cityArts February 8, 2011 by CityArts NYC

FEB. 9-FEB. 22, 2011 Volume 3, Issue 3

IN THIS ISSUE: Courtesy of CHRISTINA RAY

East Side Migrations: UES galleries continue to drift; LES scene grows stronger The charm of the Carolina Chocolate Drops Young Concert Artists celebrate 50 years

InthisIssue 7 Dance JOEL LOBENTHAL gets a head start with Alexei Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream.

8 East Side Gallery Migrations Upper East Side galleries drift downtown, while the Lower East Side gallery scene continues to strengthen.

10 At the Galleries Reviews: Celia Gerard at Sears-Peyton Gallery; Butt Johnson at CRG Gallery; Jeppe Hein at 303 Gallery; John Clement at Causey Contemporary Gallery; Esteban Vicente at New York University Grey Art Gallery.

12 Classical Music JAY NORDLINGER on James Levine and the Met Orchestra, plus Joshua Rifkin at (Le) Poisson Rouge.

14 Jazz HOWARD MANDEL is charmed by the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

15 Film Director Aaron Katz on his mysterious new movie, Cold Weather.

16 Arts Agenda Galleries, Art Events, Museums, Classical Music, Opera, Theater, Out of Town.

Auction Fine Arts & Decorative Arts Estate Auction Saturday February 19th 2011, at 11 am

19 Paint the Town by Amanda Gordon

Previews

On the Cover: Casey Porn’s “JonBreenet Ramsey,” 2011 on view at Christina Ray Gallery, 30 Grand St., through March 13.

Featuring Fine Art and a Collection of Holly Hunt Furniture and Decorations

Thursday Feb. 17th and Friday Feb. 18th 10 am to 7 pm both days Special Preview 9:30 am to 11 am on Saturday Auction Day •••

EDITOR Jerry Portwood jportwood@manhattanmedia.com MANAGING EDITOR Adam Rathe arathe@ manhattanmedia.com

Next Auction:

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Christine Werthman ART DIRECTOR Jessica Balaschak SENIOR ART CRITIC Lance Esplund

Saturday March 19th at 11 am

Previews

SENIOR MUSIC CRITIC

Thursday Mar. 17th And Friday Mar. 18th 10 am to 7 pm both days Consignments Being Accepted

Jay Nordlinger

SENIOR DANCE CRITIC

Joel Lobenthal

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS:

Valerie Gladstone, John Goodrich, Amanda Gordon, Howard Mandel, Maureen Mullarkey, Mario Naves, Nicholas Wells

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Array of Furniture and Decorations

InBrief

Exhibitions on view

January 26–April 17

Cloisonné: Chinese Enamels from the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties

‘Purge’ of Darkness In 1992, in the barely post-communist countryside of Estonia, a tattered sex trafficking escapee appears in a widow’s front yard. The young Russian thinks she’s related to the old woman, but is afraid to reveal how. The harrowing play Purge, which runs Feb. 11–20 at La MaMa, unfurls this burgeoning suspense scene by scene, as the two women (Zara and Aliide) begin to realize how intertwined their stories are. In doing so, it spans 60 years of pre- and post-Soviet history through stark flashbacks and vignettes that link the personal to the political. “It’s about the themes of losing your voice, yearning for freedom and the exploitation of women,” says director Zishan Ugurlu, the founder of Actors Without Borders, which brought Purge to the U.S. The company, she says, aims to introduce playwrights well known to audiences in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, but not to those in America. Purge was translated by Eva Buchwald, from Sofi Oksanen’s Finnish Puhdistus, which premiered in 2007 at the Finnish National Theatre. It quickly became a hit, prompting Oksanen to pen a book by the same name. “The story is about Estonia’s recent past, as well as more universal questions,” said Oksanen, 34, who’s half-Estonian, half-Finnish. She scoped out La MaMa in 2009, meeting with Ugurlu, who resides above the theater. The play’s title alludes to a lesser-known chapter of Soviet history: deportation to Stalin’s gulags for Estonians thought

to have collaborated with the Germans during WWII. Its subject matter serves as a cautionary tale about the abuses of power, never treading lightly on the stories of Aliide (Jillian Lindig) and Zara (Larisa Polonsky)—both victims of sexual violence. The play opens with a rape scene, as Soviet soldiers objectify a young Aliide’s halfnaked body in Russian. “This play is extremely dark, but the real issues are dark,” says Ugurlu. “The woman’s body is a metaphor for occupied countries. Their bodies are constantly occupied by their husbands, or their ideologies.” When the play flashes back to Estonia, circa 1951, the young Aliide (Maren Bush) has married communist leader Martin (played by well-known Finnish actor Peter Franzén), a union she only sought for security. She then stands idly by as her sister and niece are deported to Siberian work camps. But she secretly safeguards her brother-in-law, her own unrequited love, under the floorboards of her cottage. When the play returns to 1992, Aliide and Zara embark on lengthy monologues, which become increasingly confessional as Zara stops hiding her ties to Aliide’s past. Until the cathartic finale, the play operates as a thriller, with each scene left unnervingly open-ended. Zara knows that her captors could arrive at any moment, and Aliide has yet to figure out the mysterious Zara. “I don’t think there’s any relief in this play,” says Ugurlu. “But I believe there are people who will come, and at the end have seven minutes of silence thinking about the issues.” [Rachel Stern]

Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. Admission: $7 general, $5 seniors and students. Admission is free Thursday after 5:00 pm. For information about tours for adult and school groups, call (212) 501-3013 or e-mail tours@bgc.bard.edu. To learn about the Bard Graduate Center and its upcoming exhibitions, visit bgc.bard.edu. Above: “Champion vase,” Qing dynasty. Cloisonné enamel on cast copper alloy; gilded bronze. Phoenix Art Museum, 1982.209 a,b. Below: Mask, attributed to sdiihldaa/Simeon Stilthda (c. 1799-1889), Haida. Wood, paint, leather, metal. Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, 16/376.

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JAN. 12-JAN. 25, 2011 Volume 3, Issue 1

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IN THIS ISSUE: The Met’s La traviata has JAY NORDLINGER seeing Decker. Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Kirsten Kay Thoen

Maren Bush and Peter Franzén in Purge.

Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late NineteenthCentury Northwest Coast

JOEL LOBENTHAL refutes Black Swan backstage behavior. Marina Poplavskaya starring in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of La Traviata.

LANCE ESPLUND praises Noguchi renovation & show.

www.cityarts.info | 212.268.8600 February 9, 2011 | City Arts

InBrief The Power of the Hall Curate is a popular term often bandied about these days. Clothing stores do it. So do bloggers, restaurants, flea markets and, or course, museums. This week, add new music ensemble eighth blackbird to the list. The group will curate the Park Avenue Amory’s new TuneIn music festival, which takes place Feb. 16–20 in the Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. “It’s like playing God,” eighth blackbird flautist Tim Munro says, referring to the group’s curating adventure. “You wave your magic wand and someone takes your irresponsible idea and runs with it.” The festival is a series of four concerts— three curated by eighth blackbird—and will also include several artist talks. Other groups performing at the festival include red fish blue fish, Argento Chamber Ensemble and Newspeak. Although this is the first time the Drill Hall has been used for new music, the enormous space has actually been used for musical performances since 1881, according to Rebecca Robertson, president and executive producer at the Park Avenue Armory. The Armory brought in acousticians to make the live, booming hall work for both live and amplified music. “We want to keep the richness of the space because we think that’s really special,” Robertson says. “So they’ve had a pretty light touch.” While curating, eighth blackbird has taken the space into consideration as well. “We were very cognizant of generating material that would be of a scope to match that ridiculously huge space,” Munro explains. “So we tried to think big.” And they did. For the final concert, the festival will present the New York premiere of John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit, which features over 70 percussionists. Two of the concerts, titled PowerFUL

eighth blackbird.

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art books and PowerLESS, explore a provocative statement made by Igor Stravinsky: “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” “This seemed a big enough festival to take on that kind of big idea,” says Munro. The PowerFUL concert features music exploring various political beliefs, including Frederic Rzewski’s “Coming Together,” John Cage’s “Credo in US,” Matt Marks’ “A Portrait of Glenn Beck” and Stefan Weisman’s “I Would Prefer Not To.” The second concert, PowerLESS, presents so-called “absolute” music, without outside political meaning. Works include Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” Bach’s “Chaconne,” Kurt Schwitters’ “UrSonate for solo speaker” and “in vain” by Georg Friedrich Haas. “I’m like a kid in a candy shop,” Munro says. “We got the best people in America to do the best music that exists—and then we get to play it.” [Corinne Ramey]

Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart By Stefan Kanfer, out now

The new trend in celebrity biographies seems to be a renewed focus on the films, rather than the life, of the celebrity being profiled. Peter J. Biskind’s Star ignored everything in Warren Beatty’s life until he began acting professionally; William J. Mann’s How to Be a Movie Star bypassed the pitfalls of recounting the life of Elizabeth Taylor by focusing on her career at a few strategic crossroads. Now, Stefan Kanfer examines why, exactly, the lisping, haggard, forty-something Bogart is still relevant to today’s audiences—even with his narrow range and a personal life that sometimes overshadowed his work.

Found in Translation English opera singer Mark Glanville’s most ambitious idea came to him in the middle of the night three years ago—to take Schubert’s song cycle, Die Winterreise, what he called “the greatest song cycle that’s ever been written,” and reinvent it in a Yiddish context. The result was A Yiddish Winterreise: Elegy for a Vanished World, the compelling story of a Holocaust survivor’s journey told through Yiddish song, which will make its New York debut at Symphony Space Feb. 16. “When I’m performing it I’m very clear in my head of the journey the man is going on,” says Glanville. “He leaves the Vilna Ghetto and sings about the burning of his home and as he’s walking away he’s reminiscing about it all.” Glanville and composer/pianist Alexander Knapp have toured all over

Mark Glanville. Europe and have won critical acclaim for the cycle, something Glanville attributes to “the fact that it has come from the heart.” Their U.S. tour will include a second song cycle, Di Sheyne Milnerin- A Yiddish Die Schone Mullerin, set to be performed in New York City Feb. 14 at the same venue. For Glanville, whose Berlin-born mother lost relatives in the Holocaust and whose London-born father “used to talk about the Holocaust almost every single day,” working on Winterreise was a kind of reconciliation in dealing with the events of the Shoah. Winterreise, Glanville says, “doesn’t pull punches about what happened in the Holocaust. It’s brutally clear… it’s pretty horrific. But in any situation, it’s very difficult to move on if you don’t forgive people.” That reconciliation came full circle when the German government offered to invest money towards the production of the Winterreise CD, and Georg Boomgaarden, the German ambassador in London, declared the cycle to be a “contribution to reconciliation and understanding, and to our shared future.” Glanville, a linguist who can read seven languages, grew up with only a smattering of Yiddish words, like shmendrik and tuchus, thrown into conversations. Yet once he began hearing and embracing Yiddish folk songs, he realized he had found his true calling. “It’s hard to define why it was,” he says. “I found my Jewishness through music and through humor—all of which you get in abundance in Yiddish culture and songs.” Glanville sifted through hundreds of Yiddish folk songs to arrive at the 22 chosen for the cycle, which also includes

Karlheinz Weinberger: Rebel Youth Edited by Martynka Wawrzyniak with Patrick Schedler and Bruce Hackney, out now

This is what happens to white Switzerland when black music is played by a white man and then radioed across the Atlantic to Europe: Confusion erupts. Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls spring up and form impromptu gangs, one-upping each other with Elvis portraits on their belt buckles, each larger than the last. But just as the craze swept across Switzerland with blinding fury, so did it end, and no one captured it quite as tenderly as Karlheinz Weinberger. Weinberger struggled most his life as a factory worker but saw and used his subject’s rebellion, confused as it might have been, as a “proxy” for his own, as Guy Trebay notes in his accompanying essay. A foreword by filmmaker John Waters adds to the kitsch value of the subject, but don’t be mistaken: This is seriously good work. one Hebrew song and a Schubert original, translated from German to Yiddish. Di Sheyne Milnerin is the story of unrequited love between two young people, and Glanville says, “It shows a different aspect of Yiddish culture and music [than Winterreise]. The two complement each other but are still very different.” Yet even with the obviously larger Jewish market in New York, Glanville is quick to point out that his goal is more broad, saying that to some extent, if his audience were exclusively Jewish, he’d feel like a failure. “It was never my idea just to keep this music in the ghetto,” said Glanville. “I’m trying to communicate this music that I think is fantastic but is not really known outside the Jewish world.” [Anne Lubin]

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ArtsNews

20th-century music for chamber orchestra and soloists

yale philharmonia feb 28

monday at 7:30 pm • tickets $15–25 zankel hall at carnegie hall carnegiecharge: 212 247-7800 • carnegiehall.org yale in new york • david shifrin, artistic director “Spacelander Bicycle,” designed by Benjamin G. Bowden. Part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Thinking Big exhibit.

