followed by a reception and a viewing of the exhibition “The Adventure of Nature and the Senses,” consisting of five films totaling fifteen minutes and the VR presentations Booper, Get Home by Thomas Fletcher and MUD & TKU Student Work XR/VR Gallery by Mike S., Opy S., Pattrick L., Rafat A., Tate B., Xavier A., Rose L., Briana G., Sasha R., Alejan T., Joshua K., and Koby F. In addition, the Marvels of Media Game Lab Exhibition includes Elliot Rex White’s visual novel A Night for Flesh and Roses as well as Metal Place by Abdullah Kante, Fizzy Adventure by Alex Lundqvist, Awesome Game by Carter Lee, and The Happy Hedgehog Wants a Big Wish by Tech Kids Unlimited’s Digital Agency.

We’ve come a long way since Rain Man.

Below is the full schedule.

Thursday, March 27
“Vibrant Voices: Four Shorts”: House of Masks by Atticus Jackson and Jason Weissbrod, 420 Ways to Die by Samara Huckvale, Insight by Ben Stansbery, and Breaking Normal by Jessica Cabot, followed by a discussion with Weissbrod, Huckvale, Stansbery, and Tal Anderson, 4:00

“Marvels of Media Festival Opening Night,” with opening remarks from Josh Sapan, Aziz Isham, Leonardo Santana-Zubieta, and Miranda Lee; screenings of Once More, Like Rain Man by Sue Ann Pien and Elegy for the Future by Christina Phensy; panel discussion, reception, and exhibition viewing (including Night City by Kyle Davis, Daltokki by Daniel Oliver Lee, CMYK Walk in the Woods by Quinn Koeneman, As One by Bec Miriam, and Jellyfish Memories by Eliza Young), 6:30

Friday, March 28
New York premiere of Lone Wolves (Ryan Cunningham, 2024), followed by discussion with Cunningham (in person) and writer-actor Matt Foss (via live video), 6:00

Saturday, March 29
“Playful Tales: Six Shorts”: Secret of the Hunter by Jessica “Jess” Jerome, Wilson S. Whale by Harry Schad, Abelard the Traveling Hedgehog’s Underwater Adventure with Max the Turtle by Pete Peterman and Ambrose Peterman, Joust My Luck by Jacob Lenard, The Ugliest Masterpiece by Rae Xiang, and Julius’ Identity Crisis by Brendan Ratner, followed by a discussion with Schad, Lenard, Xiang, Ratner, Payton Hepler, and Andy Nava, moderated by Mr. Oscar Segal and Allison Tearney, 1:00

“Life Lessons: Four Shorts”: Unbreakable by Alex Astrella, Glitter by Violet Gallo and Maya Velazquez, Surviving the Spectrum by Carley Marissa Dummitt, and Late-Diagnosed by Matthew Baltar, followed by a discussion with Gallo, Baltar, and Dummitt, 2:30

“Media-Maker Talk and Networking Mixer,” with Jason Weissbrod and others, 6:00

Sunday, March 30
“Collage Animation Workshop,” with artist David Karasow, 4:00

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

CARMEN WINANT: MY MOTHER AND EYE PUBLIC ART FUND TALK AND TOUR

Carmen Winant, Arrival, “Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye,” 2024, (photo by Nicholas Knight / courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY)

Who: Carmen Winant, Melanie Kress
What: Public Art Fund Talk and artist-led tour
Where: Talk: The Cooper Union, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq.; tour: West End Ave. between West Sixty-Third & Sixty-Fourth Sts.
When: Talk: Wednesday, March 26, free with advance RSVP, 6:30; tour: Thursday, March 27, free with advance RSVP, 11:00 am
Why: In its continuing mission to bring unique, intriguing, and involving public art to New Yorkers all around the city, which it has been doing since its founding in 1977, the Public Art Fund has been teaming with JCDecaux for several years, placing art in bus shelters in all five boroughs. The latest installation is “Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye,” consisting of eleven compositions arranged from more than fifteen hundred screen captures taken from films Carmen and her mother took when they were teenagers traveling across the country; Winant’s mother documented her trip from Los Angeles to Niagara Falls on Super 8 in the summer of 1969 with her friend Judy Carter, while Carmen traveled from Philadelphia to Los Angeles with a 35mm camera in 2001.

