My summer has been wonderful…to the degree that anyone’s summer can be while staying in New York. We bear the brutal concrete heat and reeking garbage, for what? The best and often free cultural events that the city offers. From stadiums to house shows, artists in any medium and level have been pounding out new work and happenings, which have wowed me repeatedly this summer. I have often found myself unable to choose music for the subway ride home, I was so in awe of what I had witnessed that night. Walking through my neighborhood’s littered streets and into my stuffy apartment, I am reminded why I pay NYC rent. Here are eleven of many highlights from my wonderful summer.
6/11: Greenpoint Open studios
The intimacy of studio visits, the party atmosphere of openings, and the marathon mindset of gallery-hopping: Greenpoint’s open studio weekend combined these thrills for a dense, dizzying, and delightful chance to see dozens of artists in their personal habitats, and the wider ecosystems they create. Like the neighborhood itself, some of Greenpoint’s best artists fuse the synthetic and organic with a wide color spectrum and compressed graphic rendering. Of the studios I saw, my favorites included: Hannah Antalek, Irene Feleo, Lauren Walkiewicz, Ann Cofta and Michael MacDonald. These trends also appeared in dialogue with opacity and abstraction in Alchemical Thresholds, a stacked and compact group show. Curator Alex Feim impressively arranged over a dozen artists' work with a wide yet cohesive breadth of material and form. Ambling around the Greenpoint industrial zone, wandering through corridors of anonymous buildings, I found dazzling work around every corner. It felt like a magical treasure hunt.
From left to right, the work of: Hannah Antalek, Ann Cofta, Lauren Walkiewicz, Michael MacDonald, and Irene Feleo
6/18: Isis Davis-Marks- There is Another Sky @ Bob’s
Curator Sammy Bennet does not let the label “apartment gallery” dictate the ambition or quality of the work he shows in actor Bob Laine’s spare room. But Isis Davis-Marks’s warm and embracing solo show There is Another Sky felt perfectly at home in a home. In an installation spanning canvases (stretched or loose), framed drawings, and assemblages, Bennet and Davis-Marks presented an intimate and expansive slice of life. Looking at familial portraiture and still lifes of flowers and nightstands, I felt like I was spending a slow afternoon with the artist in a sunlit, stuff-strewn apartment. Davis-Marks freely collages, prints, paints, and embroiders, allowing for expressive overlays while letting her deft rendering compliment each method’s unique properties. She’s also a bold colorist, pushing and pulling pastel tones to vibrancy without oversaturating the viewer’s eye. Unafraid of extravagance, this show offers a humble and generous vision in the first person.
6/18: Jersey Star + Spirit Rider and Night Heart @Sunview Luncheonette
Though the griddle stays cool at the Sunview Luncheonette, this former Greenpoint diner still fosters vibrant cultural exchange as a performance venue. Musician Webb Crawford curated the evening’s bill, featuring Jersey Star, a lean and powerful troubadour, and Spirit Rider and Night Heart, an audio-visual epic, told through live fiddle, singing and shadow puppetry.
Matt Mahoney, the man behind the Jersey Star moniker, played a solo set of slow burning original songs armed with just his bass and his powerhouse of a voice. He kept the crowd holding onto every pitch of his resonant vocals, which soared seamlessly between octaves to create his song’s infectious, idiosyncratic melodies. Fiddler Georgia Beatty and shadow-puppeteer Maisie O’Brien followed with their enthralling performance Spirit Rider and Night Heart. Beatty sang over her violin, while O’Brien illuminated horses, riders, flies, and fire from an overhead projector. Experiencing the ghostly music while the hand-cut opaque figures moved against the light, I felt like I was witnessing the rituals of ancient cave paintings, watching flames animate the animals. Most remarkable was the interplay between the sights and sounds, with neither element subservient. Where else would you encounter such heart-wrenching, timeless art, but in a greasy spoon diner?
Left to right: Into my Garden Come! by Isis Davis Marks; Georgia Beatty and Maisie O’Brien performing Spirit Rider and Night Heart; Installation view of Alchemical Thresholds
6/21: Dead & Company @Citi Field
Back at Citi Field for their purported final tour, this iteration of the Grateful Dead, now another original member short, still managed a savory and at times staggeringly powerful performance. The 7 train’s tired commuters cast a curious eye on the tie-dyed fans filling the already crowded train that evening. Like the Dead, Citi Field’s surroundings offer an illuminating view of America: Gravel quarries and auto-shops; the World’s Fair Grounds and the polluted, but still beautiful Flushing Bay; Rikers Island and LaGuardia Airport. Shakedown Street—the parking lot smugglers market outside any Dead show–is not a far cry from the food or knock-offs hocked on a New York street.
