This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Sports, Space and Sandwiches

Two of the contemporary art world’s least favorite things are very likely sports and children’s museums. However, the Children’s Museum of the Arts’ new exhibition Game On! could change this unfair bias by bringing together well-respected names like Michelle Grabner and Hank Willis Thomas to explore America’s rabid love for sports, specifically addressing, according to the press release, issues like “identity, power, heroism, nostalgia, popular culture and gender.”
Artists: Louisa Armbrust, Zoe Buckman, Dario Escobar, Michelle Grabner, Norm Paris, David Rathman, Christin Rose, Jean Shin, and Hank Willis Thomas

For the past week, Participant Inc. has been holding video-taped open rehearsals and performances for Itziar Barrio’s The Perils of Obedience. The artist’s expansive, years-long project exploring the seductions of power combines a variety of unexpected sources, ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire to the actors’ own autobiographies to even an account of the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. On Wednesday, Participant Inc. will open the set of these performances as a site-specific installation, transforming the remnants of the performances, including film equipment and a mass-produced IKEA folding chair, into ephemeral sculptures.

This summer, the American Dance Institute will premiere at the Kitchen five new works by leading choreographers like Yvonne Rainer, Brian Brooks, Jane Comfort, and more. Thursday’s premiere of Rainer’s “Concept of Dust” sees the now 81 year old dancer continue to grapple with the personal theme of aging. When the work was first mounted at MoMA last year, it was a collage of materials that included Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy”, early-1940s entries from a Nazi officer’s diary, and Rainer crawling on all fours while being ridden by another dancer. No word on how the Kitchen presentation will alter the aforementioned materials for this ongoing work-in-progress, but when the opportunity to see a dance legend in action presents itself, you should take it.

While introducing her recent series of abstract paintings, Rosalind Nashashibi’s solo exhibition Two Tribes is perhaps most notable for hosting the US premiere of her new film Electrical Gaza, which was created right before the 2014 Operation Protective Edge bombing. Combining live-action with animation, Nashashibi’s film juxtaposes imagery of balmy Mediterranean landscapes with sudden chaotic shots of male bodies and cars, creating an expansive portrait of this politically-fraught and highly-charged region.

From student loans to credit cards, debt is all-too-familiar for most Americans. In response to our communal bad romance with debt, Flux Factory is launching three weeks of Debt Positive, an evolving exhibition with performances and workshops curated by Caitlin Foley and Misha Rabinovich. The group show will “re-envision debt, sublimate it, and consider possibilities for eliminating its wasteful implementations,” and its opening event includes Cayla Lockwood’s Free*Sandwiches, a participatory performance that we hope will feed hungry art viewers as advertised.

Artists: Tori Abernathy,  Sarah Beck, Paolo Cirio, Eliott Eds, Jehanne-Marie Gavarini, Thomas Gokey, Lisa Hirmer, Cayla Lockwood, PEEP – Paul Esposito and Evan Paschke, Sarah Petersen, Brittany M. Powell, Nathaniel Sullivan,Cassie Thornton, Ellen Wetmore, Moira Williams with Niki Athanasiadou, Michael Asbill, and Lichen Lovers.

Following last year’s Life After Death and Elsewhere at apexart, which highlighted artwork by men on death row at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, activist and artist Fury Young organizes a group show of artwork created by prisoners from all-across the country. Titled in reference to an album Young produced featuring songs written and recorded by current and former prisoners, Die Jim Crow explores the place of art-making as a means of self-expression within these institutions. Ranging from a hankerchief to a painting on canvas, the displayed artworks also reveal the seemingly random restrictions on materials in prisons.

In honor of Pride Month, this month’s First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum will focus on celebrating the queer community and highlighting its history of activism as seen in their current exhibition Agitprop!. In conjunction with the display of their Play Smart safer sex trading kits in Agitprop!, Visual AIDS will hold a conversation between six multigenerational women AIDS activists including artist and ACT-UP member Joy Episalla, Dyke Action Machine’s Sue Schaffner and Carrie Moyer, ballroom phenoms Kia Labeija and Egyptt Labeija and Jessica Whitbread, organizer of the community-building, boundary-breaking underwear dance party No Pants No Problem. Moderated by artist LJ Roberts, Women, Art, AIDS and Activism aims to emphasize a still underrecognized and underrepresented voice in HIV/AIDS activism.

Combining bizarre materials including a rocking horse, a plunger and a darkroom photo enlarged into whimsical assemblages, Hungarian artist András Böröcz’s will somehow transform these sculptural objects into theatrical props during his afternoon performance Leitz & Fuchs Escape Through the Chimney at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, held in conjunction with his solo exhibition Profound Objects. Rocking on his sculpture Charger, Böröcz’s performance will lampoon the creative studio process, as well as our endless material consumption.

New AFC contributor Emily Colucci was initially attracted to Sardine’s exhibition Space Oddity just for it’s David Bowie name-checking title, since she (as well as the rest of the AFC staff) are still mourning the loss of our preeminent Starman. However, curated by Matthew Mahler, this group show looks like it would make Ziggy Stardust proud, bringing together a multidisciplinary trio of artists to investigate and challenge the concept of space.

Artists: Christopher Dunlap, MaryKate Maher and Alina Tenser

Can artists inspire a push to get the Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A.) through Congress? Well, multimedia artist Natalie White seems to think so. “I am an artist — it is my duty to help stop centuries of discrimination against women. Even if it’s not convenient or easy, it must be done,” she says in the event’s listing. Not only launching her political solo exhibition Natalie White for Equal Rights at WhiteBox, White will also embark on a related two-week march from New York to Washington D.C. to drum up awareness and support for the E.R.A.