Cole Escola reinvents theater with OH, MARY!, Thomas Trosch makes the case for painting at Fredericks & Freiser, and we’re absolutely living for all the good art shows, book launches, and Stud Country’s queer two-step dance nights happening this week. Introducing your guide to the week. Share it with your friends, why don’t you!
This week’s Most Likely to Succeed events:
🆓 = costs $0, 🎨 = art, 🎼 = music, 🎬 = film, 📚= books, 🌳 = nature, 🎭 = performance, 🧠 = extra smart people, 🍸 = drinks available, 🦩 = party/friendly vibe
🔑 Click the venue link under each listing for full event details.
Monday, January 22
Reading Group: The Short Stories of James Baldwin kicks off
We shouted out The Center for Fiction in Back 2 School, our special tiny report from the week of January 8, on the best places to take classes to become a smarter, better version of yourself. Today kicks off one of the truly great courses: reading through James Baldwin’s short story collection, Going to Meet the Man, with certified smart person Regina A. Bernard. You still have time to sign up.
Center for Fiction, virtual
Mondays from 6-7:30p through March 11 📚 🧠
Book Talk with May Castleberry at the Center for Book Arts
May Castleberry has held professional roles as librarian/book publishing person at the Whitney and MoMA since the 1980’s. Tonight, she’ll present a small selection of the many artist’s book projects she produced at the Whitney and MoMA over the past 40 years.
Center for Book Arts, NOMAD
Mon from 6:30-8p 📚 🎨
Stud Country presents a night of 2-stepping
Stud Country is bringing their queer line-dancing and two-stepping party to two events in New York this week. The first is a two-step-focused dance night at the Georgia Room. If you’ve never two-stepped before, fear not: all experience levels are welcome. If you can keep rhythm, even sort of, then you can hang. Wear slippery-soled stompin’ boots, baby.
Georgia Room, Rose Hill
Mon from 8-11p 🦩🍸
Singers’ Monday Movies presents Funny Face
Did you know that Singers was actually discovered by the New York Times? They continue their Monday Movies series with Funny Face, proving once again that Singers will always give the gays and the girls exactly what they want.
Singers, Bed Stuy
Mon at 9p 🎬 🦩🍸
Tuesday, January 23
Three shows opening at Marlborough Gallery
Catch Michele Oka Doner’s The Book of Enchantment on the ground floor, Matthew Schreiber’s Possession; Experiments and Holography on the second floor, and Mickey Aloisio’s You Go Ahead—I’ll Watch on the third floor. Must be nice to have the space!
Marlborough Gallery, Chelsea
Tues from 10a-6p with an opening reception from 6-8p 🆓 🎨
Stud Country at Brooklyn Bowl
Here’s your second chance to hang with Stud Country, who honors the long tradition of queer cowboy culture by teaching you to line dance and two-step in the cutest cowboy drag you can find. Beginners, experts, and everyone in between is welcome. Studs Bailey and Sean teach line dance lessons from the stage at 8p, 10p, and midnight. Be prepared to make friends and dance with strangers.
Brooklyn Bowl, Williamsburg
Tues at 6p doors, 8p dancing 🦩🍸
Zachary Pace and Wayne Koestenbaum book talk at McNally Jackson
We’re mostly into this event for Wayne Koestenbaum—the poet, writer, and critic whose book, My 1980s, is one of our all time favorites. Tonight, he’ll talk with Zachary Pace about Pace’s new essay collection I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays About the Women Singers Who've Made Me Who I Am. It’ll be a gloriously gay event.
McNally Jackson, South Street Seaport
Tues at 6:30p 📚 🍸
Ai Weiwei talks Zodiac with Mira Jacob
In a different kind of book event: the legendary artist Ai Weiwei will talk about his new graphic memoir, Zodiac, in which he “explores the connection between artistic expression and intellectual freedom through the lens of the Chinese zodiac.” Tonight’s event is part of the Pen Out Loud series.
