Last Thursday the deep freeze lifted long enough for lots of New Yorkers, self included, to hit the first gallery openings of the year. Three shows that made my favorites list are:

Timothy Briner: Boonville, photographs on view through February 27 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art. 511 West 25th Street, Suite 506, New York, NY. 212 255 8158.

Diane Arbus: The Absence of Others and William Eggleston: 21^st Century, photographs on view through February 13 at Cheim & Reid, 547 West 25^th Street, New York, NY. 212.242.7727.

Scott Daniel Ellison: The Birthday Party, paintings on view through February 20th at ClampArt, 521-531 West 25^th Street, ground floor, New York, NY. 212.230.0020.

Above: Dan Cooney (center) hosts the opening of Timothy Briner's Boonville (left). The crowd at Cheim & Reid (right) was so dense it was hard to view the rarely seen photographs by Diane Arbus from the 1960s. Photos: Peggy Roalf.

This week brings even more, starting with a talk tonight at the New York Public Library's "flagship" branch on Fifth Avenue and ending Saturday in the East Village with an opening at Giant Robot New York.

Tonight, January 12, 5:30 pm, The New York Public Library Presents The Urban Sublime: Joel Meyerowitz and Lesley Martin in Conversation. Join master photographer Joel Meyerowitz and Lesley A. Martin, publisher of the Aperture Foundation's book-publishing program, for a talk and book signing on the subject of Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks (Aperture, October 2009). An exhibition of the same title continues at Museum of the City of New York through March 7, 2010. Tonight's event takes place at the New York Public Library, Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, 476 Fifth Avenue, Room 227, Fifth Avenue and 42^nd Street, New York, NY. 212.340.0871. Free and open to the public

Wednesday, January 13, 6-8 pm: Opening reception for Robert Voight: New Trees at Amador Gallery. Munich-based photographer Robert Voit has discovered a new kind of tree that is sprouting up all over the world: the cellular phone antenna tree, made from steel, fiberglass and plastic, molded to resemble a real tree, and clad with fake branches and leaves. Dubbing these weird sore thumbs "new trees," Voit has found all kinds of specimens - pine, palm, cypress, cactus - throughout the world, in deserts or in the middle of newly planted forests, in fields and parking lots, next to highways or in housing developments. Voit traveled throughout the U.S., South Africa and Europe to compile this project, a sort of postindustrial arboretum that is at once fun and alarming to peruse. Read more in The Daily Beast. Amador Gallery, The Fuller Building, 41 East 57^th Street, 6^th Floor, New York, NY. 212.759.6740,

Last chance, Wednesday, January 13: Kandinsky at the Guggenheim Museum. This retrospective of the Russian avant-gardist Wassily Kandinsky offers a comprehensive chronological survey of Kandinsky's work drawn from the Guggeheim, Pompidou and Lenbachaus collections. According to The New York Times, the exhibition has already beaten the museum's attendance records; in fact, during the frigid week between Christmas and New Year's, the museum counted 45,150 visitors. Read Roberta Smith's review in the Times.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue at 89^th Street, New York, NY. 212.423.3618.

Thursday, January 14, 6-8 pm: Opening reception for Alex Prager at Yancey Richardson Gallery. Through her constructed narratives and dramatic portraits, Prager explores a range of female types from vulnerable to powerful, from tragic to tender and from coolly detached to literally playing with fire. As described by L.A. Times writer Jessica Gelt, "Alex Prager's is a vision of womanhood on the edge: On the edge of beauty, of breakdown, of lust, of listlessness." Read Gelt's review in the Times. M+B Gallery will present Prager's Weekend starting January 30^th. Catalogues of both exhibitions are available at the galleries. Yancey Richardson Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY. 646.230.9610.

