Friday, April 26, 6-8pm: Diedrick Brackens | blood compass at Shainman

In this show, which occupies the gallery's two locations on Friday and Saturday, the weavings by Diedrick Brackens map an imagined place — visualizing the internal mechanisms and symbols that animate his work while removing the anchor of direct narrative. The scenes depicted in each weaving exist out of time, suspended between a distant past and a world to come. The works in this series are set at dusk, twilight, and deep night — hours that become vehicles for ritual and interiority. The silhouetted inhabitants of this in-between realm are archetypes that Brackens once described as ciphers, or “needles through which I slip the threads of biography and myth, and pass through a mesh of history and context.”

The animals, natural elements, and man-made objects, that also inhabit these works accrue significance every time they are cast in this ever-evolving mythology. The characters in this series are placed in dialogue with lightning bolts, waning suns, and orbs of light — open-ended devices of orientation. In these distilled arrangements, footholds for straightforward interpretation dissolve — inviting viewers to parse the compositions and uncover meaning.  

Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20^th Street [Friday] and 46 Lafayette Street [Saturday], New York, NY Info

Friday, April 26, 7-10 pm: Riccardo Vecchio | 16 Pages, 75 Stories at Salotto NYC

In 2022, as a recipient of an NYC Artist Corp Grant, Vecchio created 31 Degrees (Fahrenheit), a public project that aim to bring attention to issues of climate and environmental injustice. He has now produced issue Number 75 of Salotto, in the form of a sextodecimo. This format is a 16-page magazine in which the folding and cutting of the sheets used by offset printing presses (100x70 cm) results in a publication of sixteen 17x24 cm pages in which not a single millimetre of paper is wasted.

The project title takes its name from a collaborative study that heat mapped several cities in North America. The study demonstrates how poor communities and communities of color are disproportionately negatively impacted by heat. And moreover, that climate inequality follows the same patterns of income inequality. The drawings, inspired by the work of Dürer and Altorfer, will be transformed into site specific murals to bring some arboreal beauty to neighborhoods where walls are more prevalent than trees.

Salotto NYC, 84 Withers Street, Brooklyn, NY Info

Saturday, April 27, 10:30am-6pm: Art and Legacy of the Harlem Renassance at The Met

This all day symposium features dynamic conversations, presentations, and performances by leading scholarsand artists to engage with themes found in the exhibitionThe Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. Discussions and events will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways Black artists portrayed modern everyday life in Harlem and beyond in the 1920s–40s. Above: Black Belt,” by Archibald J. Motley Jr.

The National Jazz Museum in Harlem House Band, led by Christopher McBride, kicks off the day with a performance at 10am, followed by the keynote address by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson. The day will include presentations and conversations on themes such as “Harlem as Nexus”; “Legacies of Harlem on My Mind”; “Visioning the Future: The Collections of Historically Black Colleges and Universities”; and “New Renaissance: Harlem Today.” There will be a reading by actor and playwright NSangou Njikam. For program and tickets, please go here

Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue New York, NY Info

Saturday, April 27, 1:30 pm: Under the Weight of Feathers, dance at FIAF

Four dancers from the collective Pyramid Company plunge into a dreamlike world where the motion of mime, hip-hop, physical theater, burlesque, and object manipulation melds and intertwines with their every movement. The sweet, funny, impertinent performance presents a succession of sketches of everyday life

Florence Gould Halla, FIAF, 22 East 60^th Street, New York, NY Tickets

Last chance—closing Wednesday, May 1: Hello Thank You Come In at Center for Book Arts

I am thrilled to be included in this 50^th anniversary members’ show, joining a stellar group of book artists that includes Rosaire Appel, Biruta Auna, Roni Gross, Barbara Mauriello, and Buzz Spector, to name a few. 

My piece, a 20- page unique book that makes quite a bit of noise as the pages are turned, was done with Sumi ink on fine newsprint. The covers are Sumi ink on double layers of Japanese rice paper, glued together and ironed. You can see a video of the book here, and I hope you can see the show before it closes

Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27^th Street, FL3, New York, NY Info