The montages are on view in three hundred bus shelters in New York, Boston, and Chicago through April 6. You can find Horizon on Prospect Ave. and on Roosevelt Ave., Beach on the Southwest Grand Concourse, Rainbow on Frederick Douglass Blvd. and on Pearl St., Niagara Falls on 180th St. and on Clarkson Ave., Cornfield on Victory Blvd., and Bless Our Happy Home on Myrtle Ave., among other works at other locations.

“I think of myself as a feminist artist who uses art as an expression of my politics,” Winant says in a PAF Instagram post. “That has meant thinking about existing photographs as documents or as tools of the movement, how those pictures resonate now, or what they can tell us about contemporary feminism or the space between feminist movements.”

On March 26, Winant, who was born in San Francisco, grew up in Philly, and is now based in Columbus, Ohio, will participate in a Public Art Fund Talk and experimental lecture about the project, sitting down with PAF senior curator Melanie Kress at the Cooper Union. The next day, Winant and Kress will lead a tour of some of the bus shelters, beginning on the Upper West Side. Both events are free with advance RSVP.

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

DHARMA FRIENDS: NUALA CLARKE AT TIBET HOUSE

Who: Nuala Clarke, Crystal Gandrud, Rob Ward, Megan Mook, Kevin Townley
What: “Alchemy and Art on the Spiritual Path”
Where: Tibet House NYC and online, 22 West Fifteenth St.
When: Monday, March 24, free – $20 – $225, 6:30
Why: “I swim in the sea, and my experience of cold has changed. I can no longer be trusted with the question ‘Is it cold out?’ I experience it without the tightening of torso muscles and raising of shoulders. It has become separate from the whole, less readily identifiable. In my hands it feels like leanness, the appendages pared away to the essential; in my back and around my ribs it tingles; it is fresh on my lips; in my toes it is clear and my chest, above my heart, accepts it as youngness, in need of care. I am an effervescent being.” So writes Irish artist Nuala Clarke in her new book, Irish Moss of a Dead Man’s Skull (the Owl Circus, March 18, $33).

Influenced by the work of Irish alchemist and natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–91), author of Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours, with Observations on a Diamond that Shines in the Dark, as well as by installation artist Robert Irwin, serigrapher and ceramicist Robert Brown, and spiritual coach and meditation teacher Robert Chender, Clarke has spent nearly five years “thinking about whether a painting could be prescribed for an ailment.” The result is a work that Clarke calls “an ode to light, color, loss, and the elements.” The 224-page book features 86 full-color images and details the impact each of the four Roberts has had on her art and her meditation practice.

On Monday, March 24, Clarke will launch the book at Tibet House as part of the Dharma Friends series, joined by experimental writer and acquiring editor Crystal Gandrud, Food Will Win the War violist, songwriter, and lead vocalist Rob Ward, and monthly Dharma Friends hosts Megan Mook and Kevin Townley, who will lead guided meditations. Having participated back in 2010 with composer Roarke Menzies, Gandrud, my wife, and others in a performance Clarke curated for her show “You Delight Me” on Shelter Island, I can vouch for how terrific her events are, and this one should offer its own numerous pleasures.

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

SCORED BY YASUAKI SHIMIZU: CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Documentary tells the engaging story of a pair of Japanese artists and the life they have made for themselves in Brooklyn

CUTIE AND THE BOXER (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday March 22, 5:00
metrograph.com
www.facebook.com/cutieandtheboxer

Zachary Heinzerling’s Emmy-winning Cutie and the Boxer is a beautifully told story of love and art and the many sacrifices one must make to try to succeed in both. In 1969, controversial Japanese Neo Dada action painter and sculptor Ushio Shinohara came to New York City, looking to expand his career. According to the catalog for the 2013 MoMA show “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” which featured four works by Ushio, “American art had seemed to him to be ‘marching toward the glorious prairie of the rainbow and oasis of the future, carrying all the world’s expectations of modern painting.’” Four years later, he met nineteen-year-old Noriko, who had left Japan to become an artist in New York as well. The two fell in love and have been together ever since, immersed in a fascinating relationship that Heinzerling explores over a five-year period in his splendid feature-length theatrical debut.

