Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting, and thought-provoking, shows, screenings, and events. In light of the global health crisis, we are currently highlighting events and exhibitions available digitally. See our picks from around the world below. (Times are all EST unless otherwise noted.)
1. “Garden Conversations: Susanne Vielmetter + John Sonsini” on Instagram Live
As part of Vielmetter Los Angeles’s new series, artist John Sonsini will be live to talk about how he’s managing his new reality, and his studio practice more broadly. Sonsini’s solo exhibition was on view at the Los Angeles-based gallery through February 2020.
Price: Free
Time: On Instagram live at 12 p.m. PST (3 p.m. EST)
—Caroline Goldstein
2. “Financial Strategies for Artists and Freelancers Impacted by COVID-19” at the Art World Conference
The Art World Conference is hosting two free webinars in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The first looks to address the financial insecurity facing freelance art professionals who have found themselves suddenly unemployed thanks to industry-wide closures and event cancellations. Miata Edoga, founder of Abundance Bound, a financial education company for creative entrepreneurs, will lead the program with a Q&A to follow. Slots appear to be full at the moment, but you can still register for next week’s talk, “Taxes for Artists, Freelancers, and Creative Businesses: What You Need to Know NOW,” on April 21 with Hannah Cole, a tax expert who specializes in working with artists and creative businesses.
Price: Free with registration
Time: 7 p.m.–8:30 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
3. “Praise You: IG Live Chats” at Praise Shadows Art Partners
Art advisory Praise Shadows Art Partners is starting a new Instagram Live series featuring founder Yng-Ru Chen in daily conversation with art world professionals around the world. The series kicks off tomorrow with independent curator Sara Raza and there are some impressive names on the schedule: Duke Riley, artist behind the very popular Fly by Night; Eugenie Tsai, curator at the Brooklyn Museum; and Phil Tinari, director of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
Price: Free
Time: Times vary by day, each chat will be 30 minutes
—Sarah Cascone
One of the first art fairs that was postponed due to the global health crisis, the Dallas Art Fair, originally set to open this week, has postponed its 12th edition until October. But following the example of Art Basel Hong Kong, the fair is hosting online viewing rooms where collectors can digitally preview and purchase exhibitors’ offerings.
Price: Free
Time: Open daily, at all times
—Sarah Cascone
5. “Round Table Discussion: Navigating Forward During Covid-19” at POWarts
Concerned about the future of the art industry in the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic? Lost your job and in need of unemployment benefits? POWarts is hosting a Zoom discussion to help arts professionals chart a course through the uncertain waters of our time, led by Francesca Altamura, a curator at New York’s New Museum and the organization’s newest steering committee member.
Price: Free with registration
Time: 12 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
6. “Dwelling Is the Light” at Timothy Taylor
Curator and art historian Katy Hessel, who runs the Instagram account @thegreatwomenartists, has curated this exhibition—the first in a series of online shows—for Timothy Taylor. Drawing its name from William Wordsworth’s 1798 poem “Tintern Abbey,” it features works by women artists including Hope Gangloff, Hilary Pecis, and Kiki Smith, with both interior and exterior scenes, landscapes and domestic settings.
Price: Free
Time: Open daily, at all times
—Sarah Cascone
7. “Alex Chen: Design and Technology Cloud Salon” at Parsons Design + Technology
Alex Chen, creative director at Google Creative Lab, becomes the latest luminary to Zoom into Parsons’s ongoing series of Friday afternoon webinars about the mash-up of art, design, and technology. With Parsons assistant professor Richard The handling moderator duties, Chen will discuss his process and recent projects, including MTA.me, which transformed the New York subway map into an interactive digital string instrument, as well as Google’s larger investigations into the workings of music and machine learning.
Price: Free; register here.
Time: 3 p.m.–4 p.m.
—Tim Schneider
8. “ProCESs” at the Museum of Graffiti, Miami
Miami’s new Museum of Graffiti is forging ahead with its next show despite remaining closed to the public, staging a virtual opening reception via Zoom. The exhibition, curated by Carlos Mare, showcases the work of Bronx graffiti artist Robert “CES” Provenzano, who came of age in New York’s Wild Style era, tagging subway cars and urban walls. The online event will kick off with a discussion between the artist and museum founder Alan Ket about the works on view, small-scale marker illustrations and larger spay-painted canvases. There will be a Q&A, as well as surprise guests appearances from CES’s friends and collaborators, followed by a DJ set to cap off the evening.
Price: Free, RSVP to receive Zoom link
Time: 5 p.m.
—Sarah Cascone
9. Not Canceled Art Week in Berlin
Berlin may have lost its Gallery Weekend this year, but a small DIY-art week has cropped up online featuring several of the city’s most interesting galleries. Online this week via virtual shows, interviews, performances, and videos, the idea is to conjure a virtual sense of the local, in contrast to the lack of place one may feel when scrolling around through art online. The first iteration took place “in” Vienna, and Berlin’s chapter runs through April 18. I’ll be checking into Berlin-based artist Luzie Meyer’s melodic video on view from Sweetwater Berlin, which goes on view at 7 p.m. CEST on Saturday, April 17, and Catherine Biocca’s Milky Seas, on view from PSM on Sunday, April 18 at 7 p.m. CEST.