» music.yale.edu

strauss bloch martin ginastera

Robert Blocker, Dean

music.yale.edu

City Arts | www.cityartsnyc.com

This month, the newly reopened Museum of The Moving Image is offering two-for-one admission, thanks to its position as a Culture Spot for NYC & Company. The museum currently features new exhibits like Behind the Screen, an interactive exploration of TV and film production… On Feb. 1, Lincoln Center announced the program for its Great Performers 2011-2012 series, which begins in October. Performances will include the New York debut of Britten Sinfonia conducted by Thomas Adès and a return of the London Symphony Orchestra led by Sir Colin Davis… The Stella Adler Studio of Acting was granted a $35,000 donation from The Hearst Foundations to expand its outreach program, which provides free actor training to underprivileged students in New York… On Feb. 15, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn will open the new, Rafael Vinoly-designed Salon94 Bowery… The Watermill Center has announced its spring 2011 artist residencies, each including a public performance. Highlights will include Carlos Murillo’s multimedia show about Harry Smith, which begins a two-week run Feb. 16, and David Levine’s contemporary Faustian opera, beginning April 25… Beginning Feb. 26, the NewYork Historical Society will take its exhibition Nature and the American Vision: Masterpieces of the Hudson River School on the road. The exhibit features 19th-century landscape paintings that portray themes of American nature, culture and history… On Feb. 28, the New York Philharmonic kicks off its national radio broadcasts, The New York Philharmonic This Week, on WQXR. Hosted by award-winning

actor Alec Baldwin, the two-hour radio programs bring free music to listeners through March 21. Concerts will also be available at nyphil.org… Also Feb. 28, the New York City Opera and Schomburg Center for Research in African American Culture wrap up Black History Month with a tribute to renowned opera singer Betty Allen. Moderated by WQXR’s Nimet Habachy, the program features video, sound clips, personal tributes from Allen’s family and live performances from Harlem School of the Arts students… The Armory Show, an international art fair devoted to 20thand 21st-century artwork, will run March 3–6 and feature over 200 modern and contemporary exhibitors, including DIE Galerie, Meredith Ward Fine Art and Eleven Rivington… Beginning Mar. 4, the Brooklyn Museum will present Thinking Big: Recent Design Acquisitions, a collection of 20th- and 21st-century objects from the museum’s decorative arts collection… Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art will be presented Mar. 14 with the ACA-USA’s second place award for Best Project in a Public Space. The award is for Antony Gromley’s Event Horizon, in which 31 life-size body forms of the artist fabricated in cast iron and fiberglass were installed around the Flatiron District… John Chatterton of the annual Midtown International Theatre Festival announced the hiring of several new staffers who were brought in to put greater emphasis on international and dance productions. The festival’s presentation of the best Off-Off-Broadway talent starts July 11… Have news or a tip? Email us at CityArts@ ManhattanMedia.com.

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BRANFORD MARSALIS

The Ballet of the Spectacle

and the

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC

Prepare for Ratmansky’s ‘The Bright Stream,’ and ‘Giselle’ restored By Joel Lobenthal allet’s past has been far to the forefront of late, its presence compellingly prescient of the excitement to come. This past month, American Ballet Theatre gave its company premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Ratmansky’s ballet reads as a spoof of Soviet entertainments set on the USSR’s collective farms. But in 1935—when Fyodor Lopukhov choreographed the original version of this ballet—it turned out to be a doomed success in the Soviet Union. The Kremlin had drawn a bead on the music of young Dmitri Shostakovich, whose score exemplified the mocking, rambunctious, Western pop-influenced character of his early compositions. The 1920s were over, and Soviet officialdom was insisting on a much more staid national aesthetic. Both Shostakovich and Lopukhov survived periods of oppressive disfavor to become elder statesmen in the Soviet cultural scene, but Adrian Piotrovsky, a vastly accomplished dramaturge who wrote the ballet’s libretto, vanished into a camp in 1938. Bright Stream also disappeared, until Ratmansky created new choreography to go with the original narrative in 2003 for Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. As out-of-town tryouts go, ABT’s Bright Stream was polished. The second of its two acts is short but still sags a bit, as it did when the Bolshoi brought it to New York in 2005. But Ratmansky is expert at pastiche and adroit as a farceur. ABT’s dancers worked very hard, and only rarely were they needlessly laborious. The ensemble was spirited if sometimes ragged; no one in the solo roles was 100 percent there, but each and every one showed particular and individual strengths. Seeing Bright Stream break in at the Kennedy Center was a treat because its Opera House follows the old-world European model: It has a large (enough) stage and a (relatively) small auditorium. The dancers have room to move and the spectators are close without being intrusive. This June, ABT will bring Bright Stream to the Metropolitan Opera, danced by a number of stellar casts, some of whom participated in Washington. But another reason to be glad to have seen it there was the performance of young Isabella Boylston, who isn’t scheduled to do it in New York. On the basis of one performance, I certainly don’t want to make predictions about Boylston’s full potential (I have also seen her in some solo roles since she

2/4/11

February 16 – 19

Photo by Jesson Mata

“The music seemed perfectly suited to Mr. Marsalis’s velvety tone, lush vibrato and soulful approach to phrasing.” — The New York Times

Andrey Boreyko Conductor Branford Marsalis Saxophone

Works & Process at the Guggenheim: Pacific Northwest Ballet—Giselle Revisited. joined ABT in 2007), but her work is physiologically sound to a degree that isn’t as common today as one would hope. The muscular strength in her back allows her limbs to move with freedom. Her legs rise easily, and she knows when to stop: She doesn’t turn in her supporting or working hip to crank up her legs still higher. She doesn’t push, so that you’re always convinced that she has reserves of stretch as well as strength. Boylston’s acting and her comedy weren’t especially vivid; Gillian Murphy used her years of additional experience to give a more complete performance of the same role in Washington. With Boylston the dancing was the event, and it was an authentic one. Also in January, the Guggenheim Museum’s “Works & Process” series hosted Peter Boal, artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, choreologist Doug Fullington and scholar Marian Smith (whose book Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle is a must-read for anyone interested in performance history). They were there to discuss PNB’s new production of Giselle, which opens June 3 in Seattle. It’s an attempt to restore elements of the ballet recorded in archival documents. Some relate to the 1841 premiere in Paris, choreographed by Coralli and Perrot, and some to Petipa’s late-19th-century productions in St. Petersburg, which were notated by Nikolai Sergeyev. Internal consistency within Petipa’s work was glimpsed by some antique steps in the Giselle excerpts performed by PNB that correspond to Petipa texts restored in the last decade or so in Russia. Also interesting is the way that some set pieces don’t seem to have changed all that much; direct dancer-to-dancer textural transmittal can indeed be accurate.

HAYDN Symphony No. 60, Il distratto GLAZUNOV Concerto for Alto Saxophone SCHULHOFF/R. Rodney Bennett Hot-Sonate for Alto Saxophone and Chamber Ensemble R. STRAUSS Le Bourgeois gentilhomme

Alan Gilbert, Music Director The Yoko Nagae Ceschina Chair

FOR TICKETS CALL 212 875 5656 OR VISIT NYPHIL.ORG Avery Fisher Hall Box Office, Broadway at 65th Street

All programs, artists, dates, and prices subject to change. Photo by Palma Kolansky. © 2011 New York Philharmonic. Programs of the New York Philharmonic are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council of the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Classical 105.9 FM WQXR, the radio station of the New York Philharmonic.

John Adams

James DePreist

T H E J U I L L I A R D S C H O O L | Joseph W. Polisi, President

Juilliard Orchestra Fri, Feb 18 at 8 • Carnegie Hall

Fri, Mar 25 at 8 • Avery Fisher Hall

John Adams

James DePreist

57th St. & 7th Av

Conducts

STRAUSS Don Juan, Op. 20 BARTÓK Dance Suite ADAMS City Noir (2009) Tickets $30, $15 Carnegie Hall Box Office or CenterCharge (212) 247-7800 1/2-price student, senior tickets, only at the box office

Broadway & 65th St

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BERG Violin Concerto Itamar Zorman, Violin MAHLER Symphony No. 5 Tickets $30, $15 on sale beginning 2/18 Avery Fisher Box Office or CenterCharge (212) 721-6500 FREE students, senior tickets only at the box office

Photos: (top, bottom right) Nan Melville, (bottom left) Lambert Orkis

February 9, 2011 | City Arts

NY Studio Gallery located in an old storefront at 154 Stanton St.

East Side Migration Patterns The recent moves by Upper East Side galleries exhibit a continued restless spirit By V.L. Hendrickson n a constantly shifting market, New York City galleries are always coming and going, changing and adapting to trends. But the drift of major galleries trading their tony Upper East Side addresses for the larger spaces and more art-centric streets of Chelsea has been picking up in recent months after the recession slowdown. Although there have been notable additions in the Upper East Side—namely Swiss-based mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth opening its first New York gallery in the fall of 2009 on East 69th Street—many of the gallery directors say the availability of real estate in the West 20s and the changing mood of the Upper East Side’s flagship gallery buildings are some of the reasons for the migration. DC Moore Gallery, which opened in 1995 on East 57th Street, recently relocated, opening its new Chelsea location last week with two shows: Robert Kushner: Wildflower Convocation and Romare Bearden: Ideas to Realization. The space, at 535 W. 22nd St., is bigger than the Uptown gallery, but according to those involved in the move, the Chelsea scene was a bigger draw. “I’m completely entranced by 22nd Street,” says Bridget Moore, the president of

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DC Moore. “It’s one of the original Chelsea blocks. It’s a beautiful street without the cacophony of office and residential projects. It feels like it might have 100 years ago.” A colleague of Moore’s had been trying to “lure” her to Chelsea for a long time, but Moore didn’t bite until a 6,800-squarefoot space in a building owned by the Dia Foundation became available. “The space really suits our needs,” Moore says. “Collectors and curators have told us that it’s much easier to see us because they are already downtown to see shows.” The gallery also now has the space to exhibit larger installations that it hadn’t quite been able to fit in their uptown space. “We’re planning to show 600 drawings, which are part of a larger installation,” Moore said. “We didn’t have the space before and we’re delighted to finally be able to show it.” Other galleries also looked to Chelsea when they wanted more space for larger projects. The Flowers Gallery moved in 2009—during the height of the recession when rents were no longer rising at astronomical rates—from Madison Avenue to West 20th Street. “We have four times as much square footage,” says Brent Beamon, the gallery’s

director. Flowers, originally founded in London in 1970, is now able to exhibit some of the larger works, and Beamon says moving shows into the space was easier because of freight elevators that the Upper East Side location did not have. In addition to the added space, the gallery’s location gives it more visibility since people consider Chelsea an art destination, instead of just strolling along Madison Avenue and window-shopping. “Our foot traffic has increased tremendously,” Beamon explains. “We’re in good company. People spill over from openings. And we’re in the same building as the Ricco Maresca Gallery. People come seeking it and find us instead.” Some larger galleries—such as Pace, Gagosian and Mitchell-Innes & Nash— have opted for outposts in both the UES and Chelsea catering to different clientele and artistic eras. As Jay Gorney, director of contemporary art at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, explains, “Chelsea has a much, much larger attendance. It’s really the art capital of the world, and the largest number of people visit. The Upper East Side has a smaller attendance, but I sometimes think the buyers are more serious.” According to Gorney, the gallery originally showed the “modern masters” Uptown and

contemporary art in Chelsea, but they’ve been “mixing it up” in recent years. The changing nature of the UES, however, remains one of the reasons galleries have opted to move. Knoedler & Company recently announced plans to move from the space on East 70th Street, although it has not decided on a new location. It’s also been a time of migration within the neighborhood. For example, the Hirschl & Adler gallery is now filled with boxes and its hundreds of works of art are packed up, as the staff begin to move from its East 70th Street space down to the Crown Building at 730 Fifth Ave. (at the corner of 57th Street), already home to other galleries such as Nora Haime. The 57th Street area has seen the most radical change since the landlords made the decision that they wanted high-end retail and commercial tenants. The Fuller Building at 57th and Madison, long a home to many of New York’s most distinguished galleries, “is not just oriented to galleries as previous owners were,” according to Louis Newman, the director of David Findlay Jr. Fine Art. He doesn’t think this shift is necessarily a bad thing. “They bring potential clients who might not have found their way on their own,” he says. Newman finds the 57th Street location convenient for clients visiting New York who often stay in Midtown. They like to stop by the gallery, see a show at one of the nearby museums, then head back to the hotel before going to a Broadway or music