Ushio and Noriko live in a cramped apartment and studio in DUMBO, where he puts on boxing gloves, dips them in paint, and pounds away at large, rectangular canvases and builds oversized motorcycle sculptures out of found materials. Meanwhile, Noriko, who has spent most of the last half century taking care of her often childlike husband and staying with him through some rowdy times and battles with the bottle, is finally creating her own work, an R. Crumb-like series of drawings detailing the life of her alter ego, Cutie, and her often cruel husband, Bullie. (“Ushi” means “bull” in Japanese.) While Ushio is more forthcoming verbally in the film, mugging for the camera and speaking his mind, the pig-tailed Noriko is far more tentative, so director and cinematographer Heinzerling brings her tale to life by animating her work, her characters jumping off the page to show Cutie’s constant frustration with Bullie.

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in Emmy-winning Cutie and the Boxer

During the course of the too-short eighty-two-minute film — it would have been great to spend even more time with these unique and compelling figures — the audience is introduced to the couple’s forty-year-old son, who has some issues of his own; Guggenheim senior curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe, who stops by the studio to consider purchasing one of Ushio’s boxing paintings for the museum; and Chelsea gallery owner Ethan Cohen, who represents Ushio. But things never quite take off for Ushio, who seems to always be right on the cusp of making it. Instead, the couple struggles to pay their rent. One of the funniest, yet somehow tragic, scenes in the film involves Ushio packing up some of his sculptures — forcing them into a suitcase like clothing — and heading back to Japan to try to sell some pieces. Cutie and the Boxer is a special documentary that gets to the heart of the creative process as it applies both to art and love, focusing on two disparate people who have made a strange yet thoroughly charming life for themselves.

Cutie and the Boxer is screening March 22 at 5:00 as part of the Metrograph series “Scored by Yasuaki Shimizu” and will be followed by a discussion and Q&A with composer Yasuaki Shimizu and writer Yumiko Sakuma. The Saturday tribute also includes a double feature of Hiroyuki Nakano’s 1990 Pace and Nam June Paik’s 1986 Bye Bye Kipling at 2:35 and Buntarō Futagawa’s 1925 silent jidaigeki Orochi at 7:30, which will be introduced by Shimizu, about which he explains, “This film is a silent samurai movie made and released in 1925, directed by Bunta Suga. It is the first production of the Banto Tsumasaburō Production and a landmark work that sparked the ‘sword-fighting boom’ in Japan. This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of its release! I composed music for a film concert. A few years later, the master film of Orochi was rediscovered, and in 2023, a digital master version was produced. I revised the score for this 4K digital restoration, which was released the same year. This film holds great significance for me.”

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

MADNESS AND MELODRAMA: FIVE EVENINGS AT THE CHAIN

Tamara (Snezhana Chernova) and Ilyin (Roman Freud) reunite after being apart for seventeen years in Five Evenings (photo by Alexandra Vaynshtein)

FIVE EVENINGS
Chain Theatre
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
March 20-30, $49.87 – $71.21
www.fiveevenings.com

“No, this is madness,” Zoya says to Ilyin at the start of Jewish-Soviet playwright Aleksandr Volodin’s Five Evenings, a five-act multigenerational melodrama that is as relevant today as it was when it was first presented in 1959 at the Leningrad State Academic Bolshoi Drama Theater and later adapted into an award-winning 1978 film by Nikita Mikhalkov.

The work is now being revived by director Eduard Tolokonnikov and producer Polina Belkina for a thirteen-show run at the Chain Theatre, with Lana Shypitsyna or Snezhana Chernova as Tamara, Roman Freud as Ilyin, Ekaterina Cherepanova as Katya, Aleksei Furmanov as Slava, Inna Yesilevskaya as Zoya, and Dima Koan as Timofeev. The ninety-minute play (with intermission) will be performed in Russian with English surtitles; the set design is by Jenya Shekhter, with lighting by Ken Coughlin, sound by Denis Zabiyaka, and costumes by Natasha Danilova.

The story looks at two relationships, between the older Tamara and Ilyin and the younger Katya and Slava. In the second evening, they’re together at Tamara’s, and the two men have a chat while Slava sets the table, a scene that is representative of Volodin’s character development and dialogue:

Ilyin: See how nice it is? When there’s a white tablecloth and flowers on the table; it’s awkward to be petty, rude, or mean. The tablecloth should have creases from the iron — they bring back childhood memories.
Slava: How poetic.
Ilyin: One must live wisely, without haste. Remember, life’s book is full of unnecessary details. But here’s the trick: You can skip those pages.
Slava: Well, this is one page I don’t feel like reading. Aunt Toma can clean up when she gets here. After all, isn’t there a division of labor?
Ilyin: Don’t make me angry — get to work.

