Thursday, July 30, 6-8pm: Summer Invitational at First Street Gallery

This just in from long-time subscriber and contributor, Ken Carbone: I'm pleased to be exhibiting five new paintings at First Street Gallery's Summer Invitational. This show features a talented group of artists offering a spectrum of abstract and figurative work.

Close to Home, open to literal and metaphorical interpretations, can certainly be a ‘place’ near to ‘home’. But those two words, themselves, embrace not only a location, but the realm of the imagined, the deeply felt, the present, the past, or future, a foundation or a search, a source of inspiration or inquiry, or several at once. The artists, working in a variety of media, surfaces, materials and styles, offer insight into their current artistic practice and ongoing explorations in the works on view:

First Street Gallery, 547 West 27^th Street, New York, NY Info 

Last Chance, Friday, July 31: Marcel Duchamps Readymades at Gagosian

Sixty years after his readymades made their American debut at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, these iconic subversions have returned to their original launchpad at 980 Madison Avenue. Larry Gagosian has inaugurated his sleek, new ground-floor storefront space with a museum-quality presentation that feels less like a historical archive and more like a live-wire reunion of conceptual art's ultimate provocateurs. From the readymade Fountain to the rhythmic physics of the Bicycle Wheel, the work still carries a plangent energy that disrupts centuries of traditional thinking about the artist’s motives. It’s a beautifully sequenced adjunct to the comprehensive retrospective currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art [through August 22].

Gagosian, 980 Maison Avenue, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Marcel Duchamp at MoMA

Walking into this long-overdue North American retrospective—co-organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art—feels less like a stroll through art history and more like an intellectual jolt. While the chronological staging reminds us that the Dada provocateur actually began his journey with a serious command of painting, it’s the crowd gathered around Fountain and Bicycle Wheel that commands the gallery space. There is a kind of poetry to seeing his "readymades" standing firm in our highly commodified digital age. 

Duchamps, who was a committed chess master and intellectual, set the stage for what later became the conceptual art movement, with the notion that art wasn't about the single sacred object; it was about the artist’s choice. As you move from his gender-bending alter ego Rrose Sélavy to the insouciant portable miniature galleries of his Boîtes-en-valise, you realize how urgently his brand of irrational wartime humor speaks to our own fractured world. 

Through August 22 at Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53^rd Street, New York, NY Info

Saturday August 1, 2-6pm: Kingsland Wildflower Festival in Greenpoint

A rooftop field grown strictly for pollinators—a shifting tapestry of color and light amid the rigid geometry of our industrial spaces.—is the setting for the 10th Annual Kingsland Wildflowers Festival. This Saturday, the 25,000-square-foot native green meadow becomes the canvas for a celebration of community ecology and the arts. Organized by Noosphere Arts. the multi-level wildflower spaces, set against the Manhattan skyline, will host performances, with interactive dance, live music, and circus aerialists aloft. 

Meet regional environmental advocates, browse animation shorts, check out painting exhibits at Last Frontier NYC, and purchase native plant species directly from the nursery to spruce up your own green space. Click for the full program of events. The organizers are still welcoming volunteers; check the instagram page for info

Kingsland Wildflower Festival, 520 Kingsland Avenue, Brooklyn NY Directions

Continuing: Ping Pong Play and Compete, Beach 67 Rockaway

Between Tides brings together six artists—Moko Fukuyama, Ilana Harris-Babou, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Carlos H. Matos, Amalia Pica, and the collective SUPERFLEX—to rethink ping-pong tables as playable sculptures. These works invite beachgoers to approach the game in unexpected ways, transforming a familiar activity into a space for experimentation and new connections. Responding to the diverse cultural and ecological landscape of Rockaway Beach, the artists draw from sculpture, myth, and public engagement to expand the game’s symbolic and social dimensions.

Originally a parlor game for the elite in Victorian England, ping-pong later became a global pastime, a tool for diplomacy between the United States and China, and eventually an Olympic sport. The game’s simplicity allows it to transcend class, race, age, and gender, bringing people together across differences. Between Tides continues a tradition of artists who, since the 1970s, have embraced ping-pong as a platform for creative exchange, rule-breaking, and challenging expectations. Fostering shared encounters, this exhibition highlights how artists can enrich daily life in imaginative ways.

Ping-pong paddles and balls are available to borrow. Click for updates on Instagram Directions