Many of NYC’s downtown galleries, which generally take an extended August break, are keeping their doors open this year. Following is a lineup of shows, installations, and events to keep in mind for the coming days and weeks.

Thursday, July 28, 6-8pm: Re-Mastering at Frosch & Co

What does it mean to create new work in our contemporary environment? New things proliferate, yet so many are forgotten. The spine breaks on a library book and the cover falls off, never to be returned. We throw out the shower curtains we bought for our last apartment. Unsent postcards collect dust under a stack of old photographs.  In our increasingly reticulated world, why do we feel so alienated from things of our own making? Above: Jeanne Verdoux, from the Mr. Bones series, 2013

Re-Master features artists who work with things on hand to intercede in the hegemonic discourse of newness, speed, and growth at all costs. We transform objects through cycles of use and abandonment, each time imbuing them with our memories, our labor, and our DNA. By repurposing materials and the histories they contain, the artists in Re-Master re-activate our connections to not just things, but to ourselves, our work, and the ecosystem of relations within which we exist. 

Frosch & Co, 34 East Broadway, New York, NY Info

Friday, July 29, 6:30 pm: Gregory Corbino | Murmurations at Battery Park City

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council winds down its annual River to River festival with  Corbino’s puppet poem, re-scheduled from the opening week. Responding to the impacts of climate change and plastic pollution on the ocean, giant puppets crafted of plastic trash removed from New York City waterways and beaches will transform Battery Park City into a seascape of androgenous oysters, stunning sturgeon and captivating cetaceans.

The performance is composed of two movements. The first movement begins in the grass lawn of Teardrop Park, where humans of all ages are invited to learn the puppetry art of plastic bottle fish murmuration. The second movement begins as the plastic bottle fish parade to Rockefeller Park where giant puppets inspired by the biodiversity of New York Harbor will join the murmuration in a cacophonous confluence of oceanic wonder and human impact. Info Free with RSVP

Closing July 29: Ella Walker | Theater of Virtues and Vices at Casey Kaplan

Eight large, unstretched canvases hang loose from wooden armatures, like backdrops on an imagined stage, anchored by Giotto’s 1305 allegorical fresco sequence at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy. As each painting describes Giotto’s personified scenes of virtue and vice, Walker positions herself at the fulcrum, refitting old narratives into contemporary plots of unfolding tragedy, comedy, and love. 

Casey Kaplan, 121 West 27^th Street, New York, NY Info

Closing July 29: Nicole Eisenman at Hauser & Wirth

Spanning two floors of the gallery’s building on West 22nd Street in Chelsea, the exhibition provides a window into the distinct and powerful visual language Eisenman has developed over the course of the past three decades. The exhibition features recent paintings and sculptures that speak to contemporary sociopolitical issues with openness and candid ambivalence.

Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY Info

Through August 5: The odds are good, the goods are odd at Lisson Gallery

The exhibition features artists Leilah Babirye, Kristi Cavataro, Jes Fan, Doreen Lynette Garner, Hugh Hayden, Elizabeth Jaeger, Hannah Levy, Eli Ping, Jessi Reaves, Devon Turnbull (OJAS), Kristin Walsh. United through the use of atypical materials, the eleven artists in the exhibition inhabit a field outside of the sculptural norm and resist a trend-driven system. They opt, instead, to confront formality. The artists share an interest in how the human body, its strength and its fragility, is challenged by innumerable contemporary forces — from disease and illness to a dislocation in a digital world. They employ laborious practices and through their respective methods, from collecting detritus during their travels to precise sharpening of their constructions, the presence of the artists’ hands on the work remains unmistakable. The exhibition aims to accentuate the atypical disciplines that inform the orientation of sculpture-making today. Above: Installation by Leilah Babirye

Lisson Gallery, 508 West 24^th Street, New York, NY Info

Through August 21: Untitled | Hands at Carriage Trade

hand, hand me down, hand compass, hand fracture, hand deformity, hand pay, hand scroll, hand plane, hand over fist, hand injury,  hand springs, hand boiler, hand cannons, hand feel, hand mould, hand percussion, hand stencil, hand specimen, hand loom, hand and shears, hand lotion, lone hand, hand crank, poker hand, hand eczema, hand calculator, hand bells, hand waving, hand cannoneer, hand sewing, hand picking, throwing hand, hand to hand, hand fishing, hand to mouth, hand culverin, hand me down, hand compass, hand fracture, hand deformity, hand pay, hand scroll, hand plane, hand cut, hand over fist, hand acupuncture, hand, foot and mouth, hand injury, hand cooler, hand bailer, hand flapping, in safe hands, hand shake, hand turkey, a show of hands.
Carriage Trade, 277. Grand Street, New York, NY Info

Through September 10: Matthew Wong | The New World: Paintings from Los Angeles at Cheim & Read

The exhibition presents a suite of works that charted the artist’s exploration of ink wash on rice paper, materials traditional to Chinese landscape painting, some of which he began while living in Hong Kong and working in Zhongshan, China. These pieces differ markedly from those widely exhibited during the artist’s lifetime. Instead of the blues which have become virtually synonymous with the artist in the public imagination, the palette and textures of these paintings reflect the super-heated atmosphere of Los Angeles, where a teeming metropolis collides with the harsh natural landscape: the Pacific ocean, mountains, and desert.   

Startling in their simplicity, with mountains, sea, and sky distilled to their essence, some compositions are clustered with information, with nude figures walking through woodland settings, while others are spare, even stark, as in Infinity, where a lone grisaille figure wanders along an empty highway receding to the horizon. The human body is similarly abstracted, such as the columnar torso of Boyhood, or the amoeba- like heads in The Desert. There are also striking views of interiors, redolent of the artist’s love of Henry Matisse and David Hockney, with windows opening to the outdoors or offering glimpses of private lives within.

Cheim & Read, 547 West 25^th Street, New York, NY Info

Through October 8: Tiona Nekkia McClodden | Mask / Conceal / Contain at David Zwirner

The Philadelphia-based artist presents new paintings, objects made of materials both organic and inorganic, and videos that together foreground her research into the limits of embodiment and exertion as well as her interest in gestures of concealment. McClodden’s expansive practice comprises film, installation, painting, and sculpture in addition to writing and curating. Encompassing the personal, the historical, and the mythic, her work considers the presence and absence of the black figure as well as the aesthetic strategies of illumination and opacity that subvert available modes of representation.

David Zwirner, 52 Walker Street, NewYork, NY Info