cityArts November 3, 2009

NOV. 3-NOV. 16, 2009 Volume 1, Issue 9 Performance art biennial Performa kicks off.

Stephen Irwin at Invisible-Exports gallery.

Playwright

Tarell Alvin McCraney premieres a powerful triptych of new works about the black experience at The Public Theater

Joan Marcus

Kianne Muschett and Andre Holland in Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet, part of the Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney, running through December 13 at the The Public Theater.

BY CHRISTOPHER WALLENBERG arell Alvin McCraney is one of the most thrilling new voices in theater right now.

But if you haven’t heard of him, you’re not alone. The African-American writer just celebrated his 29th birthday and is only a few years out from the Yale School of Drama.

He has just a handful of produced plays so far but, considering the buzz his work has generated over the past couple of years, it won’t be long before the rest of the world—outside of New York and London—discovers this ambitious young talent.

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Although Wig Out!, his play about drag balls in Harlem and the colorful culture that surrounds them, became a minor hit at the Vineyard Theatre last winter, this fall marks a watershed moment in the young writer’s career, as his lyrical trilogy, presented under the umbrella rubric, The Brother/Sister Plays, has its world premiere at the Public Theater, following a run at the McCarter Theater in New Jersey last spring.

The triptych explores themes of identity, regret and freedom versus family responsibility.

It fuses the mythologies and rituals of West

Africa’s Yoruba culture with the harsh realities of the inner-city projects. McCraney’s plays are deeply poetic and visceral in their staging.

Presented in two parts, the trilogy is currently in previews at the Public and will have its official premiere Nov. 17.

Despite McCraney’s relative youth, his work has earned rapturous praise among theater cognoscenti, capturing London’s Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright as well as a NEA Outstanding New American Play award and The New York Times outstanding playwright award.

With such lofty expectations, questions about whether the hype will eclipse McCraney’s creative output have already surfaced. The playwright, however, says there’s simply no time to ponder these doubts. “I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant, but I literally don’t have time to think about any of that,” McCraney said recently, before heading off to rehearsals. “But I’m glad that I don’t have time to think too much about that. It’s much better that I’m just sort of working myself into a nosebleed.”

THEATER on page 8

Joseph W. Polisi, President

Wed, Nov 4 at 8 • Paul Hall at Juilliard

Grits, Gravy & Groove with Juilliard Jazz Ensembles AND WATCH OUT FOR – Tues, Dec 1 at 8 Paul Hall

Juilliard Jazz Ensembles’ Evening with Branford Marsalis as they tackle Marsalis' challenging music in this post-Thanksgiving workout FREE; standby lines form at 7 pm

Mon, Nov 9 at 8 • Alice Tully Hall Works by composers living & working in China Today

New Juilliard Ensemble Joel Sachs, Conductor Mimi Yu, Cello Chen Tao, Dizi Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: A Festival Celebrating Chinese Culture LI SHAOSHENG Skyline on the Moon (World Premiere) ZHU JIAN-ER Symphony No. 4, Op. 31, 6.4.2-1, for Chinese flute and 22 strings (Western Hemisphere Premiere) and works by YE XIAOGANG, JIA DAQUN, GUO WENJING, LIU SOLA Presented by Juilliard in partnership with Carnegie Hall FREE tickets, Juilliard Box Office

Wed & Fri, Nov 11 & 13 at 8; Sun, Nov 15 at 2 Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Juilliard

ARIODANTE

George Frideric Handel

Stephen Wadsworth, Director Gary Thor Wedow Conducts the Juilliard Orchestra and singers from Juilliard Vocal Arts Tickets: $20, CenterCharge (212) 721-6500 1/2-price for students & seniors, TDF only at Juilliard Box Office

2 Special Appearances by Alfred Brendel Thurs, Nov 19 at 6 • Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Light and Shade of Interpretation Known as one of classical music’s most thoughtful and communicative interpreters, Alfred Brendel shares his expertise in this multi-media presentation seen for the first time in the U.S. Tickets $10, Juilliard Box Office or CenterCharge (212) 721-6500

Sun, Nov 22 at 2 • Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Alfred Brendel on Schubert Via performances by featured young artists from Juilliard and The Academy of Schubert’s vocal, chamber, and solo music programmed and coached by Mr. Brendel.

FREE, tickets required

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All tickets for Alfred Brendel appearances available 11/5 at the Juilliard Box Office

EDITOR Jerry Portwood jportwood@manhattanmedia.com

Thurs, Nov 19 at 8 • Alice Tully Hall

MANAGING EDITOR Adam Rathe arathe@ manhattanmedia.com

Susanna Phillips Soprano

ART DIRECTOR Jessica Balaschak

13th Annual Alice Tully Vocal Arts Debut Recital Craig Terry, Piano MENDELSSOHN Frühlingslied; Auf Flügeln des Gesanges; Andres Maienlied 'Hexenlied' FAURÉ Les roses d'Ispahan; Nell; Après un rêve; Adieu PHILIP LASSER In Colors of Feelings World Premiere commissioned for Ms. Phillips, poetry by Wynelle Ann Carson MESSIAEN from Poèmes pour Mi: Action de graces; Paysage; La maison; Le collier; E´pouvante STRAUSS Der Stern; Muttertändelei; Rote Rosen; Als Mir Dein Lied Erklang Tickets $20 and $15, CenterCharge (212) 721-6500 1/2-price for students & seniors, TDF only at the Alice Tully Hall Box Office

Wendy Hu

Juilliard 155 W. 65th St. Box Office open M-F, 11AM-6PM • (212) 769-7406 • www.juilliard.edu

9 out of 10 Juilliard students need financial aid to attend.

If you can help provide scholarship support for the young artists who make these free concerts possible, please contact Juilliard at (212) 799-5000 ext. 278 or see www.juilliard.edu/giving

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he naked dancers bounced and jounced on stage as they covered each other in stage blood and pretended to nibble one another with false fangs. Later Neal Medlyn stood on a red tumbling mat for his unusual ode to Britney Spears that mixed experimental music, wrestling, video and a few other mediums that haven’t yet been labeled. It was a strange evening of performance at Dance Theater Workshop—even by their standards.

One of the privileges of working in arts journalism is that we have access to a wide array of cultural offerings—from classical pianists to paint-splattering aerialists—without the anxiety of forking over large amounts of money for disappointing performances. I enjoy a grungy Tribeca dance studio just as much as sitting in orchestra seats at the Met, as long as I’m witnessing something that challenges and inspires me .

This issue focuses on a full spectrum of emerging talent—from the quirky to the more mainstream—that should be thrilling to experience. Our cover story looks closely at an exciting new voice in theater, 29-year-old Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose edgy work is being produced at The Public Theater this month. Yuja Wang is a young pianist who, at the age of 22, Jay Nordlinger already trumpets as a rousing performer. We also look at the potential in this year’s Performa, the biennial of performance art. When Futurism gets a stage and a bullhorn, there’s no telling what may happen.

But don’t worry, we’re not dazzled only by the young and the new. We also have pieces that look at maestros and dancers more seasoned with age, such as the two documentaries out this month that profile Valery Gergiev and Brigitte Lefèvre of the Paris Opera Ballet. Lance Esplund revisits the abstractions of Georgia O’Keeffe, currently on display at the Whitney, and still finds lots of sex. And Howard Mandel explores the tough sounds of reeds player Henry Threadgill. He’s still challenging jazz listeners at the age of 65.

Speaking of jazz, look for our next issue Nov. 17, which will focus on the vibrant musical form that is so closely entwined with our city. The issue is dedicated to one of the most acclaimed jazz musicians of his generation, Wynton Marsalis, who receives the French Legion of Honor Nov. 6 and has helped shape the city and its culture in innumerable ways. We’ll also check in with some of the top jazz vocalists, look at the places we frequent to hear the sounds of trumpets and drums and a few other surprises.

But let me stop there. I need to get ready for that five-hour epic play about a lily and its quest to become a man. See, told you I was up for anything.

JERRY PORTWOOD Editor Ves Pitts

Juilliard

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InBrief it’s about a barter system, and it’s about being in a vitrine. Your work, your labor is in a vitrine in a sense. Where one works is suddenly on display.”

Guth typically works in video, photography, sculpture and performance, and her last piece, “Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping,” was showcased at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Guth explained public participation will largely influence the look of her latest project.

“If I only end up with the few bags I have right now, something could be made,” Guth said. “If we get piles and piles of things, that will have a completely different persona. That’s the nature of the work-energy principle.”

She plans to donate unused materials from the project to organizations like Housing Works. Guth, who understands the “trash-totreasure” element of the artwork, said she is also considering holding a clothing swap at the studio. (Jordan Galloway)

One man’s trash is MK Guth’s treasure.

Closet Case Bags of donated clothing started filling MK Guth’s apartment soon after the artist announced she needed clothing cast offs. As the opening date approached for her new exhibition, “This Fable is Intended for You: A Work-Energy Principle,” she realized she’d have to take her search for clothing handouts public. So Guth is now inviting New Yorkers to clean out their closets and provide her material for the conceptual work.

“When people hand you a bag of materials, it tells you something about them,” Guth said. “Maybe they have kids.

Maybe they’re into dyeing clothing. Maybe they work with fabric. Maybe they collect T-shirts. It tells you something about them, which is interesting.”

Guth encourages people to bring unwanted materials—sweaters, socks, sheets, yarn, rags or any unusable fabrics—to her temporary studio at an empty, retail storefront at One New York Plaza—corner of Water and Whitehall streets, where donations will be accepted through early December. “It’s

an unusual place to make art,” Guth said.

“It’s an old, retail space in Lower Manhattan.

This isn’t the hub of the art world in any way, and that’s interesting to me that this place that’s not known as a hub for art can become activated. And art can be a device to connect the narratives of the people in the neighborhood.”

The Portland, Ore.-based artist will take apart the donated material and reconfigure it into braids, ropes and cords, which will become an integral part of her exhibition and performance art piece, which is sponsored by arts World Financial Center and will be presented as part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in January at the World Financial Center.

While the area’s anemic environment is not often associated with artistry, Guth sees the potential for transformation in the space.

“It’s in a very particular environment,” Guth said. “I see that not as a deficit, but something that can add to the content of the work and what happens. It animates a retail space in a very different way than it would normally be about. It’s not about commerce,

The Diva’s Back 1984 was a memborable year for more than just George Orwell fans. That was also the year a major new soprano also emerged in the world of opera: Aprile Millo. Millo had just joined the Young Artist’s Program at the Metropolitan Opera and had sung Verdi’s “Ernani” in the parks. Major stage debuts were still in the future as far as New York City was concerned.

But that was to change fast. Her first regular stage appearance in New York City was under the auspices of the Opera Orchestra of New York in the Young Artist cover cast performance of Rossini’s William Tell at Lehman Center.

“Actually it was three weeks before what would be the surprise debut at the Met,” Millo remembered during a recent interview. She jumped in for an ailing soprano in the Met’s Simon Boccanegra on Dec. 3, 1984. Millo’s initial successes led to a collaboration with Eve Queler and Opera Orchestra that included La Battaglia di Legnano, I Lombardi, La Wally, Il Pirata, Adriana Lecouvreur and La Fanciulla

del West, among others. Flash forward 25 years and Opera Orchestra is now fighting for its life, canceling its entire opera in concert season (including a Medea that would have starred Millo). Instead, the company is replacing it with a season of their signature artists in recital.

“When Eve Queler determined to try and tread water during a difficult time, I said, ‘How may I help you? Why don’t I do a recital for you, you don’t have to pay me,’” Millo said. “I think it is very nice to celebrate 25 years in front of a New York public. Eve, over time, has given me so many chances, expanding my repertoire to show different things to New York. It has been an enormous collaboration, so I was very happy to help.”

This is actually Millo’s first recital in the city. Why did it take so long? “I thought it was overkill: I was at the Met for 18 seasons straight...I waited until the right opportunity, and I think that this is a very nice celebration to draw attention to the fact that the Opera Orchestra is not going anywhere, it’s alive.”

Being an individualist, Millo stresses that this will not be a “regular” recital, and she has enlisted many friends to help her put together something unique. “I felt the first half would

Aprile Millo

November 3, 2009 | City Arts

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InBrief be most interesting if it was a recital proper, taken from the world of lieder, art song and canzone italiane, showing how the voice sounds wed with many other instruments.”

Millo explained that the second half will be pretty much exclusively opera. Among those joining Millo in Frederick Rose Hall on Nov. 17, will be tenor Michael Fabiano, baritone Luis Ledesma and cellist Lynn Harell with Lucy Arner on piano.

