NEW
Destination Cosmos
Only open for 5 days, august 21-25
Prepare for an unforgettable journey through the cosmos with "Destination Cosmos: The Immersive Space Experience" at Hall des Lumières! Featuring stunning NASA imagery, this awe-inspiring adventure will transport you from the launch pad to the far reaches of the universe. Discover Martian canyons, see first-hand the moon landing of Apollo 11, and glide across Saturn’s rings. Join us for this extraordinary space odyssey before the school year begins and ignite your imagination!
2. An Afro-Latinx Mixtape
Currently on view at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, is the exhibition “An Afro-Latinx Mixtape.” Curated by artist Adrian Bermeo, the show features visual interpretations of Black and Latin musical genres, many born in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean islands. This is the fourth exhibition from Visual Voices, the organization’s three-year initiative focused on the work of emerging BIPOC curators.
The artists represented include Adrian Bermeo, Anthony Newton, Cameron St. Clair, Carlos Mateu, Catalina Baselli, Charlie Pastelle, Edgar Moza, Giancarlo Vargas, Gilly Lugo, Ingrid Mathurin, Irene Fernandez, Lisa Wilde, Sasha Lynn Roberts, Steven Luna, and Teri Gandy-Richardson. Their work spans mediums such as painting, sculpture, video, drawing and digital illustration.
This dynamic group exhibition showcases the Black and Latine experience through musical genres, such as hip-hop, jazz, Motown, reggaeton, rumba, salsa, reggae, and more. “An Afro-Latinx Mixtape” celebrates New York City as the unique melting pot that it is, and highlights local art movements like the Harlem Renaissance as well as hip-hop and graffiti culture.
The Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL) was founded in 1972 as a multidisciplinary arts center. With programming centered around visual, performing, and literary arts, “An Afro-Latinx Mixtape” is a great introduction to the institution’s unique mix of live and visual arts. JCAL is hosting an Artist Talk event this Friday, August 23rd, featuring many of the artists with work in the exhibition.
LAST CHANCE
3. Dog Days of Summer
Closes Friday August 23
As we inch closer and closer to Labor Day, you can extend your summer vibes by dropping by the Timothy Taylor gallery to check out their expansive “Dog Days of Summer” group show. The exhibition features more than 60 works, and includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs dating from 1915 to the present day, all celebrating “man’s best friend.”
The works on display, by such diverse artists as William Wegman, Grandma Moses, Alex Katz, Pablo Picasso, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gordon Parks, and Kiki Smith, highlight the many roles dogs play in the life of an artist: muse, metaphor, and companion. Throughout these pieces, artists explore the specific body language and intimacies that humans share with their canine companions. Other works reflect the role of dogs in history and fantasy, consumerism and psychology.
The show closes this Friday, August 23, and if you need any further encouragement to check it out, the gallery is open to real-life dogs as well. They are offering a water station and treats, so that even those non-human patrons of the arts will find something to like at “Dog Days of Summer.”
4. Vivian Maier: Unseen Work
On view at Fotografiska New York is the first major retrospective in the U.S. showcasing the work of the photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009). “Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” features approximately 230 works from the early 1950s to the late 1990s, including vintage and modern prints, color, black and white, Super 8 films, and audio recordings. The exhibit offers a complete vision of the artist’s rich archive, which serves as a fascinating testimony to post-war America and the facade of the American dream.
Though today considered one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, Maier’s work was unknown during her lifetime. Maier, who worked for 40 years as a nanny in New York and Chicago, took photos for herself alone and had a fierce desire for privacy; combined with a lack of stability in her career and finances, this prevented her from developing her own film. She placed undeveloped, unprinted work in storage with her other belongings in the early 2000s, when she moved between living in a small studio apartment and being unhoused. Due to unpaid rental fees, the negatives were auctioned off by the storage company in 2007, and a large portion were purchased by John Maloof. Maloof, a filmmaker and photographer himself, became the first person to bring Maier’s work into the public eye and began to promote it widely just after her passing in 2009.
“Unseen Work” sheds new light on Maier’s extensive body of work and focuses on the major themes that defined her creative output. Many of Maier’s images and portraits observe in detail the working-class neighborhoods in New York and Chicago that she explored from many angles. Maier’s work reveals how distant the American Dream is for most Americans, portraying through photography and film the everyday challenges they face that prevents them from economic mobility – debilitating poverty, long hours of labor, depression – some of which she experienced herself before receiving financial support later in life from the children she once nannied.
This is one of the last exhibitions at the current Fotografiska space on Park Avenue; the museum announced that it will be relocating but has yet to disclose a new location. “Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” and Fotografiska will close to the public on September 29.
5. Auriea Harvey: My Veins Are the Wires, My Body Is Your Keyboard
On view at the Museum of the Moving Image, this is the first major survey of the pioneering net-artist and sculptor Auriea Harvey. The exhibition features more than 40 of Harvey’s works, including her groundbreaking net-based interactives, video games, and augmented-reality sculptures from a career spanning nearly four decades.
Auriea Harvey has persistently reimagined and redefined the creative boundaries of networked technologies for more than three decades. She possesses a remarkable sensitivity to how the digital revolution of the 1990s spawned a societal shift in the way humans connect. Her trajectory—from creating artwork to be viewed solely in a web browser to challenging lines between virtual and tangible experiences through 3D printing and augmented reality—consistently reflects the paradoxical power of computers to enable intimacy while interfering with corporeal contact and occupation of shared space.