Thursday, January 14, 6-8 pm: Opening reception for Michael Kenna | Venezia at Robert Mann Gallery. A magical city of dreams, Venice has captured the imagination of artists for hundreds of years. From Vivaldi to Canaletto, Shakespeare to Calvino, this almost mythical city has inspired some of Western cultures greatest works of art. With the photographs in the exhibition Venezia, Kenna adds his own distinctive interpretation of this great city. The exhibition coincides with the publication of Michael Kenna: Venezia, available March 2010 from Nazraeli Press.
Robert Mann Gallery, 210 Eleventh Avene, New York, NY. 212.989.7600.

Thursday, January 14, 6-8 pm: Opening reception for Dan Perjovschi, Postcards from the World. The artist, known for his pungently political commentary in the form of wall drawings in museums, most recently at MoMA, is showing works on paper - the first exhibition of this kind in more than 10 years. In over 500 postcard-size drawings that are simultaneously humorous and profound, the Romanian artist sketches his observations from travels in the U.S. and around the world.
Lombard-Freid Projects, 531 West 26^th Street, New York, NY. 212.967.8040.

Thursday, January 14, 6-8 pm: Opening reception for The Rise and Fall of Excess Culture at Stefan Stux Gallery. The commodification of art once again becomes the subject of a group show that brings together disparate art practices by artists in different media who thematize the short-circuiting flow of capital. The show aims to not only chart the rise and fall of excess culture but to address the modes of production and consumption that creates the flow of booms and busts in the art markets.
Stefan Stux Gallery, 530 West 25^th Street, New York, NY. 212.352.1600.

Thursday, January 14, 6-8 pm: Opening reception for Hypnagogia | New Work by Kelsey Bennett. Bennet's narrative set pieces, influenced by the subversive formality of Cindy Sherman's Film Stills ad William Eggleston's documents of decadence, frame issues of identity, gender and sexuality with a strong sense of color and an eye for the gestural. Archetypes of the everyday, Bennett's subjects seem to hover in a world poised somewhere between reality and fantasy.
Christopher Henry Gallery, 127 Elizabeth Street at Broome, New York, NY. 212.244.6004

Friday, January 15, 6-8pm: Opening reception for The New Old | Yorgo Alexopoulos, Stephen Gill, Burton Machen. This group show aims to undermine common perceptions about the reliability of photographic images by demonstrating that, even as time capsules, they belong to the present as well as the past. The three photographers presented here each confront the power of agnostic forces external to the image to reshape and remake the work - and the medium itself.
Invisible Exports, 14A Orchard Street, New York, NY. 212.226.5447.

Friday, January 15, 6-8pm: Book signing for Long Live the Large Family by Carl Johan De Geer. A new publication from Dashwood Books, taken from the original grid composites of Carl Johan De Geer's rare 1980 book Med Kameran Som Trost (The Camera as Consolation), captures the spirit of the Bohemian scene in Stockholm in the 1970s.
Dashwood Books, 33 Bond Street between Bowery and Lafayette, New York, NY. 212.387.8520.

Friday, January 15, 6-9 pm: Book Arts Lounge | Paper Bonanza! An open studio workshop where author/artist Esther K Smith of Purgatory Pie Press and illustrator Liz Zanis will explore some fun (and practical) book arts techniques in this hands-on extravaganza. Loungers will make snake-book guest books, recycled paper snack holders, pop-up maps, and other exciting paper toys featured in Esther's new book The Paper Bride. Suggested contribution: $10/$5 members.
The Center for Book Arts, 28 West 27^th Street, 3^rd floor, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, New York, NY. 212.841.0295.

Saturday, January 16, 6:30-10:00 pm: Opening reception for Playful Extremities | New Work by Louise Chen, Hellen Jo, Sara Antoinette Martin, Tran Nguyen, and Sylvia Park. From Brooklyn to NoCal to Savannah, these artists plum the depths and scale the heights of darkness, melancholy, beauty, and haunting landscapes of the mind and the world of underground comix. Giant Robot New York. 437 East 9^th Street, New York, NY. 212.674.GRNY.

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