“I wanted to give a little love letter to New York and thank them for watching me grow up and for having been so supportive and wonderful.” (Eli Jacobson)

Persians for Peace Hafez Nazeri is a revolutionary from Iran. A cultural revolutionary. With his government’s blessing, Nazeri will debut his Rumi Symphony Project: Cycle One this fall and will be the first Iranian musician ever to headline Carnegie Hall when he takes the stage Nov. 14, with a show titled Iranian Sounds of Peace.

“Every day you hear about bloodshed, people are dying [from that part of the world],” explained the handsome 30-year-old.

“So it’s good to show another dimension of our culture.”

Nazeri studied Western music at New York’s Mannes College of Music at the New School, and he had to start from scratch since he didn’t even know Western music notation.

But he felt learning the classical tradition was essential to his goal of bridging the cultures.

The music blends 13th-century mystic poets’ verses into a musical “message of unity. We are all human beings, sharing a similar course,” Nazeri said. What makes Nazeri’s new work “revolutionary,” however, is that it blends

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with talented musicians setting music to the Sufi Poet’s words, which made a 20-city tour across Iran. He set attendance records, playing to 140,000 people in Tehran. He also recently performed “Rite of Fall: Mehregan” Oct. 3 in Los Angeles.

“I feel responsible for people in Iran and for the world,” he said. “Music is a universal language that shows how you can bring love to people.” (Gwen Orel)

The Maestro Machine Peacenik: Hafez Nazeri

Western classical music with Iranian sounds.

“There are so many cross-cultural projects, but most of the time one of the concepts dominates the other one,” he said. “This music is like the child of an Iranian father and Western mother—just as much one as the other.”

Musicians performing with him at Carnegie Hall—who will all sit on the ground in traditional Persian style—include artists from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center such as Paul Neubauer and Ida Kavafian, as well as Hussein Zahawy and Salar Nader on percussion. Though the work uses Persian poetry and structure, there are no “quartertones,” a hallmark of Persian music. Nazeri will also sing and play the “Hafez,” his creation, based on the traditional Iranian setar—the first modern Iranian instrument. His father, Sharam Nazeri, is called “the Iranian Pavarotti” in his homeland and was the first to set Rumi’s Sufi poetry to music more than 40 years ago. He’ll be sharing the stage with his son and lending his legendary vocals to the occasion.

Nazeri is a superstar in his home country.

He formed the Rumi Ensemble in 2000,

In the opening scene of director Allan Miller’s new film about the acclaimed Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, the sweaty-browed maestro poises his baton over a student orchestra in Rotterdam. “I’m important now,” he says, daring the musicians to better respond to his stick. “You cannot start without me.”

The 86-minute film, aptly titled You Cannot Start Without Me: Valery Gergiev, Maestro, running through Nov. 8 at Symphony Space, is a window into the life of Gergiev, international conductor and director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.

Throughout the film, Gergiev conducts everywhere—from the Metropolitan Opera to the London Symphony Orchestra—and builds the Mariinsky, a famed Russian ballet theater and opera house, into musical prominence.

Produced by Thirteen, a PBS affiliate, the film was directed by Miller, who previously won an Academy Award for the documentary From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China.

“I’ve been making films about musicians for 35 or 40 years, and was never able to make one about a conductor,” Miller explained.

“They are elusive and private, and it’s hard to get in a situation where the conductor and orchestra would be comfortable.”

Persuading Gergiev to cooperate wasn’t easy at first. “He threw all kinds of roadblocks and tests,” Miller said. “We’d meet in New York in February, and he’d say, ‘The next time I can talk to you is the sixth of April in Miami.’ So I’d say, ‘What time?’” Miller’s persistence paid off, and he was eventually given the access he desired.

The most telling scenes of the film are the rehearsals, in which a stubble-chinned, sweat-drenched Gergiev coaxes, cajoles and yells at his orchestras to play the music that the maestro hears in his head. “The playing of modern orchestras is usually very good,” Gergiev says. “That doesn’t mean it’s always very interesting.” The rehearsal scenes, and entire film, are saturated with Russian music: Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff. “He is very dedicated to keeping the culture of Russian composers and compositions alive,” Miller explained.

“The biggest challenge was to show what a conductor does to a lay audience,” said producer Margaret Smilow, who has worked with Miller on previous music documentaries.

“We wanted to show not only the work that he does, but also his humanity.”

Connecting the rehearsal scenes are a series of interviews with important players in Gergiev’s life, endless train and plane trips and a brief interview with Gergiev’s wife and children. Miller insisted that the busy 56year-old conductor has an ability for greater focus than most, and all the rushing around doesn’t detract from his music making. “The greatest capacity he has is to be 100 percent focused on whatever he’s doing, and then to change 100 percent to something else,” Miller said. “He’s not thrashing and dashing around, he’s just living every minute.”

(Corinne Ramey)

calling card that pairs Grady’s love of music and independent film. In choosing these titles, Grady thinks about a certain cultural eclecticism that he shares with his potential clientele.

“I’m going for niche films that I see and think are great,” Grady explained. “I try to think about what people who like Frownland and Chicago punk and Sufjan Stevens would be into.”

Grady earned a business degree from the University of New Hampshire, and soon after went to Columbia College in Chicago to study film. He joined then newly formed Plexifilm

as its head of production in 2002, overseeing the company’s theatrical and video releases.

Plexifilm produces and releases a range of independently minded films both in theaters and on DVD and served as a model for Factory 25. The company remains a modest operation, with Grady its only full-time employee.

As much as the physical object stands at the center of Factory 25’s mission statement, Grady is no technophobe. He wants to offer streaming content to viewers through Factory 25’s online store (www.factorytwentyfive.com), and is also

trying to get the company’s films on iTunes.

He hopes that this multiplatform approach will provide viewers with enough high-quality options while he, along with everyone else, tries to figure out the next evolution in indie film distribution.

“The whole industry is trying to scramble and figure out what works,” Grady said. “I don’t think anyone knows the answers. I’m trying to keep it small and manageable and make something physical that people want, without ignoring the direction that video distribution is going.” (Matt Connolly)

Factory 25’s Frownland DVD packaging

The Vinyl Solution At a moment when DVD sales continue to decline and new releases can often be downloaded (legally or otherwise) days after their theatrical release, Matt Grady has taken a bit of a gamble. The 39-year-old founder of Factory 25, a new independent film and music label based out of Brooklyn, is betting that you’ll still shell out some money for a DVD—or even a vinyl record—so long as what you’re getting is more than just a disc in a plastic case.

Take Frownland, Ronald Bronstein’s deeply polarizing debut feature and one of Factory 25’s inaugural DVD releases.

If you choose to purchase the $30 “LTD LP/DVD” version of the film (as opposed to the $20 standard edition), you’ll receive the following: snippets of 16mm film from a print of the movie; the film’s poster; a collection of comics purportedly drawn by one of the film’s emotionally disturbed characters; “e-mails” written between two other characters and a vinyl record of the movie’s eerie score.

That’s quite a lot of love for a film that radically divided critics and did nothing at the box office. “I think less and less people are buying the physical thing, but if people see that is nice and distinct, they will want to have it,” Grady said.

Of course, we shouldn’t be expecting the Factory 25 edition of Transformers 2 anytime soon. As with other specialty DVD labels like the Criterion Collection, Factory 25 focuses upon idiosyncratic films that appeal to niche audiences. The company’s other releases include Damon and Naomi: 1001 Nights, an anthology of the eponymous musical duo’s videos and live performances from 2001 through 2009; the documentary You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-1984; and the fauxdocumentary/teen comedy High School Record.

All releases come with their own vinyl recording appropriate to the film’s content: a company November 3, 2009 | City Arts

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MUSEUMS

Reductio ad Abstraction The Whitney’s show of Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstractions disempowers abstract art and abstractionists

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from 1918, O’Keeffe has created “291” gallery of Modern a vague, curving, Art Nouveauart in New York, discovlike form reminiscent of the prow ered O’Keeffe. Beginning of a ship, the crest of a wave, a in 1916 he exhibited her dragon’s tail, a clitoral hood and work, and in 1924 she and licking flame. In other paintings, Stieglitz were married. she combines qualities of flower But O’Keeffe’s career, and cloud or water and fire. The and this exhibition, is a Surrealist painting “At the Rodeo, gloss that suggests that art New Mexico” (1929) is a large (and especially abstract bloodshot eye. In the murky art) is not—or at least watercolor “Blue II” (1916), a form does not have to be—as curls up inside itself like an animal difficult as the experts in its shell. It is an internal picture, have made it out to be. one of hiding and gestation; but, The show, because of its actually turning in on itself, the revisionist insistence on form, as with most in O’Keeffe’s O’Keeffe the “abstractionwork, has not enough frontal presist,” the rebel, disemsure, no formal presence—life. It powers abstract art and just sits there looking pretty. abstract artists.

Rather than distill and reinvent Organized by Barbara the world, as Kandinsky does, Haskell—with assistance O’Keeffe pares away excess until from Barbara Buhler forms lose the particularities that Lynes, Bruce Robertson, make them unique. She creates Elizabeth Hutton Turner empty vessels into which we can and Sasha Nicholas—the pour our interpretations. This exhibition posits that might be a relief for anyone who O’Keeffe was, or at least believes that abstraction is anybegan her career as, a thing that one wants it to be; that “radical” abstract painter. if you can’t recognize it, then it This supposition (based must be abstract; and that the proin part on O’Keeffe’s cess of making an abstract work own misunderstanding of art is to start with something of what, exactly, she was representational and then merely doing as a painter) is to simplify, simplify, simplify. inherently flawed.

This seems to have been Just what kind of O’Keeffe’s process. The artist painter was O’Keeffe? supposedly wept when she read Inspired by early Kanreviews that suggested her art dinsky, Asian art, Arthur was sexually symbolic. And yet Dow, Arthur Dove and O’Keeffe continued to make picMarsden Hartley, among Georgia O’Keeffe Abstraction, 1926. Oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 18 1/16 in. tures that were blatantly, inescapothers, she was a meably tied to the sexual organs of diocre though seductive plants. As an artist, she refused ral of reduction, rather than that of synthesis, American Romantic and to take responsibility for the metaphoric and Symbolist—possibly a semi-abstract—painter exploration and expansion.

For O’Keeffe, to abstract is to pare down, symbolic range of her subjects. She turned but never truly an abstractionist. O’Keeffe her back on the very tradition she practiced. simplify, generalize and reduce; to remain watered down European Modernism into Seemingly wanting to have her cake and eat it forever at the outskirts of thematic commitsomething easily grasped. In illustrative, too, she worked out her own erotic impulses ment. Abstraction is a process of avoidance wishy-washy fashion, she rode the fence in pictures but got upset when viewers called for her, rather than of pursuit and investigabetween abstraction and representation. her on it. She refused to accept, to commit tion. Her forms, at once both everything And she produced some lovely, light-filled to, her chosen themes—which leaves her and nothing, remain forever decorative and pictures along the way. However, relying on pictures without direction or power. Ultipining, in search of a subject to call home. the marriage of literal natural forms, rather mately, O’Keeffe’s work is an art driven not by Some of O’Keeffe’s forms recall crevices. than on the dynamics, growth, structure and abstraction but by ambivalence.

Some suggest the folds of cloth, the depths relationships of nature, O’Keeffe narrowed of a furnace, the rings of a tree, the spiral how her pictures can be read and experiGeorgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction through Jan. 17. of a nautilus shell. But their associations enced. Too reliant on and tied to the natural Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madiconfine, rather than free them. “things” that she loved and that inspired her, son Ave. (at E. 75th St.), 212-570-3600.

In a series of sunset-colored paintings O’Keeffe’s process was one of an inward spi© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

BY LANCE ESPLUND eorgia O’Keeffe’s drawings and paintings can be dark, reticent and mercurial. They can be overt, candy-colored and erotically charged. Her sleek, softfocus renderings (loose conflations of body and nature) can suggest flowers, landscapes, buildings, bones, skies, shells, flesh, water, fire and vulva—without committing necessarily to any one particular thing. Seemingly seen upclose and larger than life, O’Keeffe’s posterscale forms are simultaneously clinical and impersonal, confessional and heartfelt. They are private fragments that have been exposed and dramatized—magnified to emblematic, if not iconic, stature.

O’Keeffe’s curving and swelling forms entice and soothe. And they make few demands on the viewer. Precise, provocative and pretty, they encourage a free association that allows you to wander, childlike, among natural phenomenon—searching for animals in clouds. O’Keeffe’s pictures provide literal freedom without reprimand; a freedom in which one can locate not only stamen and pistil among their ambiguous and androgynous forms but also (if you are feeling a little bit randy) phallus, anus and labia majora and minora.

And what could be better in art than that? Because isn’t art, especially abstract art, whatever you want it to be? Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), and the big show Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, would have you think so.