That Neighborhood Feeling The Lower East Side continues to expand its artistic boundaries By Anna Sanders Lesley Heller understands that the New York art scene—like its neighborhoods— constantly changes, morphing to accommodate new movements, people and ideas. Heller adapted to this changing environment, moving her gallery since 1994 from Soho, to two separate locations on the Upper East Side and finally opening Lesley Heller Workspace at 54 Orchard St. in January 2010. “My programming didn’t have as big of an audience on the Upper East Side,” Heller explains. Her vision for her gallery motivated a move, but despite its “worldclass” reputation, Heller knew Chelsea wasn’t for her. “It was never an option in my mind, it’s difficult to stand out there.” The small, 19th-century tenement buildings of the Lower East Side have seen countless changes, and the current art galleries filling the spaces along the cramped streets have attracted not only the wild street artists of decades past but also a growing number of gallerists with business plans and a roster of emerging and mid-career artists. “For the type of art I show, I felt the audience wasn’t right on the Upper East Side, and it has been much better down here for the gallery,” Heller explains. “It was a good move.” But the Lower East Side’s appeal wasn’t simply about the art market. “It’s not only about selling the art, but exposing different groups of people to what’s going on,” she says, adding the community feeling of the Lower East Side allows her to educate different groups about art. “I feel like I’m part of the general community and not just the art community down here.” Over 20 galleries have opened in the Lower East Side in the last several years. Centered around the Bowery and Orchard Street, the current gallery boom continues to spark debate throughout the art community over whether the Lower East Side will become the next Chelsea. Rooster Contemporary Art Gallery (190 Orchard St.) opened in the fall of 2010. Alexander Slonevsky says that he

and co-owner André Escarameia looked in neighborhoods all over the city for pop-up gallery locations after the two graduated from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. “Obviously we didn’t look in Chelsea,” Slonevsky explains. “You don’t open a gallery in Chelsea unless you have a lot of money.” After finding a location for Rooster on Orchard, Slonevsky and Escarameia decided to open a permanent gallery. Though Slonevsky explained it “wasn’t the greatest time to start a business,” Rooster has been successful so far. Because of the low rental rates, Slonevsky says, “the Lower East Side is a terrific place to start a business for a normal person like me. It’s a place where someone like myself can try a hand at what they think will be the new art scene.” UNTITLED, another shiny, new gallery, opened in September 2010 on the ground floor of a new-construction condo building just a few doors down from Lesley Heller at 30 Orchard St. Joel Mesler, coowner of UNTITLED with Carol Cohen, says that opening a gallery on the Lower East Side is definitely cheaper but, unlike other art hot-spots, the Lower East Side “didn’t feel like an art mall.” Though the amount of galleries investing in the new art scene on the Lower East Side has increased to approximately 70 in the last few years, Tim Lemberger, director of marketing and public relations for the Lower East Side Business Improvement District (BID), explains the neighborhood still isn’t as well-known for its galleries. “I think that Chelsea has branded itself as a gallery area,” he says. So, in an effort to promote the Lower East Side art scene, the BID is organizing seven “Third Thursdays” in 2011, a time when participating galleries will stay open from 6-9 p.m. “We wanted to create a cohesive night where all the galleries participate and are all open at the same time.” While Lemberger and the BID feel Third Thursdays will unite the neighborhood’s art community, many

show in the evening. “To go to Chelsea is an all-day event,” he explains. Newman certainly has noticed the comings and goings of galleries in the neighborhood, however. Although he notes three new auction houses have opened recently, several galleries are no longer on the street. “There are two categories: those that are now moving to Chelsea because they feel that is the ‘happening place,’” he says. “And those that are moving further uptown to be a little more private.” Some gallery owners want both the privacy of Uptown and the hipness of Downtown, and have opened more than one location to capture the feel of both.

Salon94, founded by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who was also featured as a judge on the Bravo reality show Work of Art, has branches in both: its flagship is on East 94th Street, a second is located on Freemans Alley and the third, and newest, space is located around the corner on the Bowery, next to the New Museum. “Uptown is quiet, inviting contemplation,” Fabienne Stephan, Salon94’s director, says. “Jeanne always emphasized that she enjoys the idea that someone made an effort to come to view art. And Freemans Alley is hidden. And now, the new Bowery space has stairs leading you down. You can’t see the show from the

galleries on the LES already feel solidarity since they are open on Sundays—a rarity in most of the art world, and a draw since the trendy restaurants in the neighborhood have a thriving brunch scene. “I think it’s also other dealers wanting to be with other dealers of their generation, trying to get the foot traffic of your generation,” Mesler explains. Although the Lower East Side galleries generally attract the vision of a new generation trying to break in, the neighborhood’s appeal is not lost on oldschool veterans. Sperone Westwater, founded in Soho in 1975 by Gian Enzo Sperone, Angela Westwater and Konrad Fischer, opened its new multi-million dollar building on the Lower East Side at 257 Bowery, near the New Museum, last September. According to Westwater, they were attracted to the neighborhood because of the mix of the Bowery’s historical and artistic legacy, and that their Norman Foster-designed building contributed to the architectural dialogue in the area. “The neighborhood pulses with creative energy and it has also become an architectural destination,” Westwater says. “Moving to the Bowery has almost doubled our space and presents our artists with a variety of spaces in which they can show their work.” Of course, Sperone Westwater’s building doesn’t necessarily mesh with the small-neighborhood vibe echoed by other Lower East Side gallery owners. “A lot of artists work really large, and there aren’t a lot of spaces that can accommodate on the Lower East Side,” Heller explains. Because most Lower East Side galleries are smaller, Heller doesn’t believe it can become the “new Chelsea.” But that doesn’t mean the scene won’t continue to evolve. “I assume that this neighborhood will slowly change as well,” Heller says. “I don’t think it will turn into a Chelsea because of the space, but I don’t think this is the end of the line at all.” < outside. In a way, it is again the idea of the tucked-away treasure.” Since the locations of the Bowery and Freemans Alley are close together, Salon94 is also able to hold exhibitions concurrently. Events and more experimental shows are held Uptown, Stephan says. Many galleries have also moved to the Lower East Side in the past few years, particularly along Orchard Street. Until recently, however, the area was difficult to navigate. “The galleries were really quite spread out,” says Nicelle Beauchene, who moved her eponymous gallery there at the end of 2009. “Now Orchard Street has become the main destination.”

By the Numbers The decisions that a gallery owner is faced with include the vibe of an area and available foot traffic. But it’s also how much square footage can be afforded in New York City’s always-volatile rental market. According to Earl Bateman, a real estate broker and publisher of nycartspaces.com who specializes in art galleries, as of the start of 2011, building owners are asking for about $96 per square foot for an upper floor gallery on the Upper East Side. Spaces in Chelsea are being offered for $39 per square foot, and the Lower East Side for $43. (Compare that with the average asking price of Brooklyn galleries being about $22 per square foot— about half that of even the least expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan.) The steep difference in rent costs and an art market still reeling from the recession seem to be the forces driving galleries southward—for example, there are now 71 galleries in the Lower East Side, up from 41 in 2008. “Larger, cheaper and a better location: That’s always the motivator for galleries,” says Batemen. If it truly is the economy that’s driving galleries away from the Upper East Side, it wouldn’t be the first time. Longtime New Yorkers may remember Soho used to have many more art galleries and Chelsea much fewer. Between 1990 and 2007, about 300 galleries moved into Chelsea while some 270 left Soho, according to a 2009 study in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Though rents in Soho rose steadily since the 1980s, galleries generally didn’t have any trouble until 1990, when art sales began to drop by two-thirds over the next five years. Those two pressures together—rent and weakening sales—were what prompted the exodus from Soho, according to Harvey Molotch, one of the study’s co-authors. “In the United States, neighborhoods don’t turn over that fast,” Molotch says. “It’s amazing how quick Soho got colonized as an art district. It’s amazing how quick they left.” Here in 2011, the economic conditions are almost the same. The recession hit Wall Street hard, taking a lot of would-be art buyers out of the market for upcoming artists, Bateman said. And while asking prices for retail space fell during the recession, they haven’t exactly been forgiving to art galleries. For instance, rents for Third Avenue retail space on the Upper East Side has risen from $745 to $847 per square foot through the recession, according to commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. [Thomas Chan]

The cluster of galleries on Orchard Street not only makes them easier to find, but according to Beauchene, since the gallery Untitled opened and James Fuentes is in the neighborhood, it attracts a certain discerning art collector looking for the next new thing. Of course, gallery owners and directors all over the city enjoy sharing the streets with other exhibition spaces instead of large retailers and apartment complexes. That was certainly the case for Bridget Moore of DC Moore. As she explains, Chelsea “is a little less mollified. There are a few less lines for Abercrombie & Fitch; a few less people taking pictures of the Trump Building.” < February 9, 2011 | City Arts

AttheGALLERIES because its lustrous surfaces recall Japanese woodblock prints, but because it comes off like an X-ray transcription of El Greco’s “View of Toledo.” Elsewhere, Gerard divines a hitherto unknown correspondence between Yellow Submarine and Sienese painting—really, “Campo” is Sassetta on LSD—and, overall, provides an object lesson in why doubt, at least when it comes to art, can be a good thing. [Mario Naves] Through Feb. 19, Sears-Peyton Gallery, 210 11th Ave., 212-966-7469.

Butt Johnson: The Name of the Rose

“Untitled (Seven Roses),” by Butt Johnson.

Celia Gerard: Regions of Unlikeness

In his seminal essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” philosopher Maurice MerleauPonty wrote of the French artist’s painterly process, of how vacillating fields of chiseled brushstrokes simultaneously defined and questioned the objects at hand. Merleau-Ponty concluded that for Cezanne “‘conception’ [could not] precede ‘execution.’” The results, rigorously analytical and forever skeptical, set into motion the idea of the canvas as a public accounting of an artist’s tussle with uncertainty. Having filtered its way through Modernism—roughly speaking, from Cubism to Giacometti to Action Painting to any number of artists eager to flaunt their egos and erasers—“Cezanne’s Doubt” has become as much a cliché as any other approach to art-making. That is, until someone comes along and demonstrates why it is, in fact, viable and vital. Celia Gerard’s black-and-white mixed-media drawings, at Sears-Peyton Gallery, remind

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us that tradition is for the taking should an artist have the gumption to follow through on it. Cezanne resides in Gerard’s drawings more in process than in image, but one can divine a link from her ruled forms to Cezanne’s insistence that nature be represented through cylinders, spheres and cones. Gerard goes about it in a reverse order—transforming fractious arrays of triangles, circles and the odd sloping contour into panoramic landscapes—of a sort, anyway. Though her diagrammatic structures create a certain perspective logic, space is developed more from the reinvention of individual shapes and the connections that accrue between them. Gerard’s compositions are malleable even as they achieve an elegant and scrabbled resolution. Gerard works on both white and black grounds, the latter to less convincing effect: their photo-negative character seems overly dramatic for a draftswoman as tight-lipped and pensive as this one. Then again, “Black Star” is irresistible not only

The rose has been so overused as an allegorical symbol that the flower is devoid of power and importance. Or so argues Butt Johnson in his first solo show at CRG Gallery, The Name of the Rose. It’s an interesting argument, but little of the work follows through on the promise of reconceputalizing a symbology for dead metaphors. Johnson’s drawings could be created by whoever designs bank notes, they are so detailed and masterfully crafted. Taking a cue from Old Master engravers and printmakers, he builds his drawings from delicate ballpoint pen lines shadowing their subjects before patterned backgrounds. Contrasting technique with subject, the drawings often depict cultural icons from the past 20 years. “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit” shows the progression of the ball screensaver that you might remember from Windows ≠97. Some of his references are classical, though thoroughly filtered through the pop-cultural lens of a child of the 1980s. In “The Ambassadors,” a large map of the world, modeled on J.C.R. Columb’s 1886 drawing of the British Imperial Federation, is flanked by characters from Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II, with the fourarmed Goro taking the place of Britannia, surveying his subjects. The composition, tightly framed by the edge of the paper, shows his debt to Old Masters like Dürer and Bruegel. The Name of the Rose traces a history of recent idleness. We have images from video games and computer culture, often symbols of wasted youth and the degradation of society, but Johnson is so steeped in these cultures that they appear almost without irony. Johnson’s work promises fresh direction as a new generation confronts our history through its own media and video games which are gaining prominence as legitimate forms of expression. [Nicholas Wells] Through Feb. 19, CRG Gallery, 548 W. 22nd St., 212-229-2766.

