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THE ART SHOW 2011

Jaume Plensa, “Endless III,” stainless steel, 2010, Galerie Lelong / Richard Gray Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
March 2-6, $20
212-488-5550
www.artdealers.org/artshow

The twenty-third annual Art Dealers Association of America Art Show is back at the Park Ave. Armory, where nearly seventy galleries will be selling painting, drawing, sculpture, and more, benefiting the Henry Street Settlement. In general, the Art Show is geared more toward collectors than any of the other fairs; at numerous (but by no means all) galleries, the more you look like a potential buyer, the more forthcoming the men and women working in there can be. With that in mind, the ADAA has made available online a free Collector’s Guide, which will help novices and experienced buyers navigate such topics as “What to Look for in a Work of Art,” “Understanding the Art World,” “How to Buy and Sell Through a Dealer,” and “What About Auctions?” But even if you don’t have deep pockets, there is plenty to see at the show, which is highly manageable, not overstuffed and overloaded with too much art and too-narrow aisles. Ameringer / McEnery / Yohe is displaying all twenty-one drawings that comprise Robert Motherwell’s “The Dedalus Sketchbooks,” what he referred to as “artful doodles” inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses, made on Cape Cod during the summer of 1982. David Opdyke’s “Bit Assemblage,” at Ronald Feldman, consists of sculptures and black-and-white drawings anchored by the large-scale Styrofoam landscape “Zenith.” Knoedler & Company’s “Milton Avery and the Figure” consists of a number of outstanding oils, while Jill Newhouse has beautiful drawings, watercolors, and small sculptures by Auguste Rodin.

David Opdyke’s “Bit Assemblage” is at the Ronald Feldman Fine Arts booth at the Art Show (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

L&M Arts has a splendid collection of Joseph Cornell boxes that look as fresh as if they were made yesterday. Franz Erhard Walther’s “Gesang des Lagers” sewn dyed canvases line the walls and even the floor at Peter Freeman, while Kathy Butterly’s small ceramic sculptures cover a table at Tibor de Nagy. Paintings by Oscar Bluemner and Charles Burchfield mesh surprisingly well at Debra Force, as do paintings and drawings by Richard Diebenkorn at Greenberg Van Doren. Photography fans will find William Klein at Howard Greenberg, Paul Strand at Zabriskie, Diane Arbus at Robert Miller, William Henry Fox Talbot and Eugene Atget at Hans B. Kraus, twelve of Laurel Nakadate’s “365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears” (one from each month) at Leslie Tonkonow, and twenty of Irving Penn’s engaging corner portraits at Pace / MacGill, including Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, John O’Hara, Igor Stravinsky, Jerome Robbins, and Walter Gropius. Among the other featured artists are Rachel Whiteread at Luhring Augustine, Jessica Stockholder at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman, Richard Artschwater at David Nolan, Alice Neel at David Zwirner, and Zhang Huan’s “Ash Paintings” at Pace. There’s also Watteau and Turner at David Tunick, “The Figure: From Old Masters through Contemporary Art” at Odyssia, Picasso at Pace Prints, Schiele at Galerie St. Etienne, and Philip Guston just about everywhere you look.

THE WHIZ: OBAMALAND

The Wizard of Oz heads to Obamaland at Abrons Arts Center

NICHOLAS LEICHTER DANCE + MONSTAH BLACK
Abrons Arts Center, Henry Street Settlement
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
June 16-19, $20, 8:00
212-598-0400
www.henrystreet.org
www.nldnyc.org

Since 1996, nicholas leichter dance has specialized in what it calls “cultural narratives where movement tells the story,” creating such works as KILLA, FREE THE ANGELS, CARMINA BURANA, and SWEETWASH. The company’s latest piece of musical dance theater, made in collaboration with Monstah Black (who also participated in KILLA), reinterprets THE WIZ and THE WIZARD OF OZ through the lens of the Obama generation. Leichter, who previously danced with Ralph Lemon, Jennifer Muller, Ronald K. Brown, and Gus Solomons jr., will ease audiences down the yellow brick road and into Obamaland at the Abrons Arts Center June 16-19, examining America’s hopes, fears, dreams, and recession-busting fantasies.

Monstah Black and nicholas leichter dance ease on down the disco road in a reimagined WIZ for the Obama generation (photo by Steven Schreiber)

Review: A fanciful collaboration between New York City-based choreographer Nicholas Leichter and self-proclaimed Messiah of the Funk Monstah Black, THE WHIZ: OBAMALAND is a campy low-budget send-up and joyful celebration of Sidney Lumet’s 1978 musical, THE WIZ. Black, serving as a sort of emcee à la Joel Grey in CABARET, has adapted songs from the original soundtrack, performing such numbers as “The Feeling That We Have,” “Ease on Down the Road,” and “Slide Some Oil” while wearing some of the most fab costumes this side of 1970s-era Studio 54 and the 1980s PARIS IS BURNING aesthetic. (Oh, those shoes…) Leichter and Black also throw in Missy Elliot’s raunchy “Lick Shots,” Faith Evans’s “Soon as I Get Home,” the Time’s “Jungle Love,” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” to keep up the funk and, in the latter case, add yet more silly humor to what was already a very funny, groovy show. The dancers, including Lauren Basco, Wendell Cooper, Stephanie Liapis, Aaron Draper, Dawn Robinson, Keon Thoulouis, Laurie Taylor, Yozmit, and Leichter, pay tribute to Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Rocky Balboa as they clearly have a ball performing Leichter’s exuberant choreography. Draper brings down the house several times, first holding fans on Robinson to make her dress and feather boa flap in the wind, then coming out as a boxer, his skinny white body soon dancing alongside three men with much, er, bigger, stronger, darker frames. Even at a mere seventy-five minutes it could use a little trimming here and there, but the show is still great fun, with one heckuva surprise near the end that will have you gasping for breath. THE WHIZ: OBAMALAND runs through June 19 at the Abrons Arts Center, but we’re hoping it comes back soon so it can be seen by the wider audience it deserves.

QUARTET v4.0

WaxFactory revisits its history and lays a course for its future with QUARTETv4.0 at Abrons Arts Center

WaxFactory YEAR 11 RETROSPECTIVE
Abrons Arts Center, Henry Street Settlement
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
February 24-28, $15
212-352-3101
www.henrystreet.org
www.waxfactory.org
www.performingrevolution.org

The SoHo-based experimental theater company WaxFactory is celebrating the completion of its eleventh year with a series of programs that look back at the company’s founding, in 1998, as well as ahead toward its future. The “Year 11 Retrospective” began in January with the presentation of BLIND.NESS (LOVE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD) as part of P.S. 122’s COIL festival and continues this week with WaxFactory’s new version of QUARTET v4.0, based on Heiner Müller’s controversial adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES. Part of the New York Public Library’s Performing Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe, the multimedia production, which uses surveillance cameras, live video capture, and real-time editing and processing, was conceived and directed by Ivan Talijancic and stars Erika Latta and Todd Thomas Peters. The celebration concludes next month with the American premiere of the company’s DELIRIUM 27, directed by Latta and running March 24-28 at Abrons Arts Center.