Docents, of course, are not the be-all and end-all of authority on art, but they can be read as museum-show barometers. I overheard one at the Whitney emphatically remark that, isn’t it nice for a change—implying that O’Keeffe’s pictures are easier to swallow than those of other abstractionists—to be able to interpret her pictures however you choose? A group of blue-haired women (visibly relaxing, going with the flow)—standing before O’Keeffe’s blatantly vaginal, four-foot-high painting “Gray Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow” (1923/25)—all nodded eagerly in agreement.

And you can feel a collective sigh of viewer-relief among the more than 130 paintings, drawings, watercolors and sculptures in the Whitney’s handsome exhibition. You can also feel visitors’ eyebrows and temperatures rise among the show’s small gathering of Alfred Stieglitz’s beautifully animated and infamously erotic photographic portraits of O’Keeffe, who became his model. Stieglitz, the photographer and tastemaker who directed the pioneering

CULTURE

The Future of the Past

Lincoln Center presents

BY KURT GOTTSCHALK This cramped Chelsea office could be mistaken for a telemarketing operation, except for the small bookshelf lined with titles like Delirious New York and Women Artists of Italian Futurism. The hive activity is in fact the epicenter of Performa, the biennial of performance art that returns this November for its third time to celebrate the most maligned of conceptual art forms. The event will also celebrate one of the most misunderstood movements in art since this is the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. With over 300 events in 80 venues across the city, Performa 09 runs the gamut from Malcolm McLaren’s performance lecture, “Jesus Christ is a Sausage,” to an ambitious multiple-artist remake of the lost 1916 film Vita Futurista. Like the film, much of the Futurists’ work has been lost over the decades.

“Most Futurist films were destroyed, either they burned them or they were destroyed during the war,” explained Lana Wilson, Performa’s publication and publicity director. “The films showed things like how the Futurist walks, as opposed to the ‘passive neutralist.’ Despite all of their problems, like fascism and misogyny, they could do some things really well, like multi-media work and engaging the senses.”

It is, in short, a month to live in the future of the past. The Futurist vision included works in theater, film, happenings, visual and sound arts—even cooking. In February, Performa celebrated the actual anniversary of the Manifesto’s publication with a dinner of absurdist food for 200 guests, all made from The Futurist Cookbook.

The next few weeks include a staggering lineup of artists. Musicians Ulrich Krieger, Alan Licht, Christian Marclay and Lee Ranaldo will accompany a screening of the 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City at the High Line Park 14th Street overpass. French choreographer Anne Collod will restage Anna Halprin’s 1965 work “Parades & Changes.”

South African artist Candice Breitz’s stageplay New York, New York will be performed simultaneously by two casts of identical twins. Polish artist Christian Tomaszewski borrows from Soviet visions of the future for his enormous cosmonaut spacesuit, which will house a fashion show featuring classic and newly designed spacewear. Liz Mogel will lead a walking tour that melds urban geography and street theater into a vision of New York’s future.

Artist and musician Mike Kelley will present three short dance pieces based on his 2005 video installation Day is Done, which in turn was based on high school yearbook photos of extracurricular activities. Kelly is also curating a night of “noise music” with pieces by

Courtesy of Jérome Delatour, Dance Theater Workshop and Performa.

Performa 09 celebrates Futurism with a staggering lineup of artists

Anne Collod’s “ Parades & Changes” John Cage, Rhys Chatham, Fred Frith, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Zorn. And No Waver cum Brasilia producer Arto Lindsay will open the month with an “art parade” in Times Square.

“Arto has been doing these Rio-styled carnival parades with dancers, artists and musicians,” Turner said. “He did it at the Viennese biennial. He has a piece composed for us for cell phones and mp3 players.”

But the most exciting of the many events is Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners, a Town Hall concert of original scores and new commissions for the intonarumori, a sort of din-producing hurdy-gurdy invented by Luigi Russolo in 1913. Einstuezende Neubauten frontman Blixa Bargeld, minimalist saxophonist John Butcher, drone pioneer Pauline Oliveros, avant rock vocalist Mike Patton, downtown guitarist Elliott Sharp and violin experimenter Tony Conrad take the stage Nov. 12 to respond to the replicas of these early sound machines, constructed by composer and musicologist Luciano Chessa.

“This is the very first reconstruction of Russolo’s first intonarumori ensemble of 16 instruments,” Chessa said. “A great deal of the instruments included have never been reconstructed before, among them the scoppiatori, the gorgogliatori and the sibilatore. When Performa commissioned me to reconstruct these instruments, I immediately pictured the intonarumori on a stage, in performance mode. Never in this process did I divorce the historical reconstruction project, with its obvious need for historical accuracy, from the performance project.”

In truth, only about a third of the events are Futurist related, although savvy attendees can enjoy playing dot-to-dot dogma by force-fitting doctrine onto different dates. The future, after all, is unwritten.

Performa 09, Nov. 1 through 22, various locations. For a complete schedule visit performa-arts.org.

Pictures Reframed

Stifters Dinge

Adventurous pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and acclaimed visual artist Robin Rhode collaborate to reinvent Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in a live performance transformed by video and imagery.

Heiner Goebbels, conception, music, and direction

Fri–Sat, Nov 13–14 at 8:00 Alice Tully Hall, Starr Theater Tickets from $50 Statoil is the Commissioning Sponsor of Pictures Reframed Pictures Reframed is sponsored by EMC2

Five pianos as in-motion sculptural works playing without performers, haunting texts, projected imagery, and wind and mist are combined in this unique, fantastical environment.

Wed–Thur, Dec 16–17 at 8:00 Fri, Dec 18 at 7:00 and 10:00 Sat, Dec 19 at 3:00, 7:00, and 10:00 Sun, Dec 20 at 2:00 Park Avenue Armory 643 Park Ave between 66th and 67th Sts. Tickets: $55 Presented in association with Park Avenue Armory

“Ms. Mitchell’s artistic daring has steered her into works of brilliance.”

—The New York Times

The Donmar Warehouse production of

Four Quartets Stephen Dillane performs T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, followed by the Miró Quartet’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Op.132, which originally inspired the timeless text. Directed by Katie Mitchell.

Wed–Thur, Dec 2–3 at 8:00

Stephen Dillane

Katie Mitchell

Baryshnikov Arts Center 450 West 37th St. Tickets: $50 Co-presented by Baryshnikov Arts Center

New Visions is made possible in part by The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Inc. Corporate support is provided by

Endowment support is provided by UBS Official Sponsors

Movado is an Official Sponsor of Lincoln Center, Inc. WNBC/WNJU are Official Broadcast Partners of Lincoln Center, Inc. Continental Airlines is the Official Airline of Lincoln Center, Inc.

One Evening Actor Stephen Dillane’s performance of Samuel Beckett’s poetry and prose is interwoven with British tenor Mark Padmore’s expressive account of Schubert’s Winterreise, directed by Katie Mitchell.

Wed–Fri, Dec 9–11 at 8:00 Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College 899 Tenth Ave between 58th and 59th Sts. Tickets from $40

Nokia is the Official Mobile Equipment Provider of Lincoln Center, Inc. MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center, Inc.

Photos: Chalk Piano 2 (no.6) © Robin Rhode; Dillane: Johan Persson; Mitchell: Stephen Cummiskey

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November 3, 2009 | City Arts

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McCraney does admit to brushing up against uncertainty and hesitation at times.

“I do have self-doubt, but it’s self-doubt in the sense that I’ve always had—the fear that comes with trying anything and whether or not you’re willing to work for it. That moment where you say, ‘OK, this thing I’m trying isn’t really working. Why is it not working? How do I know? When will I know?’ You have to have that kind of conversation with yourself and keep challenging yourself.”

Robert O’Hara, who’s directing Brothers Size and Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet, the second two plays in the trilogy, was first attracted to McCraney’s work because of its rich and theatrical use of language, myth and what he calls the “poetic vulgarity” of McCraney’s words.

“The language fits in the mouths of actors in a very potent way that is both contemporary and also mythical,” O’Hara said. “I can see his voice emerging. And it’s exciting that he’s still a very young playwright who has a lot to say—and isn’t afraid to say it so boldly.”

Each play in the trilogy—the third is In the Red and Brown—is deeply influenced and informed by the synthesized spiritual beliefs and rituals of the black American descendants of West Africa. The trilogy is a complex work that deftly links the contemporary AfricanAmerican experience—particularly of the poor, urban and resilient variety—with the

legends and myths of the Yoruba.

“When I was growing up, these mythologies crept into my folklore. These were the stories I would hear around town,” McCraney explained. “Basically I learned that there was a merging between an African culture that was retained during slavery and the Christian beliefs and rituals [they had adopted]. I always thought that was beautiful; that mixing together is what the trilogy is all about.”

He likens this mash-up to the methods of hip-hop. “It’s about taking something that is fragmented and older and mixing it with something more liquid, fluid and new, and then making a brand new brick out of it,” he said. “It’s what a hip-hop artist does. Like you sample and then break up an Aretha Franklin soul song or you break up a Tito Puente samba into fragments, and then you combine it with something more fluid and more contemporary, and then you make something brand new out of that merger.”

Set in the inner-city projects or the Louisana bayou “in the recent past,” The Brother/Sister Plays is loosely tied together by similar themes, ideas and some overlapping characters. McCraney says the experiences of the women in his life, including his mother and sister, informed the first work, In the Red and Brown Water. It unfolds as a fable about a black girl’s broken dreams, bitter regrets and inability to grow in her life. She’s become a

Deana Lawson

THEATER from page 1

Tarell Alvin McCraney passive figure who’s stuck in neutral—torn between two men and unable to bear children in a culture where motherhood and fertility are venerated.

The Brothers Size is a family drama about two siblings that delves into the dark corners of black masculinity. The final play concerns black gay identity. Although it is not explicitly autobiographical, it was influenced by the dynamics of McCraney’s relationship to his family members and how they perceived him, and he says, “It’s about people of color dealing with sexuality and spirituality.”

McCraney’s accomplishments are all the

more impressive considering the formidable obstacles he faced in his own childhood.

Reared in Miami’s Liberty City housing projects, he’s the eldest son of four. His mother died when he was 23 after contracting HIV from intravenous drug use.

McCraney said he felt like an outcast in the African-American community and found refuge in local theater groups, where he met several adults who became his mentors.

When he was 13, he saw a performance of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations that crystallized the notion that he could make a life for himself by pursuing theater and dance as a career. He managed to overcome the challenges of his upbringing to eventually enroll at DePaul University in Chicago and then the Yale School of Drama, where he studied under the visionary director Peter Brook.

He later assisted August Wilson when he was reshaping Radio Golf at Yale Rep. “I’ve just always been interested in and gravitated toward taking moments of life, framing them, putting them on display and asking questions of it and asking people to bring themselves to it,” McCraney said. “I was young, black and gay growing up in the hood, and [the people in] the community seemed to think I had a lot of trouble fitting in. I was weird. I mean, who in the ’hood goes around watching the sunset? That’s a weird kid. Which is fine: I accept that weirdness and wholeheartedly embrace it.”

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BY JOEL LOBENTHAL Ballet in America lives hand to mouth and day to day. In Paris it most assuredly does not, as is made clear in Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, which premieres in the United States with a two-week run at Film Forum beginning Nov. 4.

The Opera is home to one of the world’s greatest ballet companies, bureaucratized in the best sense of the word. Generously funded by the French government, its dancers are furnished by the company’s own first-rate school. Funding stability means that we see in La Danse longrange (three years ahead) planning that doesn’t happen all that often in much of the ballet world.

La Danse is Wiseman’s 38th film and the product of his two-month immersion in the company in 2007. Wiseman favors the fly-on-the-wall approach. No one is formally interviewed. People just go about their business: onstage, in the rehearsal studio and the executive suite. We’re ready to suspend disbelief sufficiently to imagine that we’re witnessing them with their guard let down entirely.

That may be an illusion, but we certainly get a healthy dose of unvarnished nuts and bolts.

Center stage in La Danse is POB artistic director Brigitte Lefèvre. She is a slick and seasoned operator: tough, cool and voluble—sometimes glibly so, sometimes truly articulate. It’s fun to watch her wheel and deal. A lower-ranking soloist is shown complaining in Lefèvre’s office that she’s no longer 25 and needs some adjustments in her workload and repertory. When the woman methodically produces or references some type of documentation, Lefèvre shoots out a comment to the effect of, “Oh, so you’ve already worked it out?” Oh, no, the dancer assures Lefèvre, “I came to see God first.”