Jeppe Hein

One needs not even enter Jeppe Hein’s show at 303 Gallery to understand that the artist has an interest in the gallery space: a telescopic fisheye lens mounted in 303’s

“Light Pavilion” by Jeppe Hein.

storefront allows a sneaky voyeuristic peek inside, but also turns the gallery upsidedown, in a fittingly tongue-in-cheek introduction. “360° Gallery Photo Edition,” a series of 24 black-and-white photographs created by rotating a camera in 15-degree increments around the gallery, continues this theme and creates dissonance between the gallery as representation and the gallery as referent; as a piece, though, it’s weak. Hein’s interest in the gallery is antiquated when posed alone; frankly, much of what exists to be said was said in the 1970s. Rather, it is revitalized and made relevant by his keen awareness of the gallery’s residents and visitors and his keener wit. Those works that demonstrate all of these characteristics are often his best. “Light Pavilion” is the centerpiece of the show, and rightly so. Hein has constructed a web of lights that hover above the gallery space, dilating and contracting via a system of pulleys attached to a gallery assistantpowered stationary bike. As the title suggests, when extended the chains of light form the edges of a tent, inviting viewers inside; as they fall, they are transformed into a net, closing in upon the center of the space with a sense of menace and imposition that Hein’s work has often tapped into. Hein’s works don’t come with a rulebook, but they implicitly set down instructions nonetheless: stand here; do not stand there; feel awkward around the laboring staff. In many of the works on show, there is at once an essentially art-world inside joke—a jab at the white cube, or at typical gallery behavior or art trends—and a drive toward creating something immediate, universal

and undeniable, as in the work of Olafur Eliasson or Dan Graham. “You,” a peephole that looks onto a mirror, is the final piece in the exhibition. Hein has worked with peepholes before, always as a joke; his 2000 piece “Let Me Show You The World” was a peephole where the viewer was rewarded with nothing but a gust of air in the eye. Where “Let Me Show You The World” was simply a joke, “You” seems to have more to it, not only denying the normal voyeuristic subtext of the peephole artwork but replacing it with a concern with the viewer’s selfawareness. As always with Hein, it’s a mixture of humor and intelligent comment that’s hard to dislike. [Will Brand] Through Mar. 5, 303 Gallery, 547 W. 21st St., 212-255-1121.

John Clement: Oiler

Bigger really is better. This was my thought as I left the Causey Contemporary Gallery after watching John Clement and crew erect an 18-foot-tall welded steel sculpture titled Oiler. Clement, already well known for his large and ambitious sculpture, became smitten with the idea of building one of his pieces using industrial-sized pipe originally manufactured for the oil industry. Several trips to the American Pipe Bending Company in Tulsa, Okla., one of only two places in the country that manufactures 22-inch diameter steel pipe, some fancy talking to a factory used to manufacturing for Big Oil rather than Big Art, a monster truck trip across the country and a willing gallery owner all coalesced into the wild scene I witnessed in Williamsburg. Clement invited the public to watch him and his crack team wrangle 8 tons of steel pipe and turn them into art. It was an impressive ballet of man, metal and torch,

“Oiler,” by John Clement.

with a variable-reach forklift thrown in for fun. Donning my hardhat and ear protection, I watched as Clement maneuvered the smaller of the two arced pipes into a standing position. By “smaller,” I mean 12feet by 12-feet and weighing 1,800 pounds. He engineered the piece into place with a crane in such a way that the steel looked effortlessly balanced, a graceful and sexy swoop gesture reaching high into the air. This is what makes Clement’s work so lovely. No matter how big and macho the metal, the gesture conveyed is always like a bit of elegant calligraphy. He usually paints his pieces in absurd, wonderful colors. One series was painted in colors that were plucked from the palate of Starburst candy. This use of color steers the work away from the macho-man welder myth and conveys the lighter side of the man of steel. No word yet as to the future color of Oiler, but I’m voting for pink. [Melissa Stern] Through Mar. 6, Causey Contemporary Gallery, 92 Wythe Ave., Brooklyn, 718-218-8939.

Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculptures by Esteban Vicente Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) was the only Spaniard among the AbstractExpressionists, and he was among the very few of them to devote considerable time to collage. His relative lack of recognition can be attributed to the fact that he started showing in New York a few years after de Kooning and Pollock—and perhaps, too, to the lyrical self-possession of his paintings, which did not entirely fit the prevailing aesthetic of savage gesture and primal effect. The Grey Art Gallery’s current exhibition of 80 pieces, spanning a full five decades, invites a reappraisal of his luminous work, bringing together for the first time his collages and his divertimientos, the miniature, toy-like sculptures he produced for his own amusement. When Vicente started experimenting with collage in 1949—he was momentarily without his brushes—he brought to the medium all his substantial gifts as a colorist. He soon came to appreciate this other “mode of painting,” as he called it, for the directness with which he could rearrange colors. Unlike the Cubists and Dadaists, Vicente pre-painted scraps of paper with his own colors, and unlike most of his Ab-Ex contemporaries, he showed only passing interest in surface textures; the rough edges of his hand-torn paper were more a byproduct than a vehicle of his expression. What was the nature of this expression? While Vicente considered spontaneity and instinct crucial to his process, he was essentially a classicist. His “interior landscapes,” as he referred to them, are dramas of counter-tensions, with forms expanding across the surfaces in eloquent intervals. His early collages, built up of

“Number 7,” by Esteban Vicente.

criss-crossing paper strips and marks in ink, charcoal or gouache, have something of Pollock’s gestural, all-over energy. But by the 1960s, the paper shapes had grown larger and simpler, their austere forms mobilized by leaps and shifts of color. (Two collages from 1956 incorporate labels from consumer products, but these seem to have been a momentary detour, the lettering serving as rhythmic focal points rather than commentary.) While most collages are titled generically (“Red on Green”) or not at all, there are exceptions. The shifting blocks of off-white in “Manhattan” inevitably suggest a teeming cityscape, while the luscious sweeps of orange, coral-pink and blue-green bring a tropical depth to “Kalani Hawaii.” But the collages are never merely descriptive. Their “realness” lies in their self-completing rhythms. One compelling, untitled piece from 1994, consisting solely of unpainted bits of paper on canvas, achieves a remarkably complex wholeness— colorfulness, even—out of mere off-whites.

The 20 divertimientos in the exhibition fill several display cases. Constructed of painted wood, cardboard and foamcore (and in one case a plastic snake), they charm with their whimsy. I preferred the several unpainted ones for their momentum of form; in the rest, the colors seemed to decorate rather than define. (Picasso and Henri Laurens’ painted sculptures more convincingly quantify volumes with color.) But then, the divertimientos face some stiff competition at the Grey Art Gallery. Look up, and you’ll see the dense stubbornness of a particular cadmium red, holding within a field of flaming orange, which is in turn braced by pillars of the most delicate, translucent, speckled gray. This is an untitled collage from 1982, whose irreducible elements say nothing about practical life, but everything about the possibilities of color. [John Goodrich] Through Mar. 26, New York University Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square East, 212-998-6780. February 9, 2011 | City Arts

ClassicalMUSIC&Opera

The Gift of ‘Just Rightness’

James Levine and the Met Orchestra, plus Joshua Rifkin at (Le) Poisson Rouge

A Magnificent Italian Neoclassic Giltwood Console Rome, Italy; late 18th century; from Gary Rubinstein Antiques

Defined by Quality & Design

THE SPRING SHOW March 9–13, 2011

March 9, Private VIP Preview Honoring Mario Buatta

March 10–13, Open to the Public

March 11 & 12, Royal Oak Foundation Lectures Park Avenue Armory 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street | New York City For details, show information and tickets, please visit avenueshows.com or call 646.442.1627

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By Jay Nordlinger A great concern of the music world lately has been the health of James Levine. On a recent Sunday afternoon, he took the stage of Carnegie Hall to lead his Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He had the help of a cane. Then he climbed into his chair, a swivel chair sitting on a podium. And he conducted with great vigor and animation. The first of the program’s two works was Mozart’s Serenade No. 9 in D, nicknamed the “Posthorn.” This is one of those long, multipart works written to provide outdoor entertainment. Think of it as music to tailgate to (or not). I have long been skeptical that it should be played, in its entirety, in a concert hall, for people who just sit there and listen. I wonder what Mozart would say, if he could give us his opinion. In any case, Levine conducted the work superbly. He was at his Mozartean best. From first to last, the score was kissed by what I sometimes term “just rightness”: in tempo, phrasing, weight and so on. This question of weight is important: Levine gives his Mozart a gratifying substantiality. It is a relief from the dorky, popcorn quality of “period practice” (or unthinking period practice, it might be better to say). I have mentioned that Levine was full of beans. At one point, he did a 360 in that swivel chair. There were giggles and gasps in the audience. A friend emailed me later, “Maybe he should get a seatbelt?” On the second half of the program was Mahler’s Lied von der Erde, or Song of the Earth. This is a long, emotional and involving work. It requires pacing. You don’t want to spend too much emotion in the early going. You have to observe the arc. You want climaxes to have their maximum effect. Levine knows all this, of course. He respected all the elements of the work: the hurly-burly, the tranquility, the quirkiness. He kept the musical flow going, never letting it be interrupted, never permitting a blockiness or stagnation. The two soloists were Michelle DeYoung, the American mezzo, and Simon O’Neill, the tenor from New Zealand. O’Neill owns a beautiful instrument, one that has just a little bleat in it. (At least it did on this occasion.) Unfortunately, this instrument could not be very well heard over Mahler’s, and Levine’s, orchestra. In my view, the conductor would have been wise to be a bit more accommodating. DeYoung has a beautiful voice too: warm and enveloping, excellent for Mahler, and Berlioz and not a few others. She sang her songs with

intelligence, technical security and soul. There are six songs within this great Song of the Earth. The final one is “Der Abschied,” “The Farewell.” It was rightly moving, emotionally. DeYoung was sometimes conversational, sometimes inward. Her utterances of “Ewig”—“Forever”—were beautifully simple and unaffected. Levine expressed the mysticism of this song without forgetting musical straightforwardness. Incidentally, you could hear the subway during “Der Abschied.” You can very much hear the subway in the downstairs venue in the Carnegie building, Zankel Hall. Sometimes it sounds like a roar. But you can hear it in the main auditorium too. Levine is known for long or generous concerts: His concerts are longer than pretty much anybody’s. You get a lot for your money. It occurred to me that the Brahms Requiem, which is just a little longer than Das Lied von der Erde, is often an entire program. Several years ago, my colleague Fred Kirshnit suggested that we write reviews of concerts before they took place, based on our experience with the relevant performers, and with the music world in general. That way, the public would not have to bother with going to the concerts. He was just kidding, of course. I thought of him when I read something on Carnegie Hall’s website before the afternoon with Levine and the Met Orchestra: “On this concert, these exemplary musicians bring a fresh new energy to Mozart’s ‘Posthorn’ Serenade.” Oh, how did they know? Luckily, Levine, swiveling around, supplied the energy needed. Five nights later, he conducted Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra at the Met. He was in fine form, musically. He did not take the stage afterward for a bow, however. He waved from the pit. The rumor mill is saying that the maestro will soon announce his retirement from the Met. He has to retire someday, of course. But, to quote a line from Barber’s opera Vanessa, words by Menotti, must the winter come so soon?