As the sun set, the band rocked through deep cuts and fan favorites at their simultaneous loping shuffle and in-the-pocket-groove. Despite my aversion to him, John Mayer has proven an apt student of Jerry Garcia’s guitar godliness. How amusing to see him sit through the second set, (“I hurt my back. Ya see, I sat down, and then tried getting up!”) while the ancient-looking Bob Weir stood all night heartfully barking out each lyric. As darkness domed the stadium during the spacey second set, an unusual wistfulness set in as I absorbed this panoramic Americana: The Dead playing on a baseball field under a neon Coca-Cola sign, with the lights of a Joseph Stella urban nightscape behind. I experienced a patriotism, not for a whole country, but a concurrence of cross-sections: this 50-plus-year-old traveling circus in mutual embrace with my home the World’s Borough.
7/12: They Hate Change @No Hassle Castle
“Change over everything!” Florida rap duo They Hate Change chanted with the crowd at their free set’s climax. No Hassle Castle, a DM-for-address loft, was a perfect setting for members Vonne and Dre and their insistent DIY approach. An immediate charge sparked between the artists and audience, without the height difference of a stage. Toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye with each other and the crowd, the pair (in their matching shirts) spit syncopated verses perfectly over Vonne’s eclectic, sliding beats. They played bangers from last year’s Finally New, along with their latest single “stunt (when I see u)” and an unreleased track. Under dim string lights, these exquisite performers ran a tight, hype ship, rocking a small brick room with wooden floorboards like a huge warehouse rave.
7/14: Purple Rain @The Museum of Moving Image
I saved my virgin view of Prince’s classic for the big screen, and I’m so glad I waited. I was less glad when I learned that MOMI’s A/C was broken. But for a future free screening, and cold water bottles, it was a fair deal. Besides, it was only appropriate to sit through 2 hours of Prince extremely sweaty. Once the movie began, I hardly noticed the heat, I was so utterly gleefully transported into Prince’s campy, glammed-out Minneappolis wonderland. Director Albert Magnoli uses the choreography and costumes, the sets and lighting in immaculately composed shots, accentuating the hilarious overacting and a stellar supporting cast. I particularly loved the villain henchmen duo Morris Day and Jerome Benton. Tongue-in-cheek or not, the melodrama still had the audience cracking up through the whole film–that is, when we weren’t dancing in our seats to Prince’s seductive, timeless tunes.
7/15: Young World 3 Festival @Herbert Von King Park
It was a muggy Saturday afternoon in Bedstuy, where New York’s underground hip-hop hero, MIKE, assembled a free festival with a stellar lineup of rap’s left field talent and rising stars. My current favorite, 454, beamed with warmth and gratitude, as he rapped high pitched over his glittering, candy-sweet production. The gray clouds broke, but the rain offered a cool relief, especially during sets from Mavi, and MIKE (where scene mentor Earl Sweatshirt joined for a feature!). During a prolonged shower I took shelter under a tree—and likely received some enlightenment from the futuristic funk gospel of Georgia Ann Muldrow. The weather cleared and the crowd re-flooded the field to enjoy headliner Noname who rapped with a slick backing band. She debuted new material from her then forthcoming album Sundial along with older favorites for an incredible finale to an incredible festival.
Left to right: Yound World 3 poster by Ghanaian artist D.A Japser; They Hate Change move too fast for a crisp photo
7/23: Mark Bradford- You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice @ Hauser & Wirth
Mark Bradford tears and layers sheets of found paper to channel his surroundings into enticingly textured facades, revealing different imagery at any distance. Topography, text, tissue, and metal emerge from the toothy miasma. In You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice, his massive new canvases and a poignant sculpture engulfed me in both threatening and enchanting environments. The exhibition's first floor featured Rousseau-ish rainforests with vibrant blasts of lush contrast and chroma. I felt surveyed by the spotted jaguars camouflaged in the thicket of splattered pulpy paper. Plastic bags and rope form the fauna of this vivacious, writhing, biome. On the top floor, a series of pale canvases surrounded a sculpture of Bradford in the ballroom dance pose, tellingly titled the “death drop”. On the huge horizontal wall work bleached, cemented skins and rusty stains covered embossed historical American train timetables. Taken together, this exhibition encapsulated the weight of history and emotion on the lone figure and the landscape. Quiet or ferocious, the works left me feeling like a Bradford artwork: torn and raw with my innermost layers exposed.
