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

ARTHUR ASHE KIDS’ DAY

Carly Rae Jepsen will be among the performers at annual Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day at Billie Jean King National Tennis Center

Billie Jean King National Tennis Center
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Saturday, August 25, $10-$40 ($5 with promotional code WILD4TNS through August 12), 9:30 am – 3:00 pm
www.usopen.org
www.arthurashekidsday.com

The official kickoff to the U.S. Open, which runs August 27 to September 9, takes place Saturday, August 25, with the annual Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day celebration. Honoring the legacy of the late Arthur Ashe, the 1968 Open champion who died of AIDS complications in 1993 at the age of forty-nine, the event includes tennis skill activities, workshops, and demonstrations tailored to children, as well as face painting, storytelling, hair braiding, an obstacle course, juggling, interactive games, and more. Hosted by Jordin Sparks and Quddus, the day will feature appearances by such tennis superstars as Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Kim Clijsters, Mardy Fish, and John Isner, who will be on hand to sign autographs, play exhibition matches, and hit with kids. There will also be live performances by the Wanted, Carly Rae Jepsen, Owl City, Mindless Behavior, Rachel Crow, the Love Jones Girlz, Ahsan, Caroline Sunshine, Alex Aiono, and Megan and Liz. Although admission to the grounds is free, tickets are needed for the stadium show; they go for $10 to $40, but you can get general admission promenade tickets for just five bucks if you use promotional code WILD4TNS by 11:59 pm on August 12.

GENART FILM FESTIVAL

Jennifer (Laura Prepon) has a tough time turning thirty in GenArt closing-night film THE KITCHEN

School of Visual Arts Theatre
333 West 23rd St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
August 8-14, $30 (includes film screening and free drinks at after-party), seven-day pass $150
212-255-7300
festival.genart.com

The seventeenth annual GenArt Film Festival begins August 8, kicking off a week of screenings dedicated to one feature, one short, and one after-party each night. The opening-night films are Martin Snyder’s Missed Connections, a New York-set romantic comedy that won the Audience Award at this year’s Sarasota Film Festival, and Leah Shore’s animated documentary Old Man, made from actual conversations between author Marlin Marynick and Charles Manson. The festival continues with such films as Jorg Ihle’s cell-phone thriller Privacy, Nelson Cheng’s magician documentary The Magic Life, Jonah Ansell’s animated afterlife short Cadaver, with the voices of Christopher Lloyd and Kathy Bates, Jaime King’s Latch Key, in which a young teenager tries to ignore the sudden death of her mother, and Evan Abramson and Carmen Lopez’s Carbon for Water, about the search for clean water in Kenya. The closing-night selections are Ishai Setton’s The Kitchen, in which a woman’s (Laura Prepon) thirtieth birthday is not quite the celebration she imagined, and Ryan Eggold’s Literally, Right Before Aaron, about a man (Adam Rose) invited to his ex-girlfriend’s wedding. Awards will be given out for Best Feature, Best Short Film, best emerging-actor performance, and audience favorite; this year’s jury consists of Jay Duplass, Ben Lyons, Matt Singer, and David Blaustein. Each evening will begin with a cocktail reception, include a postscreening Q&A, and conclude with an after-party at the Thompson LES hotel in the East Village or another location.

FIRST SATURDAYS: CARIBBEAN RHYTHMS

Zing Experience will help celebrate Haitian culture at Brooklyn Museum on Saturday night

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, Augsut 4, free, 5:00 – 10:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum is getting into its annual Caribbean groove with its August First Saturdays program, celebrating the cultural heritage of Haiti. The free evening begins at 5:00 with Val Jeanty, Buyu Ambroise, and Zing Experience showcasing a mix of Haitian music and also includes dance performances by Makeda Thomas (FreshWater), NICODA (How We Are Connected), and League of Unreal Dancing and a dance workshop taught by Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy. There will be a screening of Reina de mi misma, Queen of Myself: Las Krudas d’ Cuba, Celiany Rivera-Velázquez’s 2010 documentary about the lesbian hip-hop group Las Krudas, as well as a book talk with Elizabeth Nunez, who will discuss her 2011 novel, Boundaries, which deals with a Caribbean immigrant in New York. There will also be gallery talks and a hands-on art workshop, along with time to see such exhibitions as “Raw Cooked: Ulrike Müller,” “Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company,” “Playing House,” “Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin,” “Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913–1919,” and others.