Town Hall, Midtown
Tues at 7p 📚
Book Launch: Erin Williams talks What’s Wrong? with Leslie Jamison
In another different kind of book event: Erin Williams discusses her new book, What's Wrong?: Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine, with Leslie Jamison (!) whose book The Empathy Exams from 2014 is still stuck in our heads—it has some of the best writing about pain we’ve ever encountered. The event is free, just RSVP here.
Greenlight Books, Fort Greene
Tues at 7:30p 🆓 📚
Wednesday, January 24
Transcribe-a-thon: Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg
Ready for some wholesome teamwork? Here’s the task: “Fisk University and the Schomburg Center have partnered to create a digital edition of the archival papers of Arturo Schomburg, the bibliophile who built two of the world’s most important collections on Black history—one in Harlem and another in Nashville. Join teams in each city to celebrate Schomburg’s 150th birthday by helping transcribe his newly digitized papers.” You must register by emailing RemakingSchomburg@gmail.com and BYO laptop.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem
Wed from 1:30-5:30p 🆓 🎨 🦩
Sylvie Fleury’s Just Jacuzzi opening reception at Company Gallery
The great Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury is going to do something she does very well: appropriate and recontextualize luxury consumer goods, and it sounds like it’ll be a wild show. Recommended reading: Company’s text on the exhibition. Fleury’s work is funny, sad, and clever (just like us, we whisper to ourselves in the mirror).
Company Gallery, Little Italy
Wed from 6-8p 🆓 🎨
Thomas Hirschhorn’s Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake it opening reception at Gladstone Gallery
Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s new show at Gladstone takes on the idea of how to do art in Times Like These:
”How to do art in times of war, destruction, violence, anger, hate, resentment? What kind of art should be done in moments of darkness and desperation? Can art be a tool for understanding history’s changes? Can a work of art draw alternative forms of understanding the world? How to continue working - as an artist - and in doing so, avoid falling into the traps of facts, journalism, and comments? I want to ask myself these questions and above all, I want to create, with my work, a surface of reflection. I don’t pretend to resolve or offer solutions, but I want my work Fake it, Fake it - till you Fake it. to contribute to this problematic, as a form cutting a break-through in the analog into the digital.” The show opens tonight and runs through March 2.
Gladstone Gallery, Chelsea
Wed from 6-8p 🆓 🎨
Artificial Intelligence: How AI Tools are Impacting the Arts panel discussion at Cooper Union
We’re a little bit like, come on can we please talk about trees and reality, but this panel discussion on AI is sure to be riveting because Friend of the List (and NYU professor and A++ artist) Carla Gannis is on the panel. Definitely go down a rabbit hole with her project, wwwunderkammer.
Cooper Union, East Village
Wed from 6:30-8p 🆓 🎨 🧠
Thursday, January 25
PARIS PRINTS 1967-1978 (Part 1) opening reception at Hauser & Wirth
Takesada Matsutani and Kate Van Houton, partners in life and art, remind us that love is real and that it would’ve been cool to start an art career in Paris in the 1960’s. This is the first of two shows at Hauser & Wirth featuring work “exploring the couple’s overlapping oeuvres and deep involvement with printmaking over the years through a selection of etchings, screenprints, photography, painting, sculpture and various ephemera.”
Hauser & Wirth on 18th St, Chelsea
Thurs from 6-8p 🆓 🎨
Thomas Trosch solo show opening reception at Fredericks & Freiser
We love a capital-p PAINTER, and Thomas Trosch is that kind of an angel. Fredericks & Freiser writers, “over the past 25 years Trosch has developed a cult following for his wildly energetic and curiously sensitive oil paintings. He typically paints society matrons in cluttered art-filled homes, galleries, and pool parties. {editor’s note: CHIC} Intuitively rendered and lavishly painted, his eccentric tableaus suggest multiple levels of reading. In this current body of work, Trosch pairs his wealthy women alongside the male presence of the bare–chested artist. High society and bohemia come together in brilliant passages of painterly excess.” We’re dying to see this show—see you at the opening IRL
Fredericks & Freiser, Chelsea
Thurs from 6-8p 🆓 🎨
Langdon Graves’ Time is A Fire opening reception at Dinner Gallery
Dinner Gallery is dedicated to supporting and exhibiting emerging artists, which makes all their shows extra exciting. Langdon Graves’ sculptures are perfect, delicate nuggets of weirdness and humor, so we’re excited to see this show of new prints and sculpture.