A Tinge of Nostalgia Forty years ago, the pianist Joshua Rifkin recorded Joplin rags for the Nonesuch label. Ragtime enjoyed a huge revival in the 1970s. Because of Rifkin? Well, mainly because of a movie called The Sting, I think. It had a soundtrack of Joplin’s music. Everyone got to know “Solace,” “The Easy Winners” and,

especially, “The Entertainer.” And when people went hunting for LPs of Joplin— they found Rifkin. He taught us how to play the rags, really. He treated them essentially as classical music. He was not frenetic or jazzy in them. This was not honky-tonk material. He let the rags proceed at their natural, often stately tempos. They had an internal logic, mesmerizing. A lot of us wore the grooves off. Joplin was a treasure, and Rifkin was his foremost exponent. The pianist was in New York the other night, playing at (Le) Poisson Rouge, the club on Bleecker Street. He played Joplin— and Bach, and a Brazilian composer of tangos, Ernesto Nazareth (1863-1934). He did not play these composers in separate sets. He had them mingle. He began with the C-major prelude from Book I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Then he went right into “The Entertainer,” which is in the same key. (Is

“The Entertainer” not one of our national anthems?) In due course, he gave us our first Nazareth tango. These pieces turned out to be real charmers and beauties—and, for many of us, no doubt, discoveries. Rifkin played the tangos and rags with sympathy and taste. I mean no disrespect when I say that his Bach was not especially distinguished. It was competent. I found myself waiting for the rags and tangos, which were special. I felt a tinge of nostalgia, as I imagine some others did, too. I remembered those rags, and those Rifkin tracks. I could practically hear the crackles. I had forgotten how great the “Magnetic Rag” is. “Magnetic” is the word. At (Le) Poisson Rouge, you naturally hear the clatter of dishes and other barrestaurant noises. During the Bach pieces, they sounded wrong, even offensive. During the others—not so much. Joplin and Nazareth, beautiful and refined as they are, can take a little clatter. <

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RESERVATIONS 212-258-9595

Ran Dank & Vassilis Varvaresos live and perform together

and studied in Israel until winning the YCA auditions in 2009. He then came to the U.S. to earn his masters and artist diploma at Juilliard and currently is a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center, studying with Ursula Oppens and Richard Goode. In addition to school, both keep up a busy schedule of concerts, recitals and competitions. For Dank, the more recent winner of the audition, many of these engagements are booked by YCA. The organization was founded 50 years ago by director Susan Wadsworth, a pianist who, after graduating from music school, noticed that many of her talented friends were barely performing. “They had no opportunities at all, so I decided to start a series in a loft in Greenwich Village,” Wadsworth says. The series garnered excellent reviews, and eventually Wadsworth started booking other concerts. Both Dank and Varvaresos’ careers also incorporate Fourtissimo, a quartet of four pianists that also includes Soyeon Lee and Roman Rabinovich, both former classmates from Juilliard. The group seeks to explore ideas from the piano’s “Golden Age” and change various classical music conventions. For example, at a recent concert at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, the program included a movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony for two pianos and eight hands, and a tribute to Simon and Garfunkel. Despite the opportunities that have presented themselves so far, Varvaresos admits he thinks playing piano is “one of the most difficult jobs in the world” since there’s a lack of financial stability, practicing is a time-consuming, solitary activity and performing can be stressful. “You’re putting yourself out there,” he explains, “and showing your soul.”

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22 RY A U BR

All Hands On Deck By Corrine Ramey Ran Dank and Vassilis Varvaresos seem like typical New York City roommates: Both are in their late twenties and live in a four-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, which they share with two other friends. Their kitchen contains a pile of Domino’s pizza boxes, and they indulge their competitive natures by playing a FIFA soccer video game. But most Washington Heights apartments probably don’t have a Steinway piano in the living room. The two best friends—they jokingly call their relationship a “bromance”—are both professional pianists, Juilliard grads who have won myriad competitions and performed both in recitals and with orchestras around the world. Both have also had their careers shaped through their involvement with Young Concert Artists, a nonprofit that seeks to discover, launch and manage the careers of young, unknown musicians. They will both be performing in the YCA’s 50year anniversary Feb. 19. The free, 12-hour marathon at Symphony Space also features YCA alumni such as pianists Jeremy Denk and Emanuel Ax, violinists Eugene Drucker and Ani Kavafian, cellist Carter Brey and the Borromeo String Quartet. The two pianists have, in some respects, opposite stories. Varvaresos, 27, was born in Greece, and says he’s wanted to be a concert pianist for as long as he can remember. “I always knew,” he says. “I gave an interview to a Greek TV station when I was 6 and said, ‘I want to play in big halls and with big orchestras.’” He won the YCA audition at 14 and began studying at Juilliard at 18. Currently, he is finishing up his doctorate at Juilliard. Israeli-born 28-year-old Dank performed

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jalc.org/dccc $100 per person includes one complimentary glass of wine and passed hors d’oeuvres. All proceeds support the Jazz Musicians’ Emergency Fund. Price of admission, minus $25, is tax deductible. Jazz at Lincoln Center thanks Great Performances for their contributions to the Playing Our Parts Benefit Concert.

April 30, 2011 10 am-7 pm |@ Center548

www.newabikeshow.com February 9, 2011 | City Arts

Jazz

Post-Modern, Post-Racial Roots Revival The charm of the Carolina Chocolate Drops

Julie Roberts

Carolina Chocolate Drops. By Howard Mandel ophisticated New Yorkers will sing along with old-timey fiddle, guitar, mandolin and banjo-playin’, from those foot-stompin’ and harmonizin’ younguns—provided they are friendly, attractive and talented post-racial postmodernists. Proof was provided Feb. 2 by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Grammy-nominated trio who played the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center as part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series. In a 90-minute set of songs in the color-line-blurring folk style that cohered in America’s rural southeast Piedmont region about 200 years ago, Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson—with a little help from sitter-in Hubby Jenkins— traded vocal leads, passed their instruments around and charmed a largely middle-aged, almost completely pale-faced, obviously cosmopolitan crowd. Sitting and standing to buck-dance onstage before floor-to-ceiling windows, the group plucked and sang such nearly forgotten standards as “The Boatman’s Dance,” a big hit in 1843 for

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Dan Emmett and his blackfaced Virginia sang with a strong, appealing voice and, Minstrels. The Drops didn’t downplay like her bandmates, relied on the power the evil of blackface, but they asserted that of direct, familiar address. Never mind the music is as entertaining now as it was that few in the five boroughs have a back then. And they demonstrated as such with porch: Maybe we all want the comfort and infectious spirit. nostalgia-laced fantasy of friends and family They applied the same down-home gathering together to hoot ‘n’ holler, admire acoustic treatment to “Hit ’Em Up Style,” nimble fingers flying across fretboards, Blu Cantrell’s 2001 R&B/hip-hop song commiserate about love gone bad, celebrate of economic revenge on cheating mates. love that’s good, protest social ills and praise That tune has become a YouTube favorite (with approximately 466,000 Never mind that few in the five views) for the Drops, boroughs have a back porch: which convened in 2005 and could be the tip of Maybe we all want the comfort an iceberg of revivalist and nostalgia-laced fantasy of roots ensembles. In today’s fashion, the friends and family gathering act is both genuinely together to hoot ‘n’ holler. refreshing and an ironic novelty. The Chocolate Drops know this, flaunting its unusual profile as a black string the Lord (even the non-believers). Is there band by titling its second album Genuine better company for such doings than the Negro Jig. Drops? “This is not exactly back porch music,” Flemons, a tall, thin, somewhat geeky said Giddens, who played hot violin licks, gent who wore a pork-pie hat, brown shirt

and brown pants with suspenders for the performance, flashed his castanet-like rhythm-clickers in sweeping arcs of his long arms, telegraphing the beat. Dreadlocked Robinson, clad in street clothes with eye-catching neon-diamond socks, didn’t need the jug to amplify his human beatbox percussion (at concert’s end, it was announced he will be leaving the band due to tour-burnout). Giddens, in jeans, a loose v-neck blouse and low-heeled ruby slippers that she kicked off (the better to Charleston), is no anorexic glitter queen. Instead, she looks like a student who lives down the block. The three projected confidence, warmth, smarts and fun. All of them—including Jenkins, whose feature was Robert Johnson’s blues “From Four ’til Late”—believe that the quick, stereotypically high-pitched airs that snobby urbanites may associate with wizened rednecks or the soundtracks to O Brother Where Art Thou and Deliverance are theirs to enjoy, too. They’ve done the homework to know that people of African-American descent were involved in country music from the very start, same as in the birth of rock ’n’ roll. Consider it settled: American music belongs to all Americans. Racial bigotry that, in this nation’s past, ruled many social exchanges by legal fiat was often enough put aside in favor of musical merit at the county fair fiddle contests, barnyard pickin’ sessions, informal meetings in the hills and dales where laboring families of diverse origin but comparable economic means holed up and tended the land. The Piedmont’s 80,000 square miles from southern New Jersey to Alabama were settled before the American Revolution by immigrants from the British isles, Germany, France, Spain and Switzerland as well as Africans—enslaved or free. Mix up the different skills, preferences and traditions new citizens of a new world brought from their former lives and what do you get? Maybe something like the Drops, who recorded a just-released foursong EP with Brooklyn’ s Luminscent Orchestrii—which Giddens characterized as “gypsy-klezmer-tang-punk-old timey” music. The Chocolate Drops don’t live here, but New York has its own black string band, the Ebony Hillbillies. Four men—who may not be as young and cute as the Drops but just as cool—who you may have seen play in the subway, certified by the MTA’s Music Under New York program. Just back from a weeklong tour of Bulgaria, they’ll perform for free at Penn Station on the afternoons of Feb. 15 and 22—gigs scheduled in honor of Black History Month. <

FILM

Talk About the ‘Weather’

Director Aaron Katz on his mysterious new movie, ‘Cold Weather’ by Leslie Stonebraker Cold Weather is the thoughtful lovechild of Sherlock Holmes and mumblecore cinema, though its director would deny it. The film—which opened Feb. 4 at the IFC Center—chronicles the delightfully average life of brother-and-sister pair Doug and Gail until, about 40 minutes in, Doug’s exgirlfriend Rachel mysteriously disappears. Aided by his coworker Carlos, forensic studies dropout Doug attempts to follow the clues, stymied only by a dislike of Swedish fish and the lack of a car. Cold Weather is a delicious blend of comically pedestrian moments and nearly suspenseful car chases. We caught up with writer/director Aaron Katz to discuss his latest low-budget film. CityArts: How would you say your filmmaking style has evolved since your first film, Dance Party USA? Aaron Katz: One thing that’s definitely evolved is the approach to acting. Dance Party USA adheres pretty strictly to the script. Looking at that movie now, I guess I wish it was looser. Quiet City is really, really loose, I think as a response to Dance Party. There was a script, but people didn’t stick to it at all. Cold Weather is taking what I learned from both of those movies and applying it. People do stick to the script but there’s, I hope, naturalness and looseness. It sounds like your actors had some freedom. The script was written with Cris [Lankenau] and Trieste [Dunn] in mind. Cris I’d worked with before—he’s in Quiet City—and Trieste went to North Carolina School of the Arts, where I went to school. I had the idea that they would make a good brother and sister, and that was the starting point. But they hadn’t ever met. So a few months before we started shooting the movie, before we got money together or the script was even finished, I wanted them to start that relationship, so they would have a history together. You’ve mentioned that Cold Weather is a genre film. Is it also an entry into the mumblecore movement? As much as it plays with genre, we also really wanted to make the mystery stand up on its own merits, not have the mystery be a joke or a spoof. I don’t think it’s so much an entry into mumblecore as it’s just an attempt to make a genre movie that has real people in it. That’s what we’re really trying to do, have the people be really complex and three-dimensional, but also have the genre element be satisfying by itself.

Cris Lankenau (left) and Robyn Rikoon in Cold Weather, directed by Aaron Katz. Is that effort what defined the tone of the film? As I was writing the first draft, I hadn’t anticipated there being any mystery in it. I started writing [it] to be about a brother and sister, but I was reading a lot of detective books at the time. I just started incorporating this mystery stuff kind of on a whim, not thinking that I would go very far with it, but then it got really fun to write. So I have to ask about the ending. Why the abrupt finish when the action was about to climax? As much as we love the mystery elements of the movie, the story is ultimately about Doug and Gail and their relationship. Ending in the middle of a moment where there’s something that hasn’t been resolved yet is a way to suggest that their relationship continues on past the movie… One thing we actually shot wasn’t a resolution to the mystery, but we were going to do this montage at the end of the film that would take us from shots of downtown Portland to shots of residential areas and suburbs and rural areas and then wilderness. The idea being that it would set it in a really specific place. So we actually cut it together and were viewing it [but] it just didn’t feel right. You’ve shot in Portland before. How does the city inform your filmmaking process? A lot of locations were written into the script. I would say 75 percent of the film is shot within a 20-block radius of where I went to high school. I wanted to make a film that really captured what Portland feels like. We tried to include the sky in a lot of shots, and that’s a really important part of what it feels like to be in Portland during any time except for summer, really. I think anyone from Portland will feel like it’s a city they recognize. It’s weird how some films try and disguise the city that they’re shot in. I just saw Love and Other Drugs, which is shot in Pittsburgh, where I live now, and I spent the entire film not being entirely sure that it was Pittsburgh. Why hide that it’s shot there?