Price: Free
Time: Check schedule for programming
— Kate Brown
10. “RED” at Galerie Lelong
This group exhibition of 25 works by the gallery’s artists is centered on the color red, charged as it is with connotations of the body, emotions, and politics. It includes work in a variety of media by artists such as Etel Adnan, Sarah Cain, Petah Coyne, Angelo Filomeno, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Andy Goldsworthy, Jane Hammond, Alfredo Jaar, Samuel Levi Jones, Rosemary Laing, Lin Tianmiao, Nalini Malani, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, Hélio Oiticica, Yoko Ono, Jaume Plensa, Kate Shepherd, Nancy Spero, Michelle Stuart, Mildred Thompson, Barthélémy Toguo, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Catherine Yass. RED also marks the gallery’s new digital initiative and is its first to be held entirely online. Further, Galerie Lelong will donate a portion of the proceeds to Heart to Heart International to support their international and domestic responses to COVID-19.
Price: Free
Time: Open daily, at all times
—Eileen Kinsella
11. “TIME SHARE” at Performa
Performa associate curator Job Piston has launched a new online series that brings performance art online, via Radical Broadcast, the performance art organization’s online channel. To kick things off, the website has been overlaid with the video documenting Judy Chicago’s Women and Smoke (1971–72), in which nude female performers set off colored smoke fireworks in the California desert. Piston has put together work from 24 artists for the occasion, including historic works like Robert Rauschenberg’s first choreographic work, Pelican (1963), as well as contemporary projects that embrace modern technologies, such as Nick Sethi’s Instagram stories communicating with the Kalbelia, a nomadic Western India tribe. Tune in throughout the month to catch pieces from the likes of Jacolby Satterwhite, Ryan Trecartin, Zanele Muholi, and many more.
Price: Free
Time: Open daily, at all times
—Sarah Cascone
12. “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Opticks” at Fraenkel Gallery
Fraenkel Gallery presents new works by Hiroshi Sugimoto in which the well-known Japanese artist photographs the patterns of light through a prism. His carefully calibrated process depends on waiting for the right weather and the ideal moment of the day to capture the best light in his Tokyo studio. Known for ethereal black-and-white photography of seascapes and theater interiors, Sugimoto opens a new chapter in his oeuvre with these rainbow-hued works.
Price: Free
Time: Available online until August 15th
—Neha Jambhekar
13. “Rineke Dijkstra: Online Exhibition” at Marian Goodman Gallery
One of the most interesting outcomes of the lockdown era is the fact that institutions that historically have spurned “trendy” initiatives such as online viewing rooms have been compelled to embrace them. One such old-school enterprise is Marian Goodman Gallery, which just launched its inaugural virtual exhibition based on the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s first UK show, which was cut short in London. The online version comes with a video tour narrated by Dijkstra, meaty text describing the artist’s most famous and latest series, and… wait for it… prices! As a gallery that would frequently turn away any journalist inquiring about hard numbers at art fairs, Goodman making the decision to include prices is as compelling a signal as I’ve seen yet that the social-distancing era may change art-world mores for good. (If you are wondering, the works range from €35,000 to €75,000.)
Price: Free, with email submission
Time: Available online, no confirmed end date
— Julia Halperin
14. “small joys” at Sargent’s Daughters
Subscribe to the Sargent’s Daughters e-newsletter and you’ll get a weekly missive showcasing a single work of art priced below $5,000—a reminder, says the gallery, “to appreciate the small joys” in life despite the global health crisis. “We are all alone, but we are all in this together. Artists continue to make art and galleries continue to support them.” This week’s offering was an erotic watercolor by former Girls star Jemima Kirke of a man provocatively posed in women’s lingerie.
Price: Free
Time: Weekly email
—Sarah Cascone
15. “Out of Blueprints: Same Old, Brand New” at NOWNESS
NOWNESS has partnered with the Serpentine Galleries and K11 Art Foundation on a new online exhibition series titled “Out of Blueprints” after Cao Fei’s temporarily closed exhibition at the London institution, “Blueprints.” For the program, NOWNESS is releasing a moving-image work by an East Asia-based artist each week, and the first is a documentary film of Cao Fei’s 2015 work Same Old, Brand New.
A commission for Art Basel Hong Kong, the artist created a large-scale video installation that was projected onto the façade of the tallest skyscraper in the city. The moving image work incorporates elements from popular 1980s video games including Pac Man, Space Invaders, and Tetris as a comment on the speed of modern life in Asia.
Price: Free
Time: Open daily, at all times
—Naomi Rea
16. “Thalia Rodgers: You make my heart smile but you also make my eyes cry” at the Union for Contemporary Art
On view at the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha earlier this year, Thalia Rodgers’s “You make my heart smile but you also make my eyes cry” is now getting a second life on the center’s website. Rodgers has developed a distinctive motif: her large works resemble blown-up pages from her notebooks, complete with rows of blue lines and perforated, torn edges as if they’d been pulled from a spiral binder. Throughout, her explosions of abstracted, graffiti-like form are masterfully balanced and sprinkled with surrealistic figures and swirling landscapes. “I’m interested in making my own world in my pieces and shitting color all over them,” Rodgers explains.
Price: Free
Time: Open daily, at all times
—Cristina Cruz