Thursday, November 16, 6-8 pm; Barbara Nessim | Drawings at Derek Eller

Balancing Act: Drawings 1969-1974 brings together a collection of portrait drawings by pioneering artist Barbara Nessim. These depictions of enigmatic female archetypes reflected the zeitgeist of a pivotal moment in women’s history by an artist who broke through the barriers in a male-dominated field and went on to become a successful freelance illustrator. 

Her drawings, elegantly rendered and often metaphorical in nature, quickly stood out. Early assignments at adult magazines like Gent, Nugget, and Escapade permitted Nessim to make her work with minimal constraints. As her visual vocabulary expanded, Nessim’s conceptual illustrations were sought out by numerous publications and her example brough more women artists and editors into the field. Ms. Magazine, launched in 1971 by Nessim’s friend Gloria Steinem, was one such outlet. Nessim explains, “Many of the subjects that were being addressed in magazines, including those dealing with the condition of women and women’s lives in general, seem to harmonize with my style and subject matter.”

When the Equal Rights Amendment was up for ratification by Congress in 1982, Nessim was one of several women illustrators commissioned by TIME. As she began working on her submission, the ERA failed to pass. Her cover illustration pictured the head of a woman, the top half black and the bottom half white, with her eyes closed and head bowed, bifurcated by a staircase. A smaller full figure of a woman was placed at the bottom of the staircase looking up, determined to rise again.

Nessim was one of the first professional artists to master the computer as a creative tool, by way of a video residency at TIME, Inc. in the early 1980s. Now, the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) is to acquire three of her early digital artworks for their permanent collection and will be exhibited in Retrospective of Female Digital Art Pioneers in December 2024. 

Derek Eller Gallery, 300 Broome Street New York, NY  Info

Wednesday, November 15, 6:30pm: Listening Party | Return to the Source/1968 at the James

Join artist william cordova and his immersive playlist 1968, who along with scholar/educator David Austin invite visitors to communally listen to selected songs from 1968 and beyond. Moving between short clips of songs and complete tracks, cordova and Austin will draw from their own musical interests to talk about their ideas on the sonic dimensions of political struggle. 

Return to the Source attempts to dislodge the pivotal year of 1968 as one sedimented in history by offering new modes of interpretations vis-à-vis the archive. 
Left: Miriam Makeba, Burnley “Rocky” Jones, C.L.R. James, and Stokeley Carmichael, Montreal, 1968
The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, NewYork, NY Register

Wednesday, November 15, 7pm: Inwood Sacred Sites Roundtable

In 2020, the Bowery Residents’ Committee learned that the Inwood lot on which they planned to build a shelter for those experiencing homelessness had been a burial ground for enslaved Africans and a Lenape ceremonial site. The Inwood Sacred Sites project emerged from “a need to acknowledge and honor the history of the land as a site of colonial violence,” according to the project group. The Sacred Sites project is dedicated to creating a space to honor and make visible the lives of those who were lost. 

Tonight’s program includes presentations by Mark Gardner of Jaklitsch/Gardner, Elizabeth Kennedy of EKLA, and Peggy King Jorde, activist and cultural projects consultant, with a recorded presentation by Joe Baker of the Lenape Center. Moderated by Quilian Riano, dean of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture.

Higgins Hall Auditorium, Pratt School of Architecture, 61 St James Place,  Brooklyn, NY Info Registrationrequired

Thursday, November 16, 6-8pm: Artist Talk, Marco Lando | The Trip at Veridian

The exhibition  presents a series of four black-and-white videos (all created in 2023), wherein stark and solemn skyscrapers float through cosmic space. These architectural paeans to a lost civilization slowly rise, tilt, and move with no apparent purpose. Unmoored by gravity and function, they are sci-fi ruins from a defunct planet set adrift in a cold, godless universe. The soundtrack accompanying these videos reflects the ghostly image quality with its merging of the mechanical and organic.. Rather than convey ideas of a harmonious, efficient technology, Lando’s celestial music is marked by imperfection and uncertainty. 

Viridian Gallery, 548 West 28^th Street, New York, NY Info

Saturday, November 18, 12-8pm: Open Huse at MoMA PS1

Celebrate the opening of three new exhibitions: And ever an Edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022-23, Leslie Martinez: The Fault of Formation, and Teen Art Salon: A Protospective, with a full day of programming at the museum, all free and open to the public. Enjoy conversations with artists, curators, and writers, along with art activities, film screenings, and more.

Join Rirkrit Tiravanija at 1:00 for the launch of his new book, A LOT OF PEOPLE. And at 3, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2022–23 Artists in Residence Jeffrey Meris, Devin N. Morris, and Charisse Pearlina Weston speak about their time in the program. More

MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY

Monday, November 20: Look Again | European Paintings at The Met

The reopened galleries at the top of the Great Hall staircase is the culmination of a five-year project to replace the skylights. Presenting the Museum's collection of European Paintings from 1300 to 1800, these 45 galleries offer more than 700 works of art from the Museum’s holdings together with recently acquired paintings and prestigious loans, as well as select sculptures and decorative art.

The chronologically arranged galleries features masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Caravaggio, and Poussin; the most extensive collection of 17th-century Dutch art in the western hemisphere; and the finest holdings of El Greco and Goya outside Spain—while also giving renewed attention to women artists, exploring Europe’s complex relationships with New Spain and the Viceroyalty of Peru, and looking more deeply into histories of class, gender, race, and religion.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Frank Stella | Indian Birds at Mnuchin

In October 1977, Frank Stella arrived in Ahmedabad, India, at the invitation of the prominent Sarabhai family, whose foundation regularly extended hospitality to visiting artists. Assisted by the Sarabhai’s team, Stella completed the preparatory drawings and maquettes that form the foundation of the Indian Bird series. To begin, he created two drawings, A and B, comprised of irregular curves. Then superimposing drawings A and B, Stella created a third design, which served as the blueprint for the maquettes, formed from flattened soda cans. The Indian Bird maquettes, displayed here as a complete set for the first time since their inaugural exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1979, together with six of Stella’s full-size Indian Birds pieces, provide a rare glimpse into Stella’s conceptual practice. Info

Mnuchin Gallery, 45 East 78 Street, New York, NY 

Continuing: Max Beckmann | The Formative Years at Neue Gallery

After the artist received recognition for history paintings and portraits with muted palettes, an impressionistic paint handling, and references to Old Masters such as Michelangelo and Peter Paul Rubens, the course of Beckmann’s life and art shifted at the outbreak of World War I. He joined the medical corps, and at first he was energized by the turmoil of war, writing “my art can gorge itself here.” But the action soon ended for him after he had a nervous breakdown in 1915. 

Over the next decade, he captured the doomed Weimar Republic with acidic cynicism, creating riotously colored canvases populated by a cast of characters enacting the chaos of postwar urban life, becoming one of the most admired practitioners of representational painting in Germany.

The exhibition, which covers this period when the artist’s style moved towards the more naturalistic style of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) that defined his later work, covers key topics: Portraiture and the Self-Portrait, Religious Paintings, Allegory, Still-Lifes, which shifted dramatically away from his painterly and romantic earlier work due to his experience as a casualty of World War I.

Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info