WORD FOR WORD: DEBUT NOVELISTS

Bryant Park Reading Room
42nd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, August 1, free, 12:30
www.bryantpark.org

On August 1, Bryant Park’s summer Word for Word series celebrates debut novels by featuring four local writers who have just published their first fiction books. NYU Law School grad Cristina Alger will discuss The Darlings, about a wealthy New York family immersed in a financial scandal. Longtime nonfiction writer, essayist, and short-story specialist Karl Taro Greenfield will talk about his first novel, Triburbia, in which a half dozen fathers meet every morning at a coffee shop in TriBeCa and share their secrets. San Diego native Karen Walker Thompson will present The Age of Miracles, some of which the current Brooklyn resident wrote while riding the subway. And nonfiction author Jean Zimmerman turns to historical fiction in The Orphanmaster, going back to 1663 New Amsterdam. The afternoon will be moderated by Catherine Chung, whose first novel, Forgotten Country, deals with the history of a Korean family. The Word for Word series continues on Wednesday night at 7:00 with Harold Holzer discussing his latest work, Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory.

NEWFEST

Swedish romance KISS ME is part of NewFest at Lincoln Center

NY’S PREMIER LGBT FILM FESTIVAL
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
July 27-31, $12-$50
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
newfest.org/wordpress

The twenty-fourth annual NewFest gets under way today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, kicking off five days of screenings examining and celebrating the LGBT community. The opening-night selection is Brooklyn-based director Joshua Sanchez’s Four, about four people, including a young white man (Emory Cohen) and an older black man (Wendell Pierce) who meet online, faced with some hard personal choices; members of the cast and crew will attend the screening, which will be followed by an after-party. Other highlights include Andrea Esteban’s Born Naked (MLB), about a young lesbian couple traveling through Europe; Travis Mathews’s I Want Your Love, a graphic look at a man and his ex-boyfriend in San Francisco; Thom Fitzgerald’s Cloudburst, in which Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker play a longtime lesbian couple; Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s About Face: Supermodels Then and Now, with Carol Alt and Pat Cleveland joining the famed photographer for a Q&A; Kieran Turner’s Jobriath A.D., a documentary about the first openly gay rocker; and the closing-night film, Marialys Rivas’s Young & Wild, which follows a teenager’s sexual coming-of-age. Other docs look at such figures as Joe Brainard, Arthur Russell, and Bishop Gene Robinson. Special events include “Careers in Focus: A Conversation with Charles Busch,” with free tickets available here

CHELSEA ART WALK 2012

Artist Patrick Lundeen will play with his band, the Oblique Mystique, at Mike Weiss Gallery as part of Thursday night’s Chelsea Art Walk (Lundeen’s solo show, “Good for You Son,” continues at the gallery through July 28)

Multiple locations in Chelsea
Thursday, July 26, free, 5:00 – 8:00
artwalkchelsea.com

More than eighty galleries and some two dozen artist studios will remain open until 8:00 on July 26 for the third annual Chelsea Art Walk. Although summer is of course the time for group shows (not that there’s anything wrong with that), there are a handful of solo exhibits worth looking out for, including “Jake Berthot: Artist Model, Angels Putti, Poetry Visual Prose, works on paper” at Betty Cuningham, “Zoe Strauss: 10 Years, A Slideshow” at Bruce Silverstein, “Luca Pizzaroni: Bianco Trash” at Fred Torres Collaborations, Shawn Barber’s “Memoir: The Tattooed Portraits” at Joshua Liner, “Patrick Lundeen: Good for You Son” at Mike Weiss (including a set by the artist’s band, the Oblique Mystique, at 7:00), “Holly Zausner: A Small Criminal Enterprise” at Postmasters, and “Jim Marshall: The Rolling Stones and Beyond” at Steven Kasher. Among the special events are tours at 6:00 & 7:00 led by “fledgling theater company” Rudy’s Meritocracy (meet at Tenth Ave. & Twenty-first St.), a book signing with William Steiger and Rainer Gross at Margaret Thatcher Projects, and visitors to Ultra Violet Studios can have a Polaroid portrait taken of them, among numerous other gallery and artist talks and tours and opening and closing receptions.

PERFORMING REPRESENTATIONS

Jimenez Lai, “storefront back of house,” ink on paper, 2012

Storefront for Art and Architecture
97 Kenmare St.
Tuesday, July 24, free, 7:00
212-431-5795
www.storefrontnews.org

As part of the book launch for Jimenez Lai’s Citizens of No Place: An Architectural Graphic Novel (Princeton Architectural Press, May 2012, $19.95), the Storefront for Art and Architecture is hosting a special one-day-only exquisite-corpse drawing conversation with Lai, Drawing Center executive director Brett Littman, and architects Johanna Meyer-Grohbrügge and Michael Young. “Citizens of No Place imagines alternate worlds and engages with the design of architecture through the act of storytelling,” the book’s preface explains. “It offers narratives about character development, through which the reader can explore relationships, curiosities, and attitudes, as well as absurd stories about fake realities that invite new futures to become possibilities.” While discussing representation, the participants will create a continuous drawing, in conjunction with the Storefront’s current exhibition, “Aesthetics/Anesthetics,” which explores the nature of architectural drawings, with works by Lai, Vito Acconci, Sam Jacob, Philippe Rahm, Juergen Mayer H., Jorge Otero-Pailos, Noura Al Sayeh, Sho Shigematsu, Ling Fan, and others.