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February 9, 2011 | City Arts

ArtsAGENDA Exhibition Openings Anna Kustera Gallery: Karlheinz Weinberger: “Hal-

bstarke to Bikers in Color.” Opens Feb. 11, 520 W. 21st St., 212-989-0082. Armand Bartos Fine Art: “Warhol Soup.” Opens Feb. 16, 25 E. 73rd St., 212-288-6705. BoxOffice: Eric Rhein: “Transmutation.” Opens Feb. 12, 421 Hudson St., #701, 917-669-6098. Center for Cuban Studies’ Art Space: “The Art of Mella.” Opens Feb. 10, 231 W. 29th St., 212242-0559. Central Booking: “Measure for Measure.” Opens Feb. 10, 111 Front St., Ste. 210, Brooklyn, 347731-6559. Christina Ray: Casey P.: “Wild at Heart.” Opens Feb. 10, 30 Grand St., Ground Floor, 212-3340204. David Nolan Gallery: Alice Maher: “Godchildren of Enantios.” Opens Feb. 10, 527 W. 29th St., 212-925-6190. The Drawing Center: “Drawn from Photography.” Opens Feb. 18, 35 Wooster St., 212-219-2166. Gary Snyder Project Space: Laurie Fendrich: “Recent Paintings.” Opens Feb. 10, 250 W. 26th St., 212-929-1351. Gasser Grunert: Ellen Phelan: “Landscape & Still Lifes: A Selection.” Opens Feb. 17, 524 W. 19th St., 646-944-6197. Heidi Cho Gallery: Margaret Fitzgerald: “Duende.” Opens Feb. 10, 522 W. 23rd St., 212-255-6783. Homefront Gallery: Hidemi Takagi: “Blender.” Opens Feb. 12, 26-23 Jackson Ave., Queens, 347-827-0553. Jane Kahan Fine Art: Gloria F. Ross: “Rebirth of Modern Tapestry.” Opens Feb. 15, 330 E. 59th St., 212-744-1490. Jason McCoy Inc.: “After Paradise.” Opens Feb. 9, 41 E. 57th St., 212-319-1996. Lehmann Maupin: Angel Otero. Opens Feb. 17, 201 Chrystie St., 212-254-0054. Lohin Geduld Gallery: Mayumi Sarai: “Recent Work.” Opens Feb. 9, 531 W. 25th St., 212675-2656. Noho Gallery: Stephen Cimini. Opens Feb. 15, 530 W. 25th St., 4th Fl., 212-367-7063. Not Just Another Nail Salon: Ellen Levin. Opens Feb. 22, 511 W. 20th St., Ground Floor, 646734-4771. The Pace Gallery: Tara Donovan: “Drawings (Pins).” Opens Feb. 11, 510 W. 25th St., 212-255-4044. The Pace Gallery: Donald Judd: “Works in Granite, Cor-ten, Plywood & Enamel on Aluminum.” Opens Feb. 18, 534 W. 25th St., 212-929-7000. The Pace Gallery: Jim Dine. Opens Feb. 11, 32 E. 57th St., 212-421-3292. Pandemic Gallery: “Vivid Summit.” Opens Feb. 12, 37 Broadway, Brooklyn, 917-727-3466. Perry Rubenstein Gallery: Kamrooz Aram: “Negotiations.” Opens Feb. 18, 527 W. 23rd St., 212-627-8000. Pleiades Gallery: Michael Zaharuk: “Politburo: Celebrating Political Art, Satirizing the Language of the Right.” Opens Feb. 22, 530 W. 25th St., 4th Fl., 646-230-0056. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts: Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison: “Sierra Nevada: An Adaptation.” Opens Feb. 10, 31 Mercer St., 212-226-3232. Salmagundi Club: “The Eternal Landscape Exhibition.” Opens Feb. 14. “Art About Art.” Opens Feb. 14, 47 5th Ave., 212-255-7740. Salon 94 Bowery: Laurie Simmons: “The Love Doll: Days 1-30.” Opens Feb. 15, 243 Bowery, 212-979-0001. Swiss Institute: Karl Weinberger: “Intimate Stranger.” Opens Feb. 9, 495 Broadway, 3rd Fl., 212-925-2035.

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George Condo, “Figures in a Garden” on view at the New Museum through May 8. SVA Gallery: “Ostracon.” Opens Feb. 11, 209 E.

23rd St., no phone. Tabla Rasa Gallery: Clarity Haynes: “Radical Acceptance.” Opens Feb. 12, 224 48th St., Brooklyn, 718-833-9100. Talwar Gallery: Allan deSouza: “Trysts Tropicales.” Opens Feb. 10, 108 E. 16th St., 212-673-3096. Team Gallery: Massimo Grimaldi: “Highlights.” Opens Feb. 17, 83 Grand St., 212-279-9219. Westside Gallery: “Creating Dialogue.” Opens Feb. 12, 133/141 W. 21st St., 212-592-2145.

Exhibition Closings Abrons Art Center: “The West at Sunset.” Ends Feb.

20, 466 Grand St., 212-598-0400.

Alexander Gray Associates: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe.

Ends Feb. 12, 508 W. 26th St., #215, 212-3992636. Ana Cristea Gallery: Ulf Puder: “Silence.” Ends Feb. 19, 521 W. 26th St., 212-904-1100. Babcock Galleries: Harriet Bart: “Drawn in Smoke.” Ends Feb. 18, 724 5th Ave., 212-767-1852. Bertrand Delacroix Gallery: “Printer’s Proof.” Ends Feb. 19, 535 W. 25th St., 212-627-4444. Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery: Ben Rubin: “Vectors.” Ends Feb. 12, 505 W. 24th St., 212-243-8830. Cheim & Read: McDermott & McGough: “Of Beauty & Being.” Ends Feb. 12. Ghada Amer: “100 Words of Love.” Ends Feb. 12, 547 W. 25th St., 212-242-7727. Claire Oliver: Jesse McCloskey: “New World Nightmares.” Ends Feb. 12, 513 W. 26th St., 212-929-5949. C.W.G. Gallery: Songyi Kim & Maxwell Stevens. Ends Feb. 15, 511 W. 25th St., #203, 212-2424251. D’Amelio Terras: Cornelia Parker: “Rorschach (Accidental III).” Ends Feb. 19. Sam Samore: “The Dark Suspicion.” Ends Feb. 19, 525 W. 22nd St., 212-352-9460.

Daniel Cooney Fine Art: Pamela Pecchio: “On Long-

ing, Distance & Heavy Metal.” Ends Feb. 12, 511 W. 25th St., 212-255-8158. Dean Project: Carol Peligian: “Sosomuch.” Ends Feb. 12, 511 W. 25th St., 2nd Fl., 212-229-2017. Forum Gallery: Brian Rutenberg: “Low Dense.” Ends Feb. 19, 730 5th Ave., 212-355-4545. Gagosian Gallery: Piotr Uklanski: “Discharge.” Ends Feb. 19, 980 Madison Ave., 212-744-2313. Gallery 307: Eva Deutsch: “Paintings: 1950-2010.” Ends Feb. 17, 307 7th Ave., Ste. 1401, 646-400-5254. Gasser Grunert: Tiffany Pollack: “Room.” Ends Feb. 12, 524 W. 19th St., 646-944-6197. Hendershot Gallery: “A Strange Affinity to the Beautiful & the Dreadful.” Ends Feb. 20, 195 Chrystie St., 212-239-1210. June Kelly Gallery: Victor Kord: “Hiding in Plain Sight.” Ends Feb. 22, 166 Mercer St., 212-2261660. Katharina Rich Perlow: George McNeil. Ends Feb. 10, 980 Madison Ave., 3rd Fl., 212-644-7171. Lesley Heller Workspace: Deborah Brown: “The Bushwick Paintings.” Ends Feb. 20. “Fractured Earth.” Ends Feb. 20, 54 Orchard St., 212-4106120. LMAKprojects: Carlos Rigau: “Friends don’t have sleepOVerS.” Ends Feb. 13, 139 Eldridge St., 212-255-9707. Lombard-Freid Projects: Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor: “Land Distribution.” Ends Feb. 12, 518 W. 19th St., 212-967-8040. Margaret Thatcher Projects: Adam Fowler: “Trilogy.” Ends Feb. 12, 539 W. 23rd St., Ground Floor, 212-675-0222. McCaffrey Fine Art: Sigmar Polke. Ends Feb. 19, 23 E. 67th St., 212-988-2200. McKenzie Fine Art Inc.: “Plane Speaking.” Ends Feb. 12, 511 W. 25th St., 212-989-5467. Mike Weiss Gallery: Christian Vincent: “Tunnel Vision.” Ends Feb. 12, 520 W. 24th St., 212-

691-6899.

Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects: José Luis Fariñas:

“Skirting the Apocalypse.” Ends Feb. 19, 547 W. 27th St., 2nd Fl., 212-268-7132. Morgan Lehman: David S. Allee: “Dark Day.” Ends Feb. 19, 535 W. 22nd St., 212-268-6699. Noho Gallery: Jessica Fromm. Ends Feb. 12, 530 W. 25th St., 4th Fl., 212-367-7063. NURTUREart Non-Profit: “The Constructed Landscape.” Ends Feb. 19, 910 Grand St., Brooklyn, 718-782-7755. NY Studio Gallery: “Hotter Than July: A Sexploration.” Ends Feb. 12, 154 Stanton St., 212627-3276. OK Harris Works of Art: Steven Montgomery, Richard Hanson, Matthew Murray, Bruce Thurman, Elke Albrecht, Ken Morgan & John Thomas. Ends Feb. 19, 383 W. Broadway, 212-431-3600. Onishi Gallery: David Chang: “Sacred Dialogues.” Ends Feb. 11, 521 W. 26th St., 212-695-8035. The Pace Gallery: Tony Feher. Ends Feb. 12, 534 W. 25th St., 212-929-7000. Perry Rubenstein Gallery: Yves Oppenheim. Ends Feb. 12, 527 W. 23rd St., 212-627-8000. Postmasters Gallery: Jennifer & Kevin McCoy: “Abu Dhabi Is Love Forever.” Ends Feb. 19, 459 W. 19th St., 212-727-3323. Priska C. Juschka Fine Art: Amy Rathbone: “suchness.” Ends Feb. 12, 547 W. 27th St., 2nd Fl., 212-244-4320. Rooster Gallery: Judit Reigl: “New Works on Paper.” Ends Feb. 13, 190 Orchard St., no phone. Salmagundi Club: The Annual Black & White Exhibition. Ends Feb. 11, 47 5th Ave., 212-255-7740. Smack Mellon: “SITE 92: Work Permit Approved.” Ends Feb. 20, 92 Plymouth St., Brooklyn, 718834-8761. Spazio 522: Janet Mait: “New Shoes.” Ends March 24, 526 W. 26th St., Ste. 522, 212-929-1981. Stephen Haller Gallery: Linda Stojak: “From the Moment Passed.” Ends Feb. 19, 542 W. 26th St.,

212-741-7777.

Studio 601: Paul Kolker: “The Pandora Syndrome...

Go Gesundheit!” Ends Feb. 10, 511 W. 25th St., 212-367-7300. Team Gallery: Brice Dellsperger: “Refreshing Fassbinder...& others.” Ends Feb. 12, 83 Grand St., 212-279-9219. Ten43 Gallery: Abraham Yurberg. Ends Feb. 19, 1043 Madison Ave., 646-476-6341. Ubu Gallery: Judit Reigl: “Unfolding Unfolding.” Ends Feb. 12, 416 E. 59th St., 212-753-4444. Untitled: Phil Wagner. Ends Feb. 20, 30 Orchard St., 212-608-6002. Von Lintel Gallery: Allyson Strafella: “Worksight.” Ends Feb. 12, 520 W. 23rd St., 212-242-0599.

Museums American Folk Art Museum: “Perspectives: Forming

the Figure.” Ends August. “Quilts: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum.” Ends Oct. 16, 45 W. 53rd St., 212-265-1040. American Museum of Natural History: “Brain: The Inside Story.” Ends Aug. 15, Central Park West at West 79th Street, 212-769-5100. Asia Society & Museum: “A Prince’s Manuscript Unbound: Muhammad Juki’s Shahnamah.” Ends May 1, 725 Park Ave., 212-288-6400. Austrian Cultural Forum: “Alpine Desire.” Ends May 8, 11 E. 52nd St., 212-319-5300. Bronx Museum: “Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation With 21 Contemporary Artists.” Ends May 29, 1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx, 718-681-6000. Brooklyn Historical Society: “Home Base: Memories of the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field.” Ends Apr. 24. “It Happened in Brooklyn.” Ongoing, 128 Pierrepont St., Brooklyn, 718222-4111. Brooklyn Museum: “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains.” Feb. 18-May 15. “Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera.” Ends Apr. 10. Sam Taylor-Wood: “Ghosts.” Ends Aug. 14. “Lorna Simpson: Gathered.” Ends Aug. 21, 200 Eastern Pkwy., Brooklyn, 718-638-5000. Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum: “Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels.” Feb. 18-June 5. “Color Moves: Art & Fashion by Sonia Delaunay.” March 18-June 5, 2 E. 91st St., 212-849-8400. Frick Collection: “Rembrandt & His School: Masterworks from the Frick & Lugt Collections.” Feb. 15-May 15, 1 E. 70th St., 212-288-0700. International Center of Photography: “Wang Qingsong: When Worlds Collide.” Ends May 8. “Jasper, Texas: The Community Photographs of Alonzo Jordan.” Ends May 8. “Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms.” Ends

May 8, 1133 6th Ave., 212-857-0000.