No one is identified on camera, but ballet fans will know who is who. They will be amused when professional disagreement reflects domestic controversy during rehearsals led by husband-and-wife choreographer Pierre Lacotte and retired Paris Opera ballerina Ghislaine Thesmar. We eavesdrop on the couple as they exchange side-of-the-mouth retorts concerning elements of style and technique, including Thesmar’s own.

POB’s roster features some of the world’s most notable dancers, but just as interesting to watch is the corps de ballet. One gets the impression that virtually every company member is potentially a soloist, making their diligent immersion into esprit de corps all the more impressive.

As generous as the French government’s stipend is, deficits are inevitability in a system of repertory rotation. This occurs even in the European stagione system, where one bill is

Courtesy of Zipporah Films

In a new doc, Brigitte Lefèvre is shown in the trenches

Exhibits, Screenings, Live Music, Performance Art, Drink Specials & More! Starting at 5:30pm PARTICIPANTS performed consecutively for a block of performances. And so individual and corporate gifts are solicited by the Paris Opera brass.

Lefèvre and associates are shown parsing out exactly which treats visiting Americans “at the $25,000 level” will receive. Witnessing Lefèvre preside over a gala dinner put on for these visiting high-end ballet consumers is ever so slightly cringe-inducing. But Wiseman wants to show the scene, crassness and all, and Lefèvre pulls it off like a trooper.

As splendidly as the company performs, the 158-minute film contains lengthy performance footage that’s not entirely satisfactory.

One of the more controversial Lefèvre policies is that she’s placed equal emphasis on modern dance and contemporary ballet as on ballet classicism and neo-classicism. In a meeting of artistic staff, Lefèvre is perturbed that young dancers are not availing themselves more regularly of a once-a-week contemporary dance class she’s slotted into the company’s regimen.

La Danse features performance excerpts from only two classical ballets, while a halfdozen contemporary works are showcased. No footage is included of the company dancing the Balanchine, Robbins, Fokine, Nijinska, Tudor or Massine works in its repertory.

Perhaps Wiseman didn’t want to pay the compensation their representatives demanded, or it’s also possible that their works were simply not on the docket during the weeks that Wiseman was visiting. I don’t have the POB’s performance annals in front of me, but some of these works may be getting less and less of a viewing, and that’s troubling.

Paris Opera stars occasionally visit New York to dance in galas here, but the full company hasn’t had a season in New York since 1996. For the moment, La Danse will have to do. If it’s not adequate recompense for the company’s absence, it is nevertheless a worthy stopgap and tribute.

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La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, Nov. 4 through 17, Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. (betw. 6th Ave. & Varick St.), 212-727-8110 November 3, 2009 | City Arts

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AttheGALLERIES to 1912, whose hues glow with the exuberant rigor of Fauve-period Matisse; one powerfully catches sunlight cascading across bushes, rimming their shadowed blue-green cores with vivid highlights.

The stylized flowers in a sprightly 1906 still life

by Dawson (1887-1969) have an appealing, almost mystical simplicity. But the artist shortly turned to abstracted compositions of swirling, zigzagging arabesques that count among the world’s very first abstract paintings. Several such paintings at Hollis Taggart suggest, to varying degrees, human figures; “Blue Boy” (1912) captures the shimmer of Gainsborough’s famous portrait in a tapestry of darting blue-green and sienna fragments. To my eye, Dawson’s evenness of color and rhythm make them less plastically vigorous than Maurer’s or Carles’, but they poignantly predict Ab-Ex’s allover, abstract attack.

Why are these painters not better known today?

Perhaps because their work was so far ahead of its own time, and yet—a real liability after Ab-Ex’s ascendancy—still indebted to European traditions.

As it happens, each artist’s productive life was also curtailed by circumstance: Maurer’s suicide at age 64, Carles’ debilitating stroke at 59 and Dawson’s preoccupation with farming after 1914. We can only wonder what their unfettered careers might have produced. (John Goodrich) Marking Modernism, through Nov. 14. Hollis Taggart Galleries, 958 Madison Ave. (betw. E. 75th & E. 76th Sts.), 212-628-4000.

“Valley Road Wildfire Central Idaho” by Laura McPhee

Kris Graves Projects, a Dumbo gallery, has just opened “Of Land,” a fresh and visionary exhibition show of landscape photography. This elegantly curated show consists of 11 photographers whose diverse visions cover a wide of landscape and printing techniques. The photos range from the lush velvet of vintage platinum prints to the harsh colors of an “archival pigment print” and everything in between. The diversity of printing technique is fitting for a show that also ranges so far and wide in its portrayal of landscape.

There is an underlying sense of stillness to the entire show. Granted, a photograph renders the world still, but there is in this show a consistent quietude that runs through all of the works. It took me a minute to adjust my New York head to this silence. The pay off is worth the time. I loved Victor Shrager’s portraits of giant masses of butter— “Monument (2)” and “Monument (477)” that look like brilliant yellow icebergs. Beautiful and funny, they are placed on the gallery wall next to Laura McPhee’s photos of monumental steam clouds rising from a devastating forest fire, beautiful and brutal, a nice counterpoint to the butter glaciers.

Jed Devine is represented here by two pieces—“ Fireworks, Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard” and “Battery Park City Landfill, New York Early 1980s”—that differ in subject matter but share the same technique. Each is 43 inches long and made up of a series of smaller sequential photographs.

Artfully collaged, they each portray a long horizontal landscape. One, almost pitch black, captures a burst of fireworks above a small town. The other, blindingly brilliant, is of a landfill in lower Manhattan, the giant depression in the ground gently rimmed by machines.

Each is achingly poetic, and once again the gallery has made a little bit of magic happen in the placement of the works. (Melissa Stern)

paintings by Maurer, Carles and Manierre Dawson.

America’s avant-garde art may not have had global repercussions until after World War II, but the exhibition shows some of our countrymen pursuing radical experiments from the very dawn of modernism. Turning away from his early success in a Whistlerian style, Alfred Maurer (1868-1932) explored Fauvist and then Cubist idioms. Several early landscapes dated between 1906 and 1918 reveal his potent palette, with brilliantly colored trees nailing down the spacious arabesques of arcing hills. Cubist paintings from around 1930—all angles and prismatic hues—include two vivid still lifes and a strangely melancholic double portrait.

Several brushy, abstracted canvases from the ‘30s by Arthur Carles (1882-1952) anticipate, in romantic form, the epic rawness of Abstract Expressionism. One especially vibrant canvas catches a reclining nude in delicious swirls of off-whites among emerald greens and ultramarine blues. But I found myself repeatedly drawn to several tiny sketches, dating from between 1905

Marking Modernism

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Over the past couple of years, Conrad MarcaRelli’s “The Battle” (1956), a large-scale collage in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has shared exhibition space with Jackson Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” (1950), a signature “drip” painting. The formal correspondences are self-evident: Both pieces are monumental, all-over abstractions whose tactile surfaces and lilting rhythms establish a roiling, expansive elegance. The two men shared historical circumstances—Marca-Relli and

Conrad Marca-Relli, “The Samurai #2” at Knoedler Gallery

Of Land, through Nov. 21. Kris Graves Projects, 111 Front St., suite 224 (at Washington St.), Brooklyn, 212-796-7558.

Over the last decade, Hollis Taggart has focused on early American Modernism with a series of impressive exhibitions on the likes of Alfred Maurer, Arnold Friedman, Stuart Davis and Arthur Carles.

“Marking Modernism” represents a culmination of sorts, with a handsome installation of some 30

Conrad Marca-Relli; The New York Years 1945-1967

Courtesy of Hollis Taggart Galleries

Of Land

“Blue Boy” by Manierre Dawson

Pollock were part of the hard-scrabble milieu that came to be known as The New York School—and biographical particulars: It was Marca-Relli who identified Pollock’s body after his fatal car crash in 1956.

For those of us who have marveled at how decisively “The Battle” bests “Autumn Rhythm” in terms of vigor, complexity and staying power, “Conrad Marca-Relli: The New York Years 19451967,” a swift but satisfying overview, comes not a moment too soon. Here is where the life of art is rewarded by the vagaries of commerce: Knoedler Gallery has broadened the canon in a way that historians and museums are often too hidebound or skittish to venture. Even within the exhibition’s chronological parameters—Marca-Relli died in 2000 at the age of 87, so a good 30 years of the oeuvre is unaccounted for—you watch a Modernist acolyte evolve into a Modernist master. The ride is thrilling.

Marca-Relli cut, pasted and nailed fragments of painted paper, burlap and metal with sinuous, roughhewn dexterity. Like his friend Willem de Kooning, he looked to the human form for structure and emphasis; even at their most abstract or distilled, the collages are all knees and elbows, muscle and movement. Imagine the “Laocoön” as defined by Cubist logic and enlivened by Surrealist process and you’ll get some idea of the slippery, magisterial power generated by “The Samurai #2” (1962) or even the relatively discursive S-R-Y-57 “Composition” (1957).

Given the range, ambition and remarkable plasticity of Marca-Relli’s achievement, why has he been slighted in standard Modernist narratives?

Maybe his profound links to the past and, especially, to the figure are insufficiently avantgarde; perhaps a brooding romanticism renders him fatally un-cool. Could be the means: Some consider collage a “small” métier incapable of embodying heroic states of feeling. Whatever the case, The New York Years establishes Marca-Relli as a figure of no small significance. (Mario Naves) Conrad Marca-Relli; The New York Years 19451967, through Nov. 14. Knoedler Gallery, 19 E. 70th St. (betw. 5th & Madison Aves.), 212-794-0550.

Sharon Horvath: Parts of a World There are, let’s face it, too many artists. Time will weed out the over-hyped, the god-awful, the good and the great. In the meantime, we suffer a deluge of creativity. Overabundance isn’t an indication, let alone a guarantor, of good tidings. New Yorkers see more art in a season than most people do in a lifetime—is it any wonder they’re a jaded lot?

In rare cases cynicism is upset by proof that art isn’t a luxury, a commodity or a cheat, but a necessity affording sustenance, bedazzlement and pleasure.

Sharon Horvath’s paintings are cases in point: Here, we feel, is art that justifies its reason for being, largely because Horvath’s kaleidoscopic abstractions seem to encompass every reason for being.

Within densely layered surfaces, sparkling tonalities and Byzantine networks of line and pattern, Horvath weaves a bewildering range of artistic influences, historical tangents and philosophical frameworks. Her meticulous touch is, in its infinite patience, reminiscent of Himalayan iconography and, in its rhythmic insistence, not far removed from the obsessive character of outsider art. Watteau is referenced; so, too, are the early Renaissance, pictographs, blueprints and cartography. The cosmos are evoked with consummate ease along with the spiritual awe they have long inspired. Horvath speaks of embodying a “third space—an intermediate territory distinct from either inner or outer worlds.”

If that sounds dreadfully metaphysical, rest assured the artist is also a fan of more tangible pursuits, not least sex and baseball. You’ll divine within the work’s intricate architectural scaffolds a veritable Kama Sutra of randy stick figures and the encompassing glow of stadium lights. But whimsical minutiae don’t distract from artistic sweep; if anything they help to clarify it. The small paintings, prudently shushed into a back gallery, promise more than they deliver, but the bigger pieces open up and morph right before our eyes—they never stop delivering. How many contemporary artworks can you say that about? (MN) Sharon Horvath: Parts of a World, through Nov. 25. Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 138 10th Ave. (betw. W. 18th & W. 19th Sts.), 212-750-0949.

Cutters Attacking the glossy page with the finesse of a blade, “Cutters” at Cinder Gallery, is a cohesive, though somewhat cluttered, grouping of collage artists.

At times the show lacks a sense of hierarchy both within the fragments of an image—cut limbs and shapes that seemed too jumbled to have presence—and within the overall presentation of the work, which was hung salon style, and lost some of

allpart animal. But in any case, she prompts us to think as well as luxuriate in her glorious colors and intriguing figures. (Valerie Gladstone) Cristina Vergano: Just For You, Through Jan. 9, Woodward Gallery, 133 Eldridge St. (betw. Broome & Delancey Sts.), 212-966-3411.

Stephen Irwin: Sometimes When We Touch

“Afterlife” by Sharon Horvath

the works in their placement.

Curator James Gallagher’s work stands out as some of the strongest in the show, despite its diminutive size. His 1940s nudes, or half nudes, with faces obscured, pleated skirts and open cardigans, against a surface graying with texture and age, sought out their silhouettes with graceful curves. Other standout works are by artists Cless and Cameron Windish Michel, who combine the mundane and pop culture imagery predominant in the show with religious iconography and images of plants and galaxies. In Cless’ diamond-like collage, created by four sheets angled on their edge, doe-eyed starlets stare out with radiating halos, a layer of a stained glass window against speckled stardust. Lurking beneath the beauties, a landscape of patterned stripes intertwines with Mayan villages and bearded male figures standing, facing center, with candles in hand, creating an ominous and mystical atmosphere. (Caris Reid) Cutters, through Nov. 15. Cinders Gallery, 103

“Paris#2” by James Gallagher

Havemeyer St. (betw. Metropolitan Ave. & Hope St.), Brooklyn, 718-388-2311.

