Crafting the Ballets Russes at The Morgan Library & Museum

The exhibition opens with the dramatic arrival of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes troupe in Paris in 1909 and goes on to trace its impact across the arts, highlighting the rise of women in leading creative roles. They include Bronislava Nijinska, who in 1921 became the Ballets Russes’ only female choreographer and whose groundbreaking choreography defined Les Noces, Bolero, and other ballets of the era; and Ida Rubinstein, whose riveting stage presence helped establish the Ballets Russes in its first seasons and who came to rival Diaghilev as a patron of music, commissioning Bolero in 1928. Above: Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962). Curtain design for Les Noces, 1915

At the core of the exhibition is the creative process that brought these ballets to life. Crafting the Ballets Russes: The Robert Owen Lehman Collection and the accompanying catalogue address the sketches, drafts, and working copies of the composers, choreographers, and designers, capturing the ways in which they imagined, conceived, and collaborated to kindle works of astonishing originality and ongoing influence. Above: Alexandre Benois (1870–1960). Set design for the “Butter Week Fair” for Petrouchka, scene 1, 1911

Save the date, Friday, July 19, 2024 6:00–7:00: Join Robinson McClellan, Assistant Curator of Music Manuscripts and Printed Music, for a dynamic and engaging lecture on the exhibition. Info

The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY Info 

July 1, 7pm: Abasement #70 at Artists Space

Abasement is a monthly music series featuring performances, a guest DJ, and a projectionist. Beginning in 2015 at Max Fish bar in New York's Lower East Side, the evening brings together artists and bands working in free improvisation, jazz, noise, minimalism, and experimental composition.

When Max Fish permanently closed due to Covid, one of the few experimental music venues in Manhattan temporarily ceased to exist. Artists Space is pleased to continue hosting Abasement. Flyer (left) by Joe Frivaldi 

Performances this week by S. Glass, Nate Wooley's Mutual Aid Music, Lea Bertucci / Ben Vida / Ric Royer, and Sailor Beware. DJ Rafael Sánchez. Visuals by Valeria Divinorum.

For more information about this event go here

Artists Space 11 Cortlandt Alley, New York, NY Info

Last Chance, July 12: Sonia Delaunay | Living Art at Bard

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) was one of the most influential French artists of the twentieth century. Her remarkably diverse and interconnected body of work focused on the primacy of color and a synthesis of the arts. Painter, artisan, and designer, she embraced modernity and harnessed the creative power of collaboration in the realms of fashion, textiles, interiors, books, mosaics, and tapestries. Living Art comprises more than 200 objects secured from major international lenders, reflecting Delaunay’s kaleidoscopic output through all periods of her career from the early Parisian avant-garde of the 1910s to the spirited 1970s. Exploring the materiality, making, and marketing of her work, the exhibition traces a lifetime of creative expression and presents an innovator who transcended conventional artistic boundaries and devotedly lived her art.

Bard Graduate Center, 38 West 86^th Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Linda Kamille Schmidt: Fiber Space At Garvey Simon 

 The exhibition features a selection of Schmidt’s recent semi-transparent fabric collages, ranging from installation scale, to intimate, window-sized works. Schmidt’s collages are a mélange of memory, culling together personal and universal experience, all the while challenging the distinction between craft and fine art. 

Schmidt’s hand is evident in the cut, placement, and suturing of each strip of her mesmerizing displays. The artist vacillates between precise machine and loose, wobbly hand-sewn stitches. Her subtle use of pins in the works act as focal points for the eye as it dances around the celebration of color and texture. This sense of touch evokes a closeness with the fabric, almost inviting contact. A hot frenzy of geometric forms, Schmidt’s fabric swatches abut and overlap to form a kaleidoscopic play with depth and recession.

Schmidt’s larger installation work also places her squarely in a tradition of subversive feminist art. At this scale, her collage method is evocative of quilting, a generational passion in her family. Like her predecessors, Schmidt’s use of immensity and hard geometric abstraction works to undermine the association of quaintness with craftwork. 

Garvey | Simon, 547 W 27 Street, Suite 209, New York, NY 10001

Continuing: Liz Collins | Lightning Wheel at Candice Madey

This new series of works in textile presents the artist’s use of recurring patterns and forms to explore a unique and evolving symbology. Abstractions verge on the fantastical, suggesting the effects of extraordinary natural phenomenon and a rapidly changing environment in the interior world of the artist.

Like Collins’s past work in textile, installation, drawing, and design, recent works employ a vibrant color spectrum and incorporate both queer feminist sensibilities and references to 20th century abstraction in painting and in fiber. Imagery reflects the artist’s interest in theosophist visual and spiritual traditions and investigate the idea that the occult movement is an esoteric predecessor– or a link to– the origins of modern abstraction. More

Candice Madey, 1 Rivington Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing

Frank Walter was a recorder seeking to capture the world around him at every turn. His wide- ranging body of work encompasses impressionistic, brightly-colored landscapes on cardboard; expressive linear portraits on paper; bold, abstract cosmological compositions; carved wooden sculptures; and pages upon pages of writing including poems, written narratives, genealogical trees, maps, and musical scores. As a rule, Walter worked small, obsessively filling materials that were available to hand like cardboard, paper, and even the backs of the Polaroids that he sold in the photo studio he operated for a number of years. Drawing was not necessarily Walter’s primary medium but it was his constant, and there is what one might call a “drawing impulse” at the core of his investigative drive.

Frank Walter (1926–2009) was a polymath with a keen intellect and thirst for knowledge. His body of work encompasses a variety of mediums, subject matter, and styles evident in the over 5,000 paintings, 1,000 drawings, 600 sculptures, 2,000 photographs, 468 hours of recordings, and a 50,000-page archive he created. The exhibition  provides insight into not only Walter’s artistic practice but also his relationship to issues of race and identity, the legacy of slavery, the colonial and postcolonial experience, and the history and politics of Antigua, Barbuda, and beyond.

The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York, NY Info