Japan Society: “Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven

& Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art.” March 18-June 12, 333 E. 47th St., 212-832-1155. Jewish Museum: “Houdini: Art & Magic.” Ends March 27, 1109 5th Ave., 212-423-3200. Merchant’s House Museum: “19th-Century Valentines - Confections of Affection.” Ends Feb. 28, 29 E. 4th St., 212-777-1089. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Guitar Heroes: Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New York.” Ends July 4. “Cézanne’s Card Players.” Ends May 8. “Howard Hodgkin: Prints from the Collection, 1987-2002.” Ends Feb. 13. “Between Here & There: Passages in Contemporary Photography.” Ends Feb. 21. “The Roman Mosaic from Lod, Israel.” Ends Apr. 3. “Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand.” Ends Apr. 10. “Our Future Is in the Air: Photographs from the 1910s.” Ends Apr. 10. “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City.” Ends May 1. “Katrin Sigurdardottir at the Met.” Ends May 30. “Rugs & Ritual in Tibetan Buddhism.” Ends June 26. “Haremhab, The General Who Became King.” Ends July 4, 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710. Montclair Art Museum: “Warhol & Cars: American Icons.” March 6-June 19. “Will Barnet: A Centennial Celebration.” Ends July 17, 3 S. Mountain Ave., Montclair, N.J., 973-746-5555. The Morgan Library & Museum: “Mannerism & Modernism: The Kasper Collection of Drawings & Photographs.” Ends May 1. “The Changing Face of William Shakespeare.” Ends May 1. “The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives.” Ends May 22, 225 Madison Ave., 212-685-0008. El Museo del Barrio: “Luis Camnitzer.” Ends May 29, 1230 5th Ave., 212-831-7272. Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology: “Japan Fashion Now.” Ends Apr. 2. “His & Hers.” Ends May 10, Seventh Avenue at West 27th Street, 212-217-4558. Museum of American Finance: “America’s First IPO.” Ends March. “Scandal! Financial Crime, Chicanery & Corruption That Rocked America.” Ends Apr. 29, 48 Wall St., 212-908-4110. Museum of Arts & Design: “Eat Drink Art Design.” Ends Feb. 13. “Think Again: New Latin American Jewelry.” Ends Feb. 27. Patrick Jouin: “Design & Gesture.” Ends Apr. 17. “The Global Africa Project.” Ends May 15, 2 Columbus Cir., 212-299-7777. Museum of Jewish Heritage: “Project Mah Jongg.” Ends Feb. 27. “Last Folio: Remnants of Jewish Life in Slovakia.” Opens March 25. “Fire in My Heart: The Story of Hannah Senesh.” Ends Aug. 7. “The Morgenthaus: A Legacy of Service.” Ends Sept. 5, 36 Battery Pl., 646-437-4200.

Out of Town EVENTS & ATTRACTIONS WADSWORTH ATHENEUM: Rashaad Newsome exhib-

its his “MATRIX 161” collection—a four-part project combining framed collages, video spaces, a community performance project & an education gallery. His projects mesh high & low art to level the cross-cultural, socioeconomic playing field. Ends May 1, 600 Main St., Hartford, Conn., 860-278-2670, www. wadsworthatheneum.org.

THE RICHARD B. FISHER CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS: The American Symphony Orchestra

presents a season of Beethoven, Rachmaninoff & Sibelius. Feb. 11 & 12, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., 845-758-7900, fishercenter.bard.edu.

HESSEL MUSEUM OF ART: The Hessel Museum pres-

ents “Bulletin Board - Kirsten Mosher: Two Heads,” a project comprising videos, drawings, animations & installations that unite the flat with the three-dimensional. Ends March 11, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., 845-758-7598, www.bard.edu.

STERLING & FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE: The Clark

Art Institute presents “Eye to Eye: European Portraits 1450-1850,” a 30-piece collection that exhibits European portraiture across five centuries. Ends March 27, 225 South St., Williamstown, Mass.,413-458-2303, www. clarkart.edu.

FRANCES LEHMAN LOEB ART CENTER: “150 Years Later:

New Photography from Tina Barney, Tim Davis & Katherine Newbegin” presents the commissioned work of three renowned photographers illustrating the people, environment & hidden side of life at Vassar. Ends March 27, 124 Raymond Ave., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 845-437-5237, fllac.vassar.edu.

Museum of Modern Art: “Picasso: Guitars 1912-

1914.” Feb. 13-June 6. “Looking at Music 3.0.” Feb. 16-June 6. “Paula Hayes, Nocturne of the Limax maximus.” Ends Feb. 28. “Weimar Cinema, 1919-1933: Daydreams & Nightmares.” Ends March 7. “Counter Space: Design & the Modern Kitchen.” Ends May 2. “Andy Warhol: Motion Pictures.” Ends March 21. “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.” Ends Apr. 4. “On to Pop.” Ends Apr. 25. “Abstract Expressionist New York.” Ends Apr. 25. “Contemporary Art from the Collection.” Ends May 9, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400. Museum of the City of New York: “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment.” Ends May 1, 1220 5th Ave., 212-534-1672. New Museum: “Museum As Hub: The Accords.” Ends May 1. “Lynda Benglis.” Ends June 19. “George Condo: Mental States.” Ends May 8, 235 Bowery, 212-219-1222. New York Public Library: “Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.” Ends Feb. 27. “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love & Fallout.” Ends Apr. 17, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Print Gallery & Stokes Gallery, East 42nd Street & Fifth Avenue, 917-275-6975.

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART: The Yale Center

presents “Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power & Brilliance,” a retrospective featuring the portraiture of the famed Regency painter. The collection includes more than 50 works, many of which have never been seen by the public. Feb. 24-June 5, 1080 Chapel St.‚ New Haven‚ Conn., 203-432-2800, ycba.yale.edu.

Noguchi Museum: “On Becoming An Artist: Isamu

Noguchi & His Contemporaries, 1922-1960.” Ends Apr. 24, 33rd Road at Vernon Boulevard, Queens, 718-721-2308. Rubin Museum of Art: “Body Language: The Yogis of India & Nepal.” Ends May 30. “Embodying the Holy: Icons in Eastern Orthodox Christianity & Tibetan Buddhism.” Ends March 7. “Grain of Emptiness: Buddhism-Inspired Contemporary Art.” Ends Apr. 11. “The Nepalese Legacy in Tibetan Painting.” Ends May 23, 150 W. 17th St., 212-620-5000. Society of Illustrators: “Illustrators 53: Book & Editorial Exhibit.” Ends Feb. 19, 128 E. 63rd St., 212-838-2560. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: “The Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim: Found in Translation.” Feb. 11-May 1. “The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918.” Ends June 1. “Kandinsky at the Bauhaus, 1922-1933.” Ongoing, 1071 5th Ave., 212-423-3500. Studio Museum: “VideoStudio: Changing Same.” Ends March 13. “The Production of Space.” Ends March 13. “StudioSound: Matana Roberts.” Ends March 13. “Harlem Postcards: Fall/Winter 2010-11.” Ends March 13. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: “Any Number of Preoc-

Through February 20, 2011 Gallery 1: Deborah Brown: The Bushwick Paintings

Gallery 2: Fractured Earth: Theresa Hackett Nicola López Lothar Osterburg Fran Siegel

Fran Siegel, Overland 8, (detail) 2009 Ink, graphite and pigment on cut paper 90” x 134”

54 Orchard Street NY, NY 10002 212 410 6120 lesleyheller.com gallery hours: wed-sat 11am-6pm, Sun 12-6pm February 9, 2011 | City Arts

ArtsAGENDA cupations.” Ends March 13. Mark Bradford: “Alphabet.” Ends March 13, 144 W. 125th St., 212-864-4500. Whitney Museum of American Art: Charles LeDray: “workworkworkworkwork.” Ends Feb. 13. “Modern Life: Edward Hopper & His Time.” Ends Apr. 10, 945 Madison Ave., 212570-3600.

Auctions Christie’s: Christie’s Interiors. Feb. 9, 10 a.m. & 2,

20 Rockefeller Plz., 212-636-2000. Doyle New York: Belle Epoque: 19th & 20th Century Decorative Arts. Feb. 9, 10 a.m. Fine Jewelry & Contents of Abandoned Safe Deposit Boxes from Bank of America. Feb. 22, 10 a.m. The Estate of Lena Horne. Feb. 23, 10 a.m., 175 E. 87th St., 212-427-2730. ROGALLERY.com: Fine art buyers & sellers in online live art auctions. 800-888-1063, www.rogallery.com. Swann Auction Galleries: African-American Fine Art. Feb. 17, 2:30, 104 E. 25th St., 212-254-4710.

Art Events ActNow - New Voices in Black Cinema: BAMciné-

matek & the ActNow Foundation present an inaugural five-day film festival that reflects the spectrum of views within the African diasporan communities in Brooklyn & beyond. Ends Feb. 9, BAM, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-6364129, www.bam.org. Chelsea Art Gallery Tour: Participate in a guided tour of the week’s top seven gallery exhibits in the world’s center for contemporary art. Feb. 12, 526 W. 26th St., 212-946-1548, www.nygallerytours.com; 1, $20. The Roses: Paul Kasmin Gallery, in conjunction with New York City’s Department of Parks & Recreation & the Fund for the Park Avenue Sculpture Committee, announces Will Ryman’s “The Roses,” a new site-specific installation of towering rose blossoms. Ends May 31, Park Avenue Mall betw. East 57th & East 67th Streets, www. paulkasmingallery.com.

Music & Opera American Irish Historical Society: Concert pianist

Cathal Breslin performs with Trio Festivale. Feb. 17, 991 5th Ave., 212-288-2263; 6, $10+. Avery Fisher Hall: Andrey Boreyko conducts the New York Philharmonic with saxophonist Branford Marsalis in works by Haydn, Glazunov, Schulhoff & R. Strauss. Feb. 16-19, 10 Lincoln Center Plz., 212-875-5656; times vary, $30+. Avery Fisher Hall: Tenor Plácido Domingo returns to the New York Philharmonic for the first time in 11 years to perform a Valentine’s Day concert. Feb. 14, 10 Lincoln Center Plz., 212-875-5656; 8, $65+. Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch: Organist & conductor John Scott leads the TENET vocal ensemble in a program of tributes by composers designed for eight solo voices in a choral context. Feb. 12, 552 West End Ave., 917-349-9347; 7, $10+. Elebash Recital Hall: City of the World presents folk artist Merita Halili with Raif Hyseni. Feb. 14, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave., 212-8684444; 6:30, $9+. First Moravian Church: Harpsichordists Nickolai Sheikov & Elaine Comparone present a recital of old & new works for duo & solo harpsichords. Feb. 19, 154 Lexington Ave., 212-2801086; 8, $15+. Immanuel Lutheran Church: Soprano Jessica Gould & lutenist Dan Swenberg perform “Purcell The-

City Arts | www.cityartsnyc.com

atre Songs.” Feb. 9, 122 E. 88th St., 212-9679157; 1:15, free. Immanuel Lutheran Church: The Waits Trio performs “L’Apothéose de Corelli.” Feb. 16, 122 E. 88th St., 212-967-9157; 1:15, free. Juilliard: Juilliard’s annual recital by Paul Jacobs’ organ students takes place on the Holtkamp organ in Paul Hall and features six organists. Feb. 9, Paul Hall, 155 W. 65th St., 212-7697406; 8, free. Juilliard: Cellist Joel Krosnick performs solo works by Babbitt, Carter, Martino, Session, Shapey & Wernick. Feb. 10, Paul Hall, 155 W. 65th St., 212-769-7406; 8, free. Juilliard: The Metropolitan Opera & the Juilliard School present Bedrich Smetana’s “The Bartered Bride.” Feb. 15, 17 & 20, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 155 W. 65th St., 212-769-7406; times vary, $15+. Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church: Soprano Sharla Nafziger & pianist Thomas Bagwell perform as part of the “Music on Madison” series. Feb. 13, 921 Madison Ave., 212-288-8920; 3, $10+. Manhattan School of Music: The Manhattan School of Music Chamber Sinfonia & Chamber Choir perform Brazilian composer José Maurício Nunes-Garcia’s “Requiem” & Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major. Feb. 15, John C. Borden Auditorium, 120 Claremont Ave., 917-493-4428; 7:30, $5+. Merchant’s House Museum: “Love in the Parlors: A Valentine in Concert” features romantic songs & arias by 19th-century composers performed by members of the Bond Street Euterpean Singing Society. Feb. 14, 29 E. 4th St., 212-777-1089; 7, $15+. Merkin Concert Hall: Soprano Meagan Miller performs songs & arias by Barber, Wolf, Debussy, Faure & Beethoven in the annual Vidda Award Recital with pianist Brian Zeger. Feb. 9, 129 W. 67th St., 212-501-3300; 8, $10+. Miller Theatre: The music of Charles Ives is performed in a series of concerts featuring the Voxare String Quartet, pianist Stephen Gosling & soprano Sarah Wolfson. Ends Feb. 9, Philosophy Hall at Columbia University, 212-854-7799; 12:30, free. Saint Peter’s Church: The New York Composers Circle presents a concert of new music, with pianist Christopher Oldfather & violinist Andrea Schultz. Feb. 15, 619 Lexington Ave., no phone; 8, $20. Stern Auditorium: Pianist Mitsuko Uchida performs Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin & more. Feb. 11, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 8, $19.50+. Stern Auditorium: Zubin Mehta conducts the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, with guest pianist Yefim Bronfman, in works by Dorman, Liszt & Mahler. Feb. 22, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-2477800; 7, $41+. Stern Auditorium: Musica Sacra performs Handel’s “Israel in Egypt.” Feb. 23, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 8, $12.50+. Weill Recital Hall: Baritone Edward Parks & pianist Ken Noda perform Schubert’s complete “Winterreise” song cycle. Feb. 11, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 7:30, $42+. Weill Recital Hall: Norwegian trumpet virtuoso Tine Thing Helseth makes her New York recital debut with pianist Håvard Gimse. Feb. 18, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 7:30, $36+. Weill Recital Hall: Pianist & composer Gregg Kallor performs. Feb. 23, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 8, $15+. WMP Concert Hall: Violinist Jin Woo Lee & pianist Eunice Kim perform works by Chausson, Szymanowski & Mozart. Feb. 9, 31 E. 28th St., 212-582-7536; 12:30, $10.