Dinner Gallery, Chelsea
Thurs from 6-8p 🆓 🎨
Five Stories for Philip Guston book release at Karma Bookstore
Printed Matter just published Five Stories for Philip Guston, a short story collection in which “five writers have created fictions in conversation with Guston and his painting.” At tonight’s event at Karma Bookstore on 3rd St, contributing writers Thessaly La Force, Audrey Wollen, and Christopher Alessandrini will present short readings.
Karma Bookstore, East Village
Thurs from 6-8p 🆓 🎨 📚
Friday, January 26
Cole Escola’s OH, MARY! opens at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
Cole Escola is one of the greatest alt-comedy weirdos of our time, and now he’s an alt-comedy weirdo with a play. OH, MARY! is “a dark comedy starring Cole Escola as a miserable, suffocated Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Unrequited yearning, alcoholism and suppressed desires abound in this one act play that finally examines the forgotten life and dreams of Mrs. Lincoln through the lens of an idiot (Cole Escola).”
The Lucille Lortel Theatre, Greenwich Village
Fri at 7:30p 🎭 through March 24
Friday’s best art shows opening today
Theaster Gates’ Hold Me, Hold Me, Hold Me solo show opens at White Cube New York, Upper East Side. 10a-6p 🆓 🎨
Grace Carney’s girlgirlgirl show opens at PPOW, Tribeca. 11a-6p 🆓 🎨
Seen Together: Acquisitions in Photography opens at The Morgan, Midtown. 10:30a-5p 🎨
Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur Genius Raven Chacon presents A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak at the Swiss Institute, East Village. 2-8p 🆓 🎨
Saturday, January 27
Last day to see Carol Bove’s Hardware Romance at Gagosian
This is Carol Bove’s first show with Gagosian after decamping from David Zwirner Gallery—that news, like the piece in this exhibition, is big. The show is a perfect “white cube”-style display of art: the space is filled with just the one 2021 sculpture (entitled Hardware Romance), which is “lit and visible around the clock from the street on Park Avenue for the duration of the exhibition.”
Gagosian Park & 75th, Upper East Side
Sat from 10a-6p 🆓 🎨
Last day to see Ad Reinhardt at David Zwirner
A few blocks south, David Zwirner is moving on without Bove just fine. Today is your last chance to catch this incredible show of paintings from Ad Reinhardt, produced in the 1940’s. Reinhardt was, of course, one of the very cool New York Abstract Expressionist Painters who “pursued and achieved a degree of directness in his exploration of color, line, and form that would not be matched by his fellow American abstractionists until the end of [the 1940s].” We love when galleries serve up museum-worthy shows for free.
David Zwirner on 69th, Upper East Side
Sat from 10a-6p 🆓 🎨
Public Tour of Delcy Morelos’ El abrazo at Dia Chelsea
Have you seen Delcy Morelos’ big, giant mound of earth, floating, impossibly, a foot above the ground at Dia Chelsea? It’s a remarkable viewing experience. Also, you’re encouraged to touch the piece (gently), which is all we ever want to do at an art show. We have a lot of questions about how this piece was made and installed, and this public tour is a good opportunity to get some answers.
Dia Chelsea, Chelsea
Sat at 12:30p 🆓 🎨
Sunday, January 28
Goodbye to all that at the Whitney
Today is the last day to see 2023’s banger shows, Henry Taylor: B Side and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith.
The Whitney, Meatpacking District
Sun from 10:30a-5p 🎨
Sunday service with Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir
Last week, we talked about Reverend Billy, the Stop Shopping Choir, and Earthchxrch in our special report on Theatrical Church. Reminder that you can participate in this deeply important project every Sunday at 5p. Can’t make it IRL? Listen to recordings of the Sunday services at Earth Riot Radio here.
These people are building “The Post-Religious Church of the Fabulous Unknown,” which is just a chef’s smooch of a concept.
EARTHCHXRCH, East Village
Sun at 5p 🆓 🦩🎨 🎼
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