8/24: Barbie @Williamsburg Cinemas
Barbie is not an excuse to leave the work-party: Barbie is the party. The main event. The most demanding and impactful use of your attention span. Gretta Gerwig’s hilarious, incisive, insightful feminist manifesto crams in so much pathos and so many punchlines, I started feeling like the character Weird Barbie: aggressively played with to the point of transformation. The film excels at parodying normative gender roles, nailing the patriarchy for all of its silly absurdities, and articulating the countless binds and double standards imposed on women. It may be heavy handed, but so are we when imaginating with our favorite toys. Once I’ve pounded some overtime wages’ worth of drinks at next week’s fall barbecue, I’ll just say I have tickets to Oppenheimer.
8/26: Carla Perez-Devourer of Sunsets @Charmoli Ciarmoli
In Charmoli Ciarmoli, a space tucked away in a midtown office building, Carla Perez has projected a strange and beautiful vision through drawings, paintings, and hand blown glass. There’s a youthful exuberance in embracing all of these forms, especially for the artist’s debut solo show. Still, it’s obvious that they come from the same mind and hand. Curator Nakai Falcón’s arrangement affords each medium its space, while allowing the forms to speak to one another to form an overarching narrative. Throughout Devourer of Sunsets, Perez elevates nature as an aid in mediating her cross-cultural experience as a Dominican New Yorker. Her paintings recall the Mannerists and Fauves in their bold palette and heavy paint. The flowers within these brooding yet inviting scenes float out of the frames to hang from the ceiling in glass. They mimic the elongated figures in a similar palette within Perez’s funny, grotesque graphite drawings, reminiscent of Goya’s etchings. The mysteries whispered between the translucence and radiant color have followed me out of the gallery and found foothold in my mind.
8/26: No Regerts @McGolrick Park
On the row of columns in the McGolrick Park pavilion, curators Christine Stiver and Dominic Terlizzi ratchet-strapped the experiments of 13 artists working on large drop-cloths. Strong colors burst across the diverse work which spanned painting, dying, drawing, stitching and collage. The show’s title (type-o intentional) gave artists permission to work outside their familiar media–like usual color pencilist Sarah Grass, who made a site specific painting of the park’s memorial statue, complete with shiny jewels and a brass halo. Others held a dialogue with the pavilion itself, like Mahsa Fard’s embroidered gothic archway, hung at the structure’s far wall, a recess or portal into an imaginary space. Pol Morton addressed the threat of pigeon poop by including cut-outs of the birds on their work’s outward facing surface, and pictures of their cats on the inside surface. Light speckled through these makeshift canvases, and the wind billowed them in a breathlike motion. Dogs barking and children playing tag at a birthday party made a background just beyond. Seeing this overarching experiment in a wholly public setting made an inclusive, chance-prone experience, which has felt central to this special summer.
Left to right: No Regerts installation shot featuring work by Joy Curtis and Mike Olin, Mahsa Fard and Isis Davis-Marks; Installation shot of Devourer or Sunsets by Carla Perez
"Why would anyone smoke weed when they could just mow a lawn?"
-Hank Hill
-Hank Hill
The lawn was a medieval flex: a lord flaunting his land so copious, it did not even need to grow crops. The green expanse was maintained by peasant labor, just to be admired by the public and leisured upon by the lord’s court. The lawn is one of so many luxuries subsumed into the American Dream and repackaged for the masses. This dispersion has stretched into the privatized space of the lawn’s easy-going sibling: the backyard.
Homes and hedges fence off this space from the nosy public or the HomeOwners Association’s watchful eye to make a personal oasis for the increasingly legendary Middle Class American Family. When they entertain, it becomes a speakeasy for residents and their guests to enjoy booze, food and uniform green grass from wicker chairs. Those lucky enough to have a yard in a city, contend with panoptic windows, trash sheds, and more residents to share it with. That’s why such yards are as often empty as they are enjoyed. These are the grounds on which we encounter The Backyard Show.
In the immersive transformation, artworks expose such subtexts, confronting surveillance, mass-media, consumerism, and climate change. Each piece’s dynamic intervention creates a dialogue with surrounding elements: poured concrete, exposed pipes, rotting plywood. The experience feels uniquely suited to the yard’s astro-turf: lawn grass’s synthetic , sinister doppelgänger. This robot twin demands nearly no maintenance and stays green year round; it smells of rubber, and traps heat, more like a greenhouse than a plant. These sensations linger over our host’s copious plastic-melting bbq fresh off the grill!
Any appreciation of an outdoor feels cut short, hemmed in by the maintenance and conditions circumscribing our grassy patches. How long can we stay out here before distraction or destruction? Both brazenly and with tenderness, the show attempts to distinguish between as long as we can, or as long as we feel like it.
Like the weeds at the yard’s edge or the holes in the fence, these artists re-wild this outdoor space and expand its boundaries into an anarchic cooperative commons.