Yale Club of New York: The new music ensemble

loadbang performs works by Yale composers. Feb. 23, 50 Vanderbilt Ave., 212-716-2100; 7, free. Zankel Hall: Pianist Jeremy Denk plays Bach & Ligeti. Feb. 16, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212247-7800; 7:30, $38+. Zankel Hall: Soprano Measha Brueggergosman performs works by Mozart, Schubert, Berg & others with pianist Justus Zeyen. Feb. 17, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 7:30, $42+.

Jazz 55 Bar: Sean Smith Quartet. Feb. 15, 55 Christopher

St., 212-929-9883; 7, free.

Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts: The

sounds of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington & more come alive in the “American Big Band” concert. Feb. 20, Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts, 2900 Campus Rd., Brooklyn, 718-951-4500; 2, $27. Jazz Gallery: Greg Ward Quartet. Feb. 10. Warren Wolf Quintet. Feb. 11. Donny McCaslin Quartet. Feb. 12. Ingrid Laubrock Trio. Feb. 17. Chris Dingman Quintet. Feb 18, 290 Hudson St., 212242-1063; times vary, $10+. Jazz Standard: Award-winning vocalist Tessa Souter performs with guitarist Jason Ennis, drummer Conor Meehan & bassist Charnett Moffett. Feb. 22, 116 E. 27th St., 212-576-2232; times vary, $20. Manhattan School of Music: The third-annual Charles Mingus High School Competition & Festival brings talented young jazz musicians from across the country to New York City. Feb. 18-21, locations vary, 120 Claremont Ave., 917493-4428; times vary, free+. Miles Cafe: Manhattan-based French vocalist Pascalito & his Brazilian musicians performs songs from his new album, “Neostalgia.” Feb. 9, 212 E. 52nd St., 212-371-7657; times vary, $20+. Miller Theatre: Drummer Neal Smith performs with his quartet as part of the season’s jazz series. Feb. 9, Philosophy Hall at Columbia University, 212854-7799; 8, $15+. Saint Peter’s Church: Friends gather for a memorial service honoring vocalist Myrna Lake. Feb. 21, 619 Lexington Ave., 212-935-2200; 7:15, free. Smoke: The Music of Tadd Dameron, featuring George Coleman & Joe Farnsworth. Feb. 11 & 12. One For All. Feb. 18 & 19, 2751 Broadway, 212-864-6662; times vary, $30. Zankel Hall: Carnegie Hall’s “Shape of Jazz” series continues with husband-&-wife jazz pianists Bill Charlap & Renee Rosnes. Feb. 9, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 8:30, $38+.

Dance Aspen Santa Fe Ballet: The company celebrates its 15

anniversary season in a program of contemporary dance. Feb. 22-27, The Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave., 212-242-0800; times vary, $10+. Balasole Dance Company: Roberto Villanueva’s company presents “Variations,” featuring 10 new solos & two group works. Feb. 11 & 12, Ailey Citigroup Theater, The Joan Weill Center for Dance, 405 W. 55th St., 212-868-4444; 8, $20+. Buglisi Dance Theatre: The Joyce hosts the world premiere of choreographer Jacqulyn Buglisi’s “Letter of Love on Ripped Paper.” Feb. 15-20, The Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave., 212-242-0800; times vary, $10+. Candy Mountain: Fantasy & reality collide in Walter Dundervill’s production. Feb. 16-19, Dance Theater Workshop, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19th St., 212-691-6500; 7:30, $20. Frameworks: DNA presents “Frameworks,” a semiannual film series of new choreography for the camera. Feb. 13, Dance New Amsterdam, 280

Broadway, 212-625-8369; 3, $5+.

Flamenco Hoy: Choreographers Rafael Estévez &

Nani Paños, with musical direction by Chano Domínguez, present one of the most popular contemporary flamenco shows in Spain by Carlos Saura. Feb. 16-20, New York City Center, 130 W. 56th St., 212-581-1212; times vary, $35+. New York Theatre Ballet: The company revives Merce Cunningham’s “Septet” at “Signatures II.” Feb. 11 & 12, Florence Gould Hall, 55 E. 59th St., 212-355-6160; 7, $25. OBject.obJECT: DNA presents an all-female triple bill production featuring works by Ximena Garnica, Jennifer Nugent & Adrienne Westwood. Feb. 17-20, Dance New Amsterdam, 280 Broadway, 212-625-8369; 8, $12+. Paul Taylor Dance Company: Paul Taylor presents two New York premieres & time-honored masterworks. Feb. 22-March 6, New York City Center, 130 W. 56th St., 212-581-1212; times vary, $10+. RAW Directions: The program presents three performances of new 15-minute works by its five participants. Feb. 10-12, Dance New Amsterdam, 280 Broadway, 2nd Fl., 212-625-8369; 8, $12+. Ronald K. Brown & Evidence: The company celebrates 25 years at The Joyce with the world premiere of “On Earth Together.” Ends Feb. 13, The Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave., 212-2420800; times vary, $10+.

Theater Billy Elliot: This Tony-winning adaptation of the

2000 film chronicles a young British boy’s desire to dance ballet in a poverty-choked, coal-mining town. Open run, Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45th St., 212-239-6200. La Casa de Bernarda Alba: Tyrannical mother Bernarda Alba attempts to dominate her five unmarried daughters, all of whom harbor a secret passion for the same man. Ends May 27, Repertorio Español, 138 E. 27th St., 212-225-9999. Chicago: The long-running revival of Kander & Ebb’s musical about sex, murder & celebrity continues to razzle-dazzle. Open run, Ambassador Theatre, 219 W. 49th St., 212-239-6200. Diary of a Madman: Geoffrey Rush stars in the adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s comic 1853 short story centered on the life of a minor civil servant in Russia. Feb. 11-March 12, BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., 718-636-4129. Driving Miss Daisy: James Earl Jones & Vanessa Redgrave star in Alfred Uhry’s play. Ends Apr. 9, Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St., 212-239-6200. Fuerza Bruta - Look Up: A visual dance-rave, technoride, Latino walking-on-the-ceiling fiesta from Buenos Aires. Open run, Daryl Roth Theatre, 101 E. 15th St., 212-239-2600. Gentrifusion: Six playwrights explore the gentrification of New York’s neighborhoods. Ends Feb. 13, The LABA Theatre at the 14th Street Y, 344 E. 14th St., 866-811-4111. Memphis - A New Musical: Set in the titular city during the segregated 1950s, this musical charts the romance between a white DJ & a black singer as rock-&-roll begins to emerge. Open run, Shubert Theatre, 225 W. 44th St., 212-239-6200. The Misanthrope: The Pearl Theatre Company performs Richard Wilbur’s translation of Molière’s comedic text, which tests the theory of opposites attracting in matters of love. Ends Feb. 20, New York City Center Stage II, 131 W. 55th St., 212581-1212. Spider-Man - Turn Off the Dark: Julie Taymor directs while Bono & The Edge provide the score as the comic-book classic hits Broadway. Opens March 15, Foxwoods Theatre, 213 W. 42nd St., 877-250-2929.

PainttheTOWN

By Amanda Gordon

The Sound Of History

Sofia Coppola; Rachel Feinstein and her daughter Flora.

Toys For Titans Jan. 27 at Lever House, one of Manhattan’s iconic buildings, owner Aby Rosen gazed upon the giant toy soldiers artist Rachel Feinstein has installed in the lobby. “It makes me think I’m in some sort of playland of corporate America,” said Rosen, an art collector and prominent businessman. Feinstein had Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen” on her mind. Her environment includes soldiers, a golden chariot, sculptures of goblins and children, beds of red roses and “The Snow Queen’s Room,” a lair done up in Carpenter Gothic style. Many guests looked like Snow Queens themselves, with their white fur coats or hats, among them the director of The New Museum, Lisa Phillips, and filmmaker Sofia Coppola. Feinstein played the part in an off-white velvet dress, her signature red lipstick and a retinue formed by her daughter and two sons. Before heading in to dinner, the artist chatted with Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. The Feinstein boys seemed to find the scene a bit much, weeping all over their beautiful suits. “We sent them home because they cried so much their lapels were soaked,” said Feinstein’s husband, artist John Currin. Among the adults attending were David Wassong, managing director of Soros Fund Management, designer Marc Jacobs, restaurateur Derek Sanders, biotechnology entrepreneur Deeda Blair and Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Amy Astley. Artists on the scene included Sarah Sze, who is working on a piece for the next segment on The High Line, Dana Schutz and Lisa Yuskavage. Artist John Newman said his “small, strange, unusual and intimate” sculptures will soon be on display at Knoedler & Co. Rosen, who commissioned the Feinstein piece, said he hasn’t invited artists to set up studios in the offices of Lever House. “There’s never any vacant space, it’s very desirable,” he said, adding after a pause, “There is a lot of art here.”

Real Nixons met their operatic kin backstage at the Metropolitan Opera during the premiere of Nixon in China. The president’s daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, and her son, Christopher Nixon Cox, visited the stage Nixons during the first intermission of John Adams’ epic comedy drama, which was inspired by Richard M. Nixon’s history-changing trip to China one snowy winter in 1972. “It’s overwhelming to think that 30 or 40 years ago the doors to China weren’t open,” said Christopher Nixon Cox, 31, adding that he goes to Beijing a couple of times a year to raise money from sovereign funds on behalf of his company, OC Above: Tricia Nixon Cox with James Global Partners LLC. Maddalena and Janis Kelly. Below: “To see a country growing up is an exciting Isabella Rossellini, Mark Morris and thing,” he said. Isaac Mizrahi. Tricia Nixon Cox said her parents called her from China on her birthday and brought back two cloisonne vases she still has. Her husband, Edward Cox, the New York State Republican chairman, said of the birthday call: “We were in Boston at Locke-Ober. The restaurant was surprised when they got a call from the president.” Edward also said Nixon’s yen to visit China dated from his days as a traveling businessman, years before becoming president. As the one-time first daughter posed for a photo with her stage parents, James Maddalena and Janis Kelly, she said, “Let’s lock arms. We used to do this in our family.” The opera, first heard in Houston in 1987, is generally polite to the dead president, though there is some reference to extreme sweating in the last act, which went on so long that one wished to rest in one of the several beds arrayed on the stage for the singers who spend their time dreaming or dying. The audience, which dwindled over the hours, clapped and cheered when the curtain dropped not long before midnight.

Photos: Amanda Gordon/Bloomberg News

Jill Kargman and Jacob Buchdahl.

Jackets, Book And Otherwise Jill Kargman celebrated her new book of essays, Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut, with a party at the Chanel boutique on East 57th Street. Being the daughter of the vice chairman of Chanel Inc., Arie L. Kopelman, she got to wear Chanel: a black leather dress with laser-cut camellias from the Paris-Shanghai collection, which her husband, Harry Kargman, described as “Coco meets Trent Reznor.” “It’s going back tomorrow,” said Jill. “No one wants to see a 36-year-old in a tight dress.”

Aby Rosen; Marc Jacobs.

Courtesy of Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News; agordon01@bloomberg.net February 9, 2011 | City Arts