Katya walks in as Ilyin is teaching Slava how to box, declaring, “What are you doing, you slimy snake? What are you doing?!” A moment later, Ilyin says to Katya, “A demonic woman. Is that a manicure you’ve got there?”

Katya (Ekaterina Cherepanova) and Slava (Aleksei Furmanov) seek freedom and love in Five Evenings (photo by Alexandra Vaynshtein)

Born in Minsk and raised in Moscow after his mother’s death when he was five, Aleksandr Lifshitz — he changed his last name to Volodin because Lifshitz was too Jewish and was impacting his ability to get published — was drafted into the Red Army during WWII and was injured twice before earning a medal for courage. His first play, The Factory Girl, debuted in 1955 and traveled throughout the USSR. Five Evenings, which deals with time, suffering, resilience, and rebuilding, was followed by such plays as My Elder Sister and Do Not Part with Your Beloved in addition to several screenplays.

A champion of the individual who subtly rejected Stalinism in his works, Volodin died in 2001 in St. Petersburg at the age of eighty-two; his son Vladimir Lifschitz, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, revoked the copyright of his father’s plays in Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine. Lifschitz will be at the Chain Theatre to participate in a postshow discussion on March 20.

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

LITERARY INSIGHT: KYLE THOMAS SMITH AND JOHN MADERA AT NYI MEDITATION CENTER

Who: John Madera, Kyle Thomas Smith, Josh Wexler
What: Writers’ Voices — An Evening of Literary Readings
Where: New York Insight Meditation Center, 115 West Twenty-Ninth St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves., twelfth floor, and online
When: Sunday, March 16, free with advance RSVP (suggested donation $15), 2:00
Why: “There’s an album called Classical Music for Creativity that is perfect, or almost perfect, for blocking out noise so you can read, write, or study. I suppose you could paint or draw or sculpt or design clothes to it too. You can buy it on iTunes for $7.99. I could look up the track listings and rattle them off for you, but the truth is, I don’t know which track is which, or who composed what, when it’s sounding away in my earbuds. All I know is that when I hit shuffle, there are no lyrics and no singing to distract me, and the orchestras’ crescendos are often all that it takes to bring what I’m writing to a crescendo. Theories like the Mozart effect say that just listening to classical music will raise your IQ. That kind of thing used to be hugely important to me when I was younger, but what’s more important to me now is that the music drowns out other people’s chatter. I don’t want anyone or anything intruding on my flow. Still, there’s too much cabin fever when you write at home past a certain number of days and libraries are so stuffy. Plus, you can’t bring drinks in. So, I go to cafes. I’ve been going to them ever since I was a teenager. It’s good to be around people, and even to hear a dull roar of their voices, just to know you’re a part of something larger than yourself and your confines. It’s even better if you can tune everybody out when you’re around them and for me, Classical Music for Creativity does the trick.”

So begins award-winning author Kyle Thomas Smith’s latest memoir, François (StreetLegal Press, 2024), the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based author’s follow-up to the hilarious 2018 Cockloft: Scenes from a Gay Marriage and the poignant 2010 novel 85A. Smith will be around people on Sunday, March 16, when he appears at New York Insight Meditation Center to read from François, which features William Etty’s dramatic 1828 oil painting Male Nude, with Arms Up-Stretched on the cover. Smith, a practice leader in New York Insight’s Brooklyn sangha, will be joined by New York City–based writer, editor, and publisher John Madera, who will read from Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024), his debut collection of short experimental fiction that includes such stories as “Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs,” “Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan,” and “Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata.” Following the readings, Smith and Madera will sit down for a conversation moderated by bookseller, activist, musician, piano teacher, and suicide hotline director Josh Wexler. The event, hosted by the NYI Artist Salon and being livestreamed as well, will begin with presentations by other members of New York Insight’s community.

And just in case Smith is interested, among the works on Classical Music for Creativity are Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Symphony in G Major, Wq. 182 No. 1: I. Allegro di molto, conducted by Hartmut Haenchen; several Vivaldi concertos for violin, cello, mandolin, and/or strings; and Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, HWV 351: IV. La réjouissance, in addition to compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Jean-Philipe Rameau.

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