“Sweet Dreams” by Cristina Vergano

Cristina Vergano: Just For You Cristina Vergano’s sensual, richly colored paintings and sculptures enchant with their many layers of meaning. A consummate artist with the skills of a classically trained Renaissance painter, she usually chooses as her subjects animals and women, sometimes combining them in one body to give them the character of mythological creatures.

In fact, over the years, in solo exhibits here and abroad, she has introduced a formidable gallery of mysterious hybrid characters in pastoral settings.

Her sympathies clearly lie with the beautiful and often maltreated among us; in the past, she has represented female martyrs throughout history, especially as victims of colonialism.

In her current show of 21 paintings and 12 ceramic and porcelain sculptures, she moves into new territory, in some paintings reinterpreting Picasso, particularly strikingly in portraits of two of his women companions, Olga Khokhlova and Francoise Gilot. Dressing “Olga” in colorful cubist attire, she depicts her as tender and somewhat weary, her face both surrealistic and Grecian, a composite of Picasso’s influences and her own.

Between her fingers, Olga holds a drawing of a man and woman on a bed, and above her head a scrap of paper dangles from the ornate frame, saying in French, “hot bread, honey, and jasmine,” indicating the best of their life together.

Again, returning to Picasso for inspiration, Vergano revisits his “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” with her own “Demoiselles,” three voluptuous nudes who appear to inhabit an elegant whore house.

There is a swimming pool in the background and grapes, a banana and a pear on a table. But these are no more ordinary women than those of Picasso: one has the head of a fierce white bird, another of a dog—she holds an African mask—and the third, her serene face exposed, holds a powerful African mask above her head. They are no more victims than his demoiselles, for they share power with the creatures with which they are fused, as well as the ability to hide behind their masks’ eternal features.

She incorporates Pop Art into her amusing

“Sweet Dreams,” a painting of a woman with a beautiful white horse’s head, wearing a skimpy dress, which displays the words, “Sweet Dreams Baby.” It would be quite a dream—tantalizing, confusing and strangely classical. Though creatures of all sort abound in this breathtaking show, she created the resonant landscape “Just For You” without them. A pastoral scene of the sea with the sun fading in the distance, it glows with light.

But never content with the usual, she painted a silver flying saucer in the sky, ominous and unapproachable. Here, as in her amusing 12-inch sculptures of hybrid characters, her sense of humor never fails her. “Bunny Lo” is a curvy girl in a black bikini, wearing a red garter belt on her thigh, with, however, a rabbit head. She might say we are

In his first New York solo show, Kentuckybased artist Stephen Irwin presents a sensual corpus of works, realized with the classical technique of rubbing out the sheen from magazines—here vintage pornography—and altering its original purpose to reach a central aim: the appearance of skin.

Recreating a quasi-adolescent dichotomy between pornography and eroticism, Irwin subtly plays with an altered representation of sexuality. The striking sensuality of Irwin’s work is particularly contained in the metaphor of the void, expressed in most of his images. Brushing out the surface of the glossy paper in order to isolate heterogeneous zones, Irwin allows us to imagine loving hands convulsively grabbing desired body and trying to reach an erased image, a disappeared flesh. This could be called something like “air sex,” an elusive or inaccessible act and feeling, but one that’s never virtual or simulated. It is the case in “Untitled (Finger)” and “Untitled (Lick),” in which a finger and a tongue slowly disappear in almost unnoticeable sources of desire and pleasure, significantly isolating romantic gestures.

There is a profound sense of erotic intimacy in Irwin’s pieces, allowing the viewer’s eye to catch rare moments of ecstasy, such as in the four images titled “Choke,” depicting the orgasms of males screaming, again, into the void.

In the series “Stroke,” the artist’s rub has only left pieces of paper that seem to have become strips of flesh, ephemeral and barely visible. The playfulness of the small erotic bubbles in “Circle Game” echoes art history’s cut-ups and collages as much as popular graphic sex novels. There is obviously an obsession with flesh and touch in Irwin’s artistic practice. The rub itself is a way to mark the glossy paper, as to preserve only the essential.

In knots of steel wool on the gallery’s walls, the disabused and ironic message “You Already Know How This Will End” reminds us bitterly of the morning after a night of love, like when the post-punk English band Gang of Four desperately claimed: “Your kiss so sweet, your sweat so sour.

Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you, but I know it’s only lust.” (Martha Kirszenbaum) Stephen Irwin: Sometimes When We Touch, through Nov. 29. Invisible-Exports, 14A Orchard St. (betw.

Canal & Hester Sts.), 212-226-5447.

“SI09 5” by Stephen Irwin

October 20, 2009 | City Arts

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ClassicalMUSIC

A Stunning Young Pianist

BY JAY NORDLINGER ou might as well learn her name now, because, if you care about the piano at all, you may well be repeating it for decades: The name is Yuja Wang. She was born in China, in 1987. She eventually made her way to the United States and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she studied with Gary Graffman. That is a familiar trajectory: China to Curtis and Graffman.

Lang Lang made it a few years before Wang.

He is now a grand old man of 27.

Wang made her recording debut with Deutsche Grammophon, playing an extremely difficult program: Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata, the Liszt Sonata and other gentle ditties. That recording is, in a word, stunning.

The technique is phenomenal and the musicality really no less so. Wang shows herself, on that recording, to be a clean Romantic—soulful and passionate, yet unfailingly tidy. But it is only a recording—and, given the tricks that studio engineers can play, you cannot judge a performer except in the flesh.

New Yorkers had a chance to hear Wang when the Philadelphia Orchestra came to Carnegie Hall. She played a rarely heard concerto by Prokofiev, “No. 2.” This is a monster of a work, taken on by relatively few pianists: Yefim Bronfman is its great exponent in our

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time. But Wang is another. She absolutely slew this monster of a concerto, playing it to the hilt.

As on the recording, she was a clean Romantic. The blizzard of notes was there, but remarkably clear, almost crystalline. Believe it or not, there were elements of Clementi in this Prokofiev Second. She supplied the brittleness that Prokofiev calls for, but did not overdo that quality. In the Scherzo, she was fantastically nimble and impish, as the music demands.

Here is a pianist with wit, a sense of fun.

Elsewhere, she savored Prokofiev’s harmonies, eschewing any urge to rush. And, throughout the concerto, she played “con slancio,” as they say—with real relish and dash.

Perhaps above all, she played with a big, obvious love of the piano. She seems born to play it. She gives the impression that she is never happier than when at the keyboard, and would play far into the night, with no audience and no applause. And, oh, that technique: At intermission, a veteran pianist said to a group of us, “Will someone please tell that child that the Prokofiev Second is hard?”

On that night, many musicians and critics shook their heads in disbelief, marveling at what they had heard. Feel like hearing her yourself? She will be within shouting distance of the city on Nov. 12 and 13—first in New Brunswick, N.J., and then in Greenvale, N.Y.

Jennifer Taylor

And a lovable veteran soprano

Yuja Wang performing at Carnegie Hall on Oct. 13 with The Philadelphia Orchestra.

She will play the Rachmaninoff Second with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.

By the way, when I asked the conductor Lorin Maazel last summer about the future of music, he answered, “Thank God for China.” hristine Brewer is a veteran singer, hailing from downstate Illinois. She is a dramatic soprano and one of our best: When she is on top of things, no one can surpass her. We were meant to have her as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Ring at the Metropolitan Opera last spring. But she withdrew, or was withdrawn, for reasons not entirely clear. In any case, she appeared in Zankel Hall, downstairs in the Carnegie building, for a recital with the pianist Craig Rutenberg.

With her fans out in force, she presented a varied, interesting and satisfying program. It began with “Divinités du Styx,” from Gluck’s Alceste, an aria made popular by Callas in a famous recording. Then she sang Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, those studies for Tristan und Isolde. She continued with Strauss: three splendid songs, including “Ich liebe dich,” with which Leontyne Price used to excite audiences. And, speaking of Price, Brewer concluded her first half with two songs of Joseph Marx—the first of which was “Selige Nacht,” a Price standby and favorite.

After intermission, Brewer sang Britten cabaret songs, some spirituals arranged

by John Carter and an unexpected final set: English-language songs from yesteryear, parlor-type songs, championed by great divas of the past, including Helen Traubel and Eleanor Steber. Among those songs was Frank Bridge’s marvelous “Love Went a-Riding,” which, with its galloping piano accompaniment, is sort of an English “Erlkönig” (but not really).

Not a few of us learned this song when Arleen Auger, with Dalton Baldwin, recorded it.

Brewer, unfortunately, did not have her best

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night—she had a respectable one, which ended far better than it began. When she started out, her voice was not itself, unusually harsh and metallic. The acoustics of Zankel Hall, which are the aural equivalent of a very bright spotlight, were no friend to her. But her real voice soon emerged, and she sounded much better at 9:30 than she had at 7:30. Interpretively, she was hit-or-miss: Several of the songs were too careful, lacking a natural flow. “Träume” from the Wesendonck Lieder was without transport, stubbornly earthbound. (The pianist is responsible here too.) Strauss’ “Befreit”—which might tear your heart out—was nothing special. But the Marx songs sent forth their desired glow.

Brewer obviously likes those Britten numbers, and she was charming in them: Her pleasure in singing them was fairly contagious.

She sang the Carter-arranged spirituals with dignity, sincerity and conviction. Incidentally, it is heartening to hear white singers sing spirituals—George London made a whole album of them, Marilyn Horne sang a few. They are songs for all Americans, and all people. And that final set was a success, though “Love Went a-Riding,” from both singer and pianist, was pedestrian—unrollicking.

The evening was long, and Brewer lengthened it, with three encores—all of them worth it. “Review,” by Celius Dougherty, was a joy and a hoot. It parodies a review of a voice recital in Carnegie Hall. Brewer’s was not her best recital, but it was good enough, and I would rather hear her on an off night than others at their maximum. She has a first-rate voice, a strong understanding of music and a priceless “intangible”: lovability.

I don’t know whether we will ever see her as Brünnhilde or in any other role at the Met. But some of us will never forget her in song, oratorio and other music. And her recordings—of opera included—should last for generations.

JAZZ

Served Straight Up Henry Threadgill refuses to supply sweet, simple tunes burred or limpid tuba tones, Takeishi’s fretless

BY HOWARD MANDEL bass guitar figures or Ellman’s light-fingered hen composer and reeds player plucks and strums underscored by Kavee’s loose, Henry Threadgill recently led louche rhythms. Threadgill, at a music stand, his quintet Zooid at Roulette in concentrated on the activity swelling around Soho, all elements were in place him. The musicians’ gestures —more discordant for a night of great music. And indeed, the than obviously connected—gradually accumu90-some-minute concert was received with lated, and then their leader jumped in on flute a sustained ovation by a standing-room-only or alto sax with brief but insistent phrases. His crowd. Yet even listeners familiar with and posture upright, his brow furrowed, his hooded well disposed toward this artist might have eyes dead serious, Threadgill expressed himself found themselves uneasy. What is one to think when expertly performed works result in like an Old Testament prophet decrying vanity a less-than-gratifying experience? Is the music and other illusions from a barren, windswept plateau. The music flowed in a subversion of or are we ourselves at fault? conventional instrumental hierarchy: sometimes A critically acclaimed yet never complaEllman preceded and sometimes he echoed cent artist, 65-year-old Threadgill performs rarely in New York. He’s not one for multi-set, Threadgill; other times he paired with Takeishi; fenced with Davila, or flew on his own. Kavee multi-night stands in the clubs—his last local mostly maintained a steady pulse, smiling softly gig I recall was in 2005 at the Museum of as if enraptured by a symphony in his head.

Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden. This recent concert was a celebration of This Brings Us To, Vol. 1, Threadgill’s His posture upright, his brow first album in eight years and the furrowed, his hooded eyes debut of a commissioned work dead serious, Threadgill being video-taped for Roulette expressed himself like an Old TV (broadcast Thursdays on Testament prophet decrying Manhattan Cable Television). vanity and other illusions from a Having emerged in Chicago barren, windswept plateau. as a professional musician 40 The commission piece “All The Way Light years ago, his aesthetic fully formed, Threadgill Touch”—which was the concert’s second half, has persistently convened unusual ensembles lasting more than 30 minutes—involved someto manifest a sonic vision that clearly comes what more formal call and response, as Hoffman from deep within his vivid, broadly informed bowed scratchy clusters or precisely picked imagination. He’s best known for the brilliant angular lines bouncing off Threadgill, Ellman, collaborative trio Air; his seven-musician Sextett; his two tubas, two guitars, second horn and et al. No tune names were announced; no words said but the names of the musicians at each set’s drums band Very Very Circus, and perhaps his never-recorded Society Situation Orchestra. The end. Many more details were embedded in each piece than could be absorbed in a single listenmembers of Zooid—guitarist Liberty Ellman, ing, and Threadgill’s new album makes return tuba player Jose Davila, bassist Stomu Takeishi visits to this soundscape possible. But still, the and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee—are overall message was foreboding. The composer Threadgill intimates, though they hadn’t colcomes off as a seer with slight sympathy for laborated in exactly this combination before. mere humans. That’s a grim message to take Cellist Christopher Hoffman joined them for away from an evening out, though such stark “All The Way Light Touch.”

In the intimate Soho gallery space Roulette realism may be just the right prescription for those who want their culture straight, no chaser. occupies, acoustics were fine, sight lines Are we living in hard times? Yeah. Who speaks disturbed only by the four cameras documentto that? From the jazz world? ing the gig and the audience was flush with Should a Henry Threadgill abandon his musicians and fans ready for anything. What explorations, sugarcoat what he finds? Aren’t Threadgill and company offered was moody, we as tough as he is, able to entertain tumult, richly textured group interplay, organized find form in apparent chaos, embrace contrasounds produced with virtuosity and passion diction and paradox, listen gratefully to harsh but few immediately discernable touchstones truths? We may want simpler, sweeter songs, such as strong melody or cyclical harmonies.

The band had a plan but its goals were elusive, but here’s the real deal: All music’s not about pleasure, some wakes us from our dreams. its comforts few, its points resistant to quick The music didn’t soothe you? Poor baby. But assessment. Maybe that was the point. it raised doubts, asked questions? No loss, no Each separate piece of the evening’s first fault. That’s a valid end in itself. half seemed to begin airily, with Davila’s softly

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Tickets: $25, $10 for Students --no added handling charge! -- available online at www.gc.cuny.edu/concertsandconversations

Ursula Oppens, pianist Charles Neidich, clarinetist performing works by

John Corigliano, Elliott Carter (American premiere), Tania León, Tobias Picker (world premiere), and Joan Tower.

Plus a Conversation with the composers about creating and playing music in New York today For information, call 212-817-8215

November 3, 2009 | City Arts

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GALLERIES Gallery listings courtesy of A.I.R. GALLERY: Carolyn Martin: “Unfenced.” Sylvia

Netzer: “Reticulated Forms.” Sarah Blackwelder: “Safe as Houses.” Opens Nov. 5, 111 Front St. #228, Brooklyn, 212-255-6651.

AC INSTITUTE: Joseph Farbrook: “Nostalgia for Neverwas.” Ends Nov. 28. Maya Suess: “It It and the Gimme Box.” Ends Nov. 28, 547 W. 27th St., 5th floor, www.artcurrents.org.

ACA GALLERIES: “Eccentrics, Misfits and Idealists.”

Ends Dec. 5, 529 W. 20th St., 212-206-8080.

ANA CRISTEA GALLERY: Zsolt Bodoni: “The Foundries of Ideology.” Ends Nov. 21, 521 W. 26th St., 212-904-1100.

ART IN GENERAL: “Erratic Anthropologies.” Ends Jan. 9, 79 Walker St., 212-219-0473.

BABCOCK GALLERIES: Alan Gussow: “A Painter’s Nature.” Ends Nov. 25, 724 5th Ave., 212767-1852.

BLUE MOUNTAIN GALLERY: Margaret Leveson. Opens Nov. 3, 530 W. 25th St., 4th floor, 646-4864730.

BOWERY GALLERY: Diana Cabouli. Opens Nov. 3, 530 W. 25th St., 4th floor, 646-230-6655.

CAVIN-MORRIS GALLERY: Lidia Syroka: “Nomadic Bodies.” Tim Rowan: “Stone Ridge Alchemy.” Ends Nov. 28, 210 11th Ave., 212-226-6768.

CHC GALLERY: Joshua Gage: “Tragedy in Pop.” Ends Nov. 21, 511 W. 20th St., 212-741-0007.

CROSSING ART GALLERY: “The Solid and the Sublime.”

Ends Nov. 22, 136-17 39th Ave., Queens, 212359-4333.

CUCHIFRITOS: “Liberty & The Land,” featuring works

by Benny Andrews and William Villalongo.

Ends Nov. 28, 120 Essex St., 212-420-9202.

DC MOORE GALLERY: Jane Wilson: “Recent Paintings.”

Opens Nov. 11, 724 5th Ave., 212-247-2111.

DEAN PROJECT: “Mirror on Mirror Mirrored.” Ends Nov. 19, 45-43 21st St., Queens, 718-706-1462.

DEITCH PROJECTS: “Stages.” Ends Nov. 21, 489 Broome St., 212-343-7300.

DFN GALLERY: Jan Aronson: “Portraits of Place.” Ends Nov. 19. Barbara Nessim: “The Model Project.”

Opens Nov. 11, 74 E. 79th St., 212-334-3400.

DUMBO ARTS CENTER: “The Experience of Green.”

Ends Nov. 29, 30 Washington St., Brooklyn, 718-694-0831.

ENGLISH KILLS ART GALLERY: Carter Davis and Andrew Hurst. Ends Nov. 22, 114 Forrest St., ground floor, Brooklyn, 718-366-7323.

FIRST STREET: Mark Gotbaum: “Paintings and Drawings.” Opens Nov. 3, 526 W. 26th St., suite 915, 646-336-8053.

FLOMENHAFT GALLERY: Miriam Shapiro and Paul Brach. Opens Nov. 5, 547 W. 27th St., suite 200, 212-268-4952.

FOXY PRODUCTION: Sterling Ruby: “The Masturbators.” Ends Nov. 21, 623 W. 27th St., ground floor, 212-239-2758.

FRONT DESK APPARATUS: “Jasmine & Plus B,” curated

by Amy Granat. Ends Nov. 21, 54 King St., ground floor, 917-475-1562.

FRONT ROOM GALLERY: “10th Anniversary Exhibition.”

Ends Nov. 22, 147 Roebling St., Brooklyn, 718782-2556.

GALERIA RAMIS BARQUET: Rashaad Newsome: “Standards.” Ends Nov. 25, 532 W. 24th St., 212-675-3421.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY: Roger Ballen: “Boarding House.”

Opens Nov. 5, 980 Madison Ave., 212-744-2313.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY: Mike Kelley: “Horizontal Tracking Shots.” Opens Nov. 7, 555 W. 24th St., 212-741-1111.

GALERIE LELONG: Sean Scully: “Recent Paintings.”

Ends Dec. 12, 528 W. 26th St., 212-315-0470.

GALLERY SATORI: Ethan Greenbaum and David

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Scanavino: “Mastercraft.” Ends Nov. 29, 164 Stanton St., 718-544-6155.

GEORGE BILLIS GALLERY: “Santana,” paintings of New York. “Elizabeth O’Reilly,” watercolor collages.

Ends Dec. 19. 555 W. 25th St., 212-645-2621.

HANS P. KRAUS, JR. FINE PHOTOGRAPHS: “Silver Anniversary: 25 Photographs, 1835 to 1914.” Ends Nov. 20, 962 Park Ave., 212-794-2064.

HESKIN CONTEMPORARY: “Seek & Hide and India Evans: Rimembri Ancora?” Ends Nov. 28, 443 W. 37th, ground floor, 212-967-4972.

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS: Stephen Irwin. Ends Nov. 29, 14A Orchard St., 212-226-5447.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY: T.V. Santhosh: “Blood and Spit.” Ends Nov. 14, 513 W. 20th St., 212-645-1701.

JASON MCCOY INC.: Rachel Hovnanian: “Power and Burden of Beauty.” Ends Nov. 7, 520 W. 20th St. Opens Nov. 10, 41 E. 57th St. 212-310-1996.

KATHARINA RICH PERLOW: Yvonne Thomas: “Paintings 1950s-1960s.” Ends Dec. 10, 41 E. 57th St., 13th floor, 212-644-7171.

KNOEDLER & COMPANY: Conrad Marca-Relli: “The New York Years 1945-1967.” Ends Nov. 14. Project Space: Saul Leiter: “Paintings.” Ends Nov. 7, 19 E. 70th St., 212-794-0550.

KRAVETS/WEHBY GALLERY: “Edible Woman.” Ends Nov. 25, 521 W. 21st St., 212-352-2238.

LENNON, WEINBERG, INC.: “Before Again – Joan Mitchell, Louise Fishman, Harriet Korman, Melissa Meyer, Jill Moser, Denyse Thomasos.” Ends Nov. 28, 514 W. 25th St., 212-941-0012.

LESLIE FEELY FINE ART: Kenneth Noland. Closing date TBD, 33 E. 68th St., 212-988-0040.

LOHIN GEDULD GALLERY: Jay Milder: “Recent Work.”

Ends Nov. 14, 531 W. 25th St., 212-675-2656.

METAPHOR CONTEMPORARY ART: “Slippery When Wet.” Ends Nov. 22, 382 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn, 718-254-9126.

MOUNTAIN FOLD GALLERY: Rinko Kawauchi: “Condensation.” Ends Nov. 28, 55 5th Ave., 18th floor, 212-255-4304.

NORTE MAAR: Brooke Moyse: “The Other Side.”

Through Nov. 21, 83 Wyckoff Ave., Brooklyn, 646-361-8512.

NEW YORK CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA STUDIES: “Incarnational Aesthetics.” Ends Nov. 25, 44 W. 28th St., 7th Floor, 212-213-8052.

OLD PRINT SHOP: American Prints & Drawings: 1750 to Present. 150 Lexington Ave., 212-683-3950.

PACEWILDENSTEIN: David Hockney: “Paintings 20062009.” Ends Dec. 24, 534 W. 25th St. and 32 E. 57th St. 212-421-3292.

PAUL RODGERS/9W GALLERY: Peter Sacks: “Paintings.”

Ends Dec. 12, 529 W. 20th St., 212-484-9810.

PETER BLUM CHELSEA: Rosy Keyser: “The Moon Ate Me: New Paintings.” Ends Nov. 14, 526 W. 29th St., 212-244-6055.

POSTMASTERS GALLERY: Spencer Finch: “The Brain Is Wider Than The Sky.” Ends Nov. 28, 459 W. 19th St., 212-727-3323.

RANDALL SCOTT GALLERY: “UNSeen: A Photographers’ Salon.” Ends Nov. 21, 111 Front St., suite 204, Brooklyn, 212-796-2190.

RECESS: Corin Hewitt and Molly McFadden. Ends Nov. 28, 41 Grand St., 646-836-3765.

RED TRUCK GALLERY: NYC Pop-Up: “Hard Time Mini Mall.” Ends Nov. 30, 368 Broome St. SLATE GALLERY: Karen Margolis: “The State of All Things.” Ends Nov. 22, 136 Wythe Ave., Brooklyn, 718-387-3921.

STEVEN KASHER GALLERY: Josh Gosfield: “Gigi Gaston—The Black Flower.” Ends Nov. 25, 521 W. 23rd St., 212-966-3978.

THE PAINTING CENTER: Craig Manister: “Recent Paintings.” Ends Nov. 21, 52 Greene St., 2nd floor, 212-343-1060.

WORK: Ryan V. Brennan: “Close Your Eyes and

Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera

ArtsAGENDA

Ildar Abdrazakov as Mephistopheles and Ramon Vargas as Faust in the Metropolitan Opera’s “La Damnation de Faust,” running through Nov. 17.

Look as Far as You Can See.” Ends Nov. 16, 65 Union St., Brooklyn, 785-608-5653.

ZACH FEUER GALLERY: Sister Corita Kent. Ends Dec. 5, 530 W. 24th St., 212-989-7700.

AUCTION HOUSES CHRISTIE’S: Impressionist/Modern Works on Paper.

Nov. 4, 10 a.m. Post-War and Contemporary Art. Nov. 10, 7, 20 Rockefeller Plz., 212-636-2000.

DOYLE NEW YORK: High Society. Nov. 3, 10 a.m.

American Art. Nov. 11, time TBA, 175 E. 87th St., 212-427-2730.

POSTER AUCTIONS INTERNATIONAL: 550 Rare Posters.

Nov. 8, 11 a.m., 601 W. 26th St., 212-787-4000.

ROGALLERY.COM: Fine art buyers and sellers in online live art auctions. 800-888-1063, www.rogallery.com.

SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES: Art, Press and Illustrated Books. Nov. 10, 1:30, 104 E. 25th St., 212-254-4710.

ART EVENTS IFPDA PRINT FAIR: The annual International Fine Print

Dealers Association (IFPDA) Print Fair focuses on fine prints from all periods. Nov. 5 through 8, Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave., 212-6163930; times vary, $75 and up.

THE PIER ANTIQUES SHOW: New York’s largest art and antiques event, including a large seletion of fashion and vintage clothing as well as collectibles, posters, jewelry, art and more. Nov. 14 & 15, Pier 94, 12th Avenue at West 55th Street; 10 a.m.-6, $15.

AVENUE ANTIQUES AND ART AT THE ARMORY: Featuring a world-class selection from 50 prominent dealers.

Dec. 3 through 6 at the Park Avenue Armory.

Dec. 2 Opening Night Preview Benefit for The American Cancer Society HOPE LODGE NYC. To purchase benefit tickets, please call 646-442-1646. Lectures provided by Royal Oak Society on Dec. 3 & 5. For additional show information please visit www.avenueshows.com.

MUSEUMS AMERICAS SOCIETY: Fernell Franco: “Amarrados

[Bound].” Ends Dec. 12, 680 Park Ave., 212249-8950.

AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM: “1989: The End of History or The Beginning of the Future?” Ends Nov. 24, 11 E. 52nd St., 212-319-5300.

BARD GRADUATE CENTER: “Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick.” Ends Jan. 2010, 18 W. 86th St., 212501-3023.

BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC: “Next Wave Art.”

Ends Dec. 20, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100.

BROOKLYN HISTORICAL SOCIETY: Public Perspectives: “Brooklyn Utopias?” Ends Jan. 2010, 128 Pierrepont St., Brooklyn, 718-222-4111.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM: “Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video.” Ends Jan. 2010, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th floor, Eastern Pkwy., Brooklyn, 718-638-5000.

CHELSEA ART MUSEUM: “Jean Miotte: What a Beautiful World.” Ends Jan. 2010, 556 W. 22nd St., 212255-0719.

COOPER-HEWITT NATIONAL DESIGN MUSEUM: “Design for a Living World.” Ends Jan. 2010, 2 E. 91st St., 212-849-8400.

THE FRICK COLLECTION: “Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection.” Ends Jan. 2010, 1 E. 70th St., 212-288-0700.

THE KITCHEN: “Besides, With, Against, And Yet: Abstraction and The Ready-Made Gesture.” Opens Nov. 13, 512 W. 19th St., 212-255-5793.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: “Watteau, Music, and Theater.” Ends Nov. 29. “Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156-1868.” Ends Jan. 2010. “Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (1733-1799).” Ends Jan. 2010. “Surface Tension: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection.”

Ends May 2010, 1000 5th Ave., 212-535-7710.

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO: “Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis.” Ends Feb. 2010, 1230 5th Ave., 212-831-7272.

MUSEUM OF AMERICAN FINANCE: “Women of Wall Street.”

Ends Jan. 2010, 48 Wall St., 212-908-4110.

MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN: “Ghost Stories: New Design from Nendo.” Ends Jan. 2010. “Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection.” Ends Jan. 2010, 2 Columbus Cir., 212-299-7777.

MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE: “Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges.” Ends Jan. 2010, 36 Battery Pl., 646437-4200.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: “Looking at Music: Side 2.”

Ends Nov. 30, 11 W. 53rd St., 212-708-9400.

NATIONAL ACADEMY MUSEUM: “Reconfiguring the Body in American Art, 1820-2009.” Ends Nov. 15, 5 E. 89th St., 212-996-1908.

NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY: “Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River School at the New-York Historical Society.” Ends March 2010. 170 Central Park West, 212-873-3400.

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS: “Lincoln Center: Celebrating 50 Years.” Ends Jan. 2010, 40 Lincoln Center Plz., 212-870-1630.

RUBIN MUSEUM OF ART: “The Red Book of C.G. Jung.”

Ends Jan. 2010. “Mandala: The Perfect Circle.”

An exploration of Himalayan Buddhism’s everpresent symbols. Ends Jan. 2010, 150 W. 17th St., 212-620-5000.

SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM: “Intervals: Kandinsky.” The first major American retrospective of the artist’s work since the 1980s. Ends Jan. 2010, 1071 5th Ave., 212-423-3500.

SKYSCRAPER MUSEUM: “China Prophecy: Shanghai.”

Ends Mar. 2010, 39 Battery Pl., 212-968-1961.

SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM: “New Amsterdam: The Island at the Center of the World.” Ends Jan. 2010, 12 Fulton St., 212-748-8651.

STUDIO MUSEUM OF HARLEM: “30 Seconds off an Inch.”

Opens Nov. 12, 144 W. 125th St., 212-864-4500.

MUSIC & OPERA AMERICAN VOICES: This Opening Night Gala Concert

brings favorite selections from American opera and musicals and boasts a roster of stars. Includes a special performance from the New York City Ballet. Nov. 5, David H. Koch Theater, 20 Lincoln

P O S T E R AU C T I O N Center Plz., 212-870-5570; 7, $12 and up.

MARIA MILLAR WITH KILTERCLASH: With more than 170

performances as the featured fiddler in Riverdance under her belt, this Juilliard grad commands both violin and stage alike. Nov. 6, BAMcafé Live, 30 Lafayette Ave., 718-636-4100; 9, free.

THE MENDELSSOHN SALON WITH ANDREW HENDERSON: Students from the Mannes College of Music perform vocal and instrumental works composed or influenced by Mendelssohn as part of the festival celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth.

Nov. 8, Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, 921 Madison Ave., 212-288-8920; 3, $10 and up.

RUTGERS WIND ENSEMBLE: One of the leading wind bands in the United States performs “In Wartime” by David Del Tredici and “Windfall”

by Charles Wuorinen, under the direction of William Berz. Nov. 10, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, 212-8645400; 8, $15 and up.

SHANGHAI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA: Celebrity pianist Lang Lang performs with China’s oldest Western-style orchestra, founded in 1879, for Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 2.” The program closes with a contemporary Chinese classic, Chen Qigang’s “Iris Unveiled.” Nov. 10, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 8, $36 and up.

URSULA OPPENS: Pianist Oppens performs works of contemporary American composers. Followed by a conversation with the composers. Nov. 11, The Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave., 212-817-8215; 7, $25.

BERLINER PHILHARMONIKER: Performs three concerts.

Nov. 11, 12 & 13, Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave., 212-247-7800; 8, $67 and up.

WATTEAU’S INSTRUMENTS OF PASSION: Baroque instrumental ensemble led by violinist Robert Mealy. Nov. 12, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., 212-570-3949; 3:30, free with museum admission.

NEW AMSTERDAM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA: Ankush Bahl returns to conduct a Mostly Mendelssohn program celebrating the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Nov. 13, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, 212864-5400; 8, $10 and up.

LA DAMNATION DE FAUST: Robert Lepage’s imaginative production of Berlioz’s masterpiece returns for a second season. Ends Nov. 17, Metropolitan Opera, West 62nd Street (betw. Columbus & Amsterdam Aves.), 212-362-6000; times vary, $20 and up.

JAZZ AFRO LATIN JAZZ ORCHESTRA: A Different Take: The

orchestra performs as part of a retrospective of its work and premieres a new commission celebrating the life of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Nov. 5 & 6, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, 212-864-5400; 8, $40.

CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE: The bassist considered one of the greatest of his generation performs in quintet Inside Straight. Nov. 10 through 15, The Village Vanguard, 178 7th Ave. (at 11th St.), 212-2554037; times vary, $35.

ELLEN O’BRIEN TRIO: The three-time Apollo Theatre competition winner and her trio perform with featured guitarist Jeff Golub. Nov. 8, Blue Note, 131 W. 3rd St., 212-475-8592; times vary, table $24.50.

GRETCHEN PARLATO: The jazz singers returns for a celebration of her new album In a Dream. Nov. 4, Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St., 212-576-2232; 7:30, $20.

HALL OF FAME MARY LOU WILLIAMS CENTENNIAL: Celebrating the centennial of the first lady of jazz and honoring her legacy with performances by Geri Allen, Geoffrey Keezer and the Jazz at Lincoln

Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsailis. Nov. 13 & 14, Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Time Warner Center, Broadway at W. 60th St., 212-721-6500; 8, $30 and up.

JEREMY PELT QUINTET: Featured Mingus Big Band trumpeteer Jeremy Pelt performs with JD Allen, Danny Grissett, Dwayn Burno and Darrell Green. Nov. 7, Smoke Jazz and Supper Club, 2751 Broadway, 212-864-6662; times vary, $30.

JOHN FARNSWORK QUINTET: Takes the stage with special guest Richie Cole and ends the night with a jam session. Nov. 9, Smoke Jazz and Supper Club, 2751 Broadway, 212-864-6662; times vary, $20.

MACEO PARKER: The saxophonist who helped define funk performs music recorded with James Brown.

Nov. 13 & 14, The Allen Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Time Warner Center, Broadway at W. 60th St., 212-721-6500; times vary, $55 and up.

MULGREW MILLER & WINGSPAN: Perform with Antonio Hart and Steve Nelson. Nov. 10 through 15, Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, 33 W. 60th St. (at Broadway), 212-258-9595; times vary, $30 and up.

THE MUSIC OF BLACK ORPHEUS: Featuring music from Nilson Matta-Brazilian Voyage trio, Kenny Barron, Filo Machado, Paulo Braga, Anne Drummond and Jorje Silve. Nov. 3 through 8, Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, 33 W. 60th St. (at Broadway), 212-258-9595; times vary, $30 and up.

THE NEW JAZZ QUARTET: Performing new works from members as well as classic Cuban and Brazilian jazz music. Nov. 12, 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson St. (at Canal St.), 212-601-1000; 8, Free.

SUZZANNE DOUGLAS: Sings the songs of Abbey Lincoln. Nov. 14, The Metropolitan Room, 34 W. 22 St. (betw. 5th and 6th Aves.), 212-206-0440; 7:30, $20.

VIJAY IYER TRIO: The jazz piano trio perform songs off its new album Historicity. Nov. 6 through 8, Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St., 212-576-2232; times vary, $30.

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AFTER MISS JULIE: Sienna Miller and Jonny Lee

Miller star in Patrick Marber’s reimagining of Strindberg’s classic drama of sexual politics, now set in 1945 London. Ends Dec. 6, American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42 St., 212-719-1300.

BROKE-OLOGY: Two African-American brothers find their relationship tested over the care of their ailing father. Ends Nov. 22, Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, 150 W. 65th St.,212239-6200.

COUNTY OF KINGS: A Def Poetry Jam alum’s solo show about growing up in Brooklyn as hip-hop emerges. Ends Nov. 8, Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., 212-967-7555.

FINIAN’S RAINBOW: The 1947 musical fable about a mischievous Irishman, his headstrong daughter and a stolen pot of gold follows its well-received Encores! run with a move to Broadway. Opens run, St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44 St., 212-239-6200.

GOD OF CARNAGE: This star-studded production of Yasmine Reza’s Tony-winning play chronicles two married couples’ comically savaged evening together. Open run, Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, 242 W. 45 St., 212-239-6200.

HAIR: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical: Diane Paulus’ celebrated revival of the 1967 hippie-centered musical continues its rocking Broadway run. Open run, Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45 St., 212-239-6200.

HAMLET: Jude Law headlines director Michael Grandage’s stylish production of Shakespeare’s oft-performed masterpiece. Ends Dec. 6, Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44 St., 212-239-6200.

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Deavere Smith addresses health care and the human body in her latest one-woman show, which features material from interviews with Lance Armstrong, Anderson Cooper and Ann Richards.

Ends Dec. 6, Second Stage Theatre, 305 W. 43rd St., 212-246-4422.

LOVE, LOSS AND WHAT I WORE: Nora and Delia Ephron adapt Ilene Beckerman’s popular book of the same title. Ends Jan. 3, Westside Theatre, 407 W. 43rd St., 212-239-6200.

MEMPHIS: A New Musical: Set in the titular city during the segregated 1950s, this musical charts the romance between a white DJ and a black singer as rock-and-roll begins to emerge. Open run, Shubert Theatre, 225 W. 44 St., 212-239-6200.

THE NEIL SIMON PLAYS: Brighton Beach Memoirs: David Cromer directs Simon’s autobiographical play about life as a baseball-obsessed Jewish boy in Brooklyn, which will play in repertory with Simon’s Broadway Bound (previews begin Nov. 18). Ends Jan. 31, Nederlander Theatre, 208 W. 41 St., 212-921-8000.

NEXT TO NORMAL: A woman and her family struggle to cope with her bipolar disorder in this emotional, Tony-winning musical. Open run, Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45 St., 212-239-6200.

THE NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM: The American Premiere of Edna Walsh’s “The New Electric Ballroom.”

This production is a companion piece to “The Walworth Farce,” which made its critically lauded American premiere in April 2008. Ends Nov. 22, St. Ann’s Warehouse, 38 Water St., Brooklyn, 718-254-8779.

OLEANNA: The David Mamet classic about the relationship between a male professor and his female student. Ends Mar. 7, John Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St., 212-239-6200.

THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD: J. M. Synge’s eccentric, high-spirited comedy celebrates the grand poetry and reckless abandon of the Irish imagination. Ends Nov. 22, New York City Center, 130 W. 56th St., 212-581-1212.

QUARTETT: With a quintessentially Wilsonian war of the sexes, director Robert Wilson brings to life the work of German playwright Heiner Muller featuring iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert. Nov. 4 through 14, BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., 718-636-4100; times vary, $25 and up.

THE ROYAL FAMILY: Rosemary Harris, Ana Gasteyer, and John Glover are among the theater veterans populating this revival of George S. Kaufman and Enda Ferber’s 1927 backstage comedy. Ends Dec. 13, Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47 St., 212-239-6200.

A STEADY RAIN: Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman star in Keith Huff’s play about the thorny relationship between two Chicago cops. Ends Dec. 6, Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, 236 W. 45 St., 212-239-6200.

SUPERIOR DONUTS: Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts returns with this comedy about an aging white donut shop owner and his young black employee. Open run, Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45 St., 212-239-6200.

VIGIL: A verbose malcontent takes questionable care of his dying aunt in Morris Panych’s darkly comic play. Ends Nov. 22, DR2 Theatre, 103 E. 15 St., 212-239-6200.

WISHFUL DRINKING: Carrie Fisher’s comic memoir chronicles the actress’ roller-coaster career and struggles with addiction. Ends Jan. 3, Studio 54, 254 W. 54 St., 212-719-1300.

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HAN TANG YUEFU MUSIC AND DANCE ENSEMBLE: The

ensemble enacts the legendary story of government corruption depicted in the ancient painting of “The Feast of Han Xizai.” Ends Nov. 8, The Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave., 212-691-9741; times

vary, $10 and up.

WROUGHT IRON FOG: Tere O’Connor’s dance unfolds

in multiple directions to engage in a poetic interface with the complex ideologies of contemporary culture. Featuring an original score by James Baker, lighting design by Michael O’Connor and performance by Hilary Clark, Daniel Clifton, Erin Gerken, Heather Olson and Matthew Rogers. Nov. 10 through 14, Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19th St., 212-924-0077; 7:30, $15.

CAVE NY BUTOH FESTIVAL: The fourth biennial Butoh Festival features performances, workshops and conversations with artists. Ends Nov. 25, various locations, www.nybf09.caveartspace.org.

HARKNESS DANCE CENTER 75TH ANNIVERSARY GALA: The seminal event of the anniversary year includes an array of select performances and honorees. Don’t miss the Martha Graham Dance Company, Ailey II, Parsons Dance, Doug Varone & Dancers, Monica Bill Barnes, Mark Dendy repertory by Jerome Robbins, Doris Humphrey, Pearl Lang, Katherine Dunham, film clips, guest artists and tributes. Nov. 5, 92nd Street Y Kaufmann Concert Hall, Lexington Avenue at East 92nd Street, 212-966-6414; 8, $100 and up.

GARNICA LEIMAY’S FURNACE: Tokyo-based master Ko Murobushi, director-performer Ximena Garnica and visual artist Shige Moriya promote the origins and international evolution of Butoh Dance.

Ends Nov. 8, Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St., 212-219-0736; times vary, $18.

FILM 1962: New York Film Critics Circle: In celebration

of the 75th anniversary of the revered critics’ organization, BAM showcases the rich and varied output from the one year when the NYFCC did not present its annual awards due to a newspaper strike. Through Nov. 9, BAM Rose Cinema, 30 Lafayette St., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100; times vary, $11.

ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI: The artist’s single-screen moving image pieces will continue to be screened in conjunction with MoMA’s exhibition “Projects 91: Artur Zmijewski.” Ends Jan. 2010, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53 St., 212-397-6980; times vary, $10 (adult), $8 (seniors), $6 (students).

BEESWAX: Andrew Bujalski’s latest examines the complicated relationships between a wheelchairbound vintage store owner, her friend and store co-owner, and her unemployed twin sister.

Nov. 8, 15, & 22, Leonard Nimoy Thalia, 2537 Broadway, 212-864-5400, times vary, $11 (general, $9 (seniors), $7 (members).

BEST BOY: The Film Society marks the 30th anniversary of Ira Wohl’s Oscar-winning documentary about his mentally-challenged cousin with a special screening and discussion with Wohl.

Nov. 8, The Walter Reade Theater, 165 W. 65 St., 212-875-5601; $11 (adult), $8 (senior), $6 (members, students, and children).

BIG APPLE FILM FESTIVAL: Now in its sixth year, the festival will feature 114 films over five days and opens with Against the Current, starring Joseph Fiennes and Mary Tyler Moore. Nov. 3 through 7, Tribeca Cinemas, 54 Varick St., 212-9472001; times vary, $20.

COST FAN TUTTE: An HD screening of Mozart’s classic opera of love and betrayal, this production was originally performed during the Salzburg Festival earlier this year. Nov. 15, Symphony Space, 2357 Broadway, 212-864-5400; 7, $21 (general,) $19 (members).

DETOUR: Edgar G. Ulmer’s twisted noir classic will be shown for one night only at BAM, with Ulmer scholar and New School professor Noah Isenberg introducing the film’s 6:50 screening. Nov. 16, BAMcinématek, 30 Lafayette St.,

Brooklyn, 718-636-4100 x1; 4:30, 6:50, 9:30, $11 (adult), $7 (member).

DIRECTED BY JERRY LEWIS: In conjunction with film scholar Chris Fujiwara’s new book on Lewis, this series explores the rubbery-faced comedian’s directorial work and includes several rarely-screened films. Nov. 12 through 19, Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave., 212-505-5181; times vary, $9 (adult), $7 (seniors, students and children).

FILM COMMENT SELECTS: The Box: Cult auteur Richard Kelly will discuss his latest headtrip thriller, in which a couple will receive a million dollars if they agree to kill a random person by pressing a mysterious button atop the eponymous package.

Nov. 5, The Walter Reade Theater, 165 W. 65 St., 212-875-5601; $20 (adult), $18 (senior), $15 (members and students).

FOUR WOMEN FILMMAKERS: Directors Peggy Ahwesh, Ericka Beckman, Abigail Child and Su Friedrich have each curated a series of personally-influential films, and all but Child will be on hand to discuss them. Nov. 6 & 7, Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave., 212-505-5181; times vary, THE HAND OF FATIMA: Augusta Palmer’s documentary investigates what happened when legendary group the Master Musicians of Jajouka and her rock-critic father crossed paths in 1971. Nov. 13 through 19, Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave., 212-505-5181; times vary, $9 (adult), $7 (seniors, students and children).

IBEROAMÉRICA: Our Way(s): MoMA salutes Iberoamérica, the intergovernmental organization that has supported over 500 Spanish, Latin American and Portuguese films since its inception, with a selection of films connected to the organization. Nov. 5 through 13, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53 St., 212-397-6980; times vary, $10 (adult), $8 (seniors), $6 (students).

LIFE LESSONS: Italian Neo-Realism and the Birth of Modern Cinema: This massive retrospective of the influential cinematic movement features over 35 films from 1943 through 1962. Through Nov. 25, The Walter Reade Theater, 165 W. 65 St., 212-875-5601, times vary, $11 (adult), $8 (senior), $6 (members, students and children).

MODERN MONDAYS: This series highlighting contemporary avant-garde artists continues with screenings and discussions with video artists Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn (Nov. 9) and multimedia artist Christian Marclay (Nov. 16). Nov. 9 & 16, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53 St., 212-3976980; $10 (adult), $8 (seniors), $6 (students).

MOVING IMAGE MASTERPIECES: This collaboration between the Museum of the Moving Image and Queens Theatre in the Park continues with screenings of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (Nov. 5) and Frederico Fellini’s 81/2 (Nov. 12). Nov. 5 & 12, Queens Theatre in the Park, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, 718-760-0064; 7:30, $10 (general), $8 (members).

NEW FRENCH FILMS: This overview of recent works from France boasts five New York premieres, including the latest from François Ozon. Nov. 11 through 15, BAMcinématek, 30 Lafayette St., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100 x1; times vary, $11 (adult), $7 (member).

THE RED SHOES: Michael Powell and Emeric

Pressburger’s stunning 1948 dance drama returns in all its Technicolor glory, with Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker (wife of the late Powell) introducing the screening on Nov. 6.

Nov. 6 through 19, Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., 212-627-2035; times vary, $12 (adult), $6 (child).

RIGOLETTO: The acclaimed Massimo Zanetti conducted this production of Giuseppe Verdi’s famous opera, which be will screened in high definition. Nov. 15, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, 2537 Broadway, 212-864-5400; $21 (general), $19 (members).

ROGER CORMAN: Poe and Beyond!: Anthology’s retrospective of the cheeky and prolific B-movie director begins with screenings of his famous Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Through Nov. 8, Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave., 212-505-5181; times vary, $9 (adult), $7 (seniors, students and children).

THE SAGA OF GÖSTA BERLING: In conjunction with a new translation of Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf’s work, Film Forum screens this 1924 Lagerlöf adaptation, with live accompaniment by pianist Steve Sterner and an introduction by George C. Schoolfield, professor emeritus of Scandanavian literature at Yale. Nov. 16, Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., 212-627-2035; $12 (adult), $6 (child).

SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE) (AKA EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF): Isabelle Huppert stars in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1980 rumination on art, sex and capitalism, which marked the director’s return to film after working in video throughout the 1970s. Nov. 8, BAMcinématek, 30 Lafayette St., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100 x1; 6:30, 9:15, $11 (adult), $7 (member).

TO SAVE AND PROJECT: MoMA’s international film preservation festival, celebrates its seventh year with gloriously preserved masterworks and rediscoveries of world cinema, nearly all of which are having their New York premieres. Through Nov. 15, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53 St., 212-397-6980; times vary, $20.

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS: Film Forum offers one more chance to savor the operatic teen angst of Elia Kazan’s 1961 classic, which returns following its popular screenings during the theater’s recent Kazan retrospective. Nov. 13 through 17, Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., 212-627-2035; times vary, $12 (adult), $6 (child).

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: Hear Marlon Brando bellow up to Stella one more time as Film Forum brings back Elia Kazan’s classic 1951 Tennessee Williams’ adaptation, following its popular screenings during the theater’s recent Kazan retrospective. Nov. 6 through 12, Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., 212-627-2035; times vary, $12 (adult), $6 (child).

WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS?: Following a screening of this documentary on five female artists navigating the upper echelons of the art world, co-director Pamela Tanner Boll and artists from the film will participate in a Q-and-A moderated by author Courtney E. Martin. Nov. 8, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, 2537 Broadway, 212-864-5400, 2:45, $11 (general), $9 (seniors), $7 (members).

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DecorativeARTS

Craft and Circumstance The Japan Society offers a scholarly look at Serizawa’s textiles and more

BY BRICE BROWN Attention all doodling, quirky shapemaking, pseudo-mystical, quasi-outsider artists and their admirers: Serizawa Keisuke (1895-1984) is in town and he’s not taking any prisoners. His deceptively humble textile designs contain universes when compared with the majority of anemic, modernist-derived abstractions and off-kilter naive scratchings being made today. Serizawa’s exhibition at the Japan Society, counting 100 works ranging from kimonos to book illustration to hanging curtains (noren), is a shot in the arm for people seeking a richly layered, intelligent and, at times, surprisingly alien viewing experience. It also further proves my point of the decorative arts’ vital, integral and often directly influential role in contemporary art.

Take, for example, Serizawa’s stencil-dyed, two-leaf paper screen from 1962 depicting the Chinese character for Ame (Rain) on the left and Hare (Sunshine) on the right. This quietly subversive diptych conflates language, image, narrative and metaphor into a few minimally rendered, richly colored, self-content forms resting on stylized foliage. Fresh and simple at first blush—and downright oozing with a calm

Morandi-esque confidence—Serizawa depicts time and weather, melancholy (dampness) and satisfaction (warmth), abstraction and representation so you believe his way is the only way Rain and Sunshine could ever be represented.

Though long considered one of the greatest Japanese artists of the 20th century—he was designated a Living National Treasure in 1956—and widely known throughout most of Europe, this is, somewhat surprisingly, the first scholarly look at Serