7 Can’t Miss Art Exhibits in NYC This Month

By  Barbara Calderón

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Welcome to Remezcla’s guide to the can’t miss Latino art openings and events in your city. Mingle with art admirers, collectors and casual passersby to check out these new works. And don’t forget to grab a free glass of wine…or three.

Beatriz Santiago-Muñoz: Song, Strategy, Sign

Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago-Muñoz is premiering her film That which identifies them like the eye of the Cyclops (2016,) a three channel video that shows the worlds of Caribbean women and envisions a post-patriarchal society. Her show, which will open this Wednesday April 20th, will also include a set of masks and a silent 16mm film Black Beach/Horse/Camp/The Dead/Forces (2016.) The film follows the lives of different people from Vieques, Puerto Rico, land used as a bombing-site and occupied by the U.S. Navy until 2003. Santiago-Muñoz will be giving a talk about her work on feminist utopias this Thursday, April 21st along with psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici.

New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002

Narrative/Collaborative

Closing this week April 23rd, is a group show at Galerie Lelong that involves Brazilian artists Helio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida with Cosmococa 1973/2003. The series of photographs show portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Luis Buñuel and other pop culture icons playfully overlaid with cocaine powder lines. The photographs were taken at an installation that was originally exhibited in 1973 in a multisensorial space with slide projections, amplified sounds, balloons, and the live cocaine portraits. Too bad Lelong couldn’t recreate the original 1973 show.

Galerie Lelong
528 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001

Time & Tide: Amanda Valdez & Caris Reid

Huge paintings of women with symbolic moons and cats atop their heads drew me into Denny gallery space last week while walking through the LES. The show I saw is the first iteration of a two-person exhibit by Amanda Valdez and Caris Reid. Their works are based on research about ancient lunar worship and rituals and all things related to moon cycles. The first phase of the show was the opening on April 7th that corresponded to April’s new moon. The second phase will be this Saturday April 23rd where they will rehang new works in honor of the full moon, a time for completion and destruction, Reid says. The exhibition will close on May 15.

Denny Gallery
261 Broome St.
New York, NY

Adriana Varejão : Kindred Spirits

Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão is trying to make a point with these new works: contemporary and minimalist artists of the Western world owe a lot to the visual cultures of Native Americans. In one self-portrait, her face is painted with Native American tribal markings. In the next, her face is splayed with a yellow square, something more similar to the iconography of contemporary and minimalist paintings. Then, the influences get blurry. The internationally-praised artist who will be exhibiting at the Summer 2016 Olympics uses her practice to talk about colonialism, racial identity, mestizaje, and cultural exchange. You can hear her speak about her research and the complexities of her artwork with the curator Pedro Alonzo this Friday, April 22nd at 5pm.

Lehmann Maupin
201 Chrystie St
New York, NY

Argentinian artist Lucia Fainzilber sees women as flowers of all sorts, with different structures, scents and ultimately, obsessions. She uses a type of fashion photography to express the uniqueness of her vision of a female world. The show is up until May 21st.

Praxis
541 West 25th Street
New York, NY

Disguise: Masks and Global African Art

Masks in traditional museum shows are often seen as the crux of what museums do wrong when trying to educate their audiences about the rituals of indigenous communities. Masks in all cultures were originally meant to be worn and used in performance. So when museums put them under a glass case or tacked onto a wall, it deactivates them and turns them into exoticized objects. With this show, the Brooklyn Museum aims to recontextualize African masks by pairing them with work from contemporary artists, in order to provoke more interesting conversations about the hidden and often transformative powers of the mask. 25 contemporary artists are in the show, including Puerto Rican artist Alejandro Guzman whose performances with wild masquerade sculptures made from fur, plants, and metals are not to be missed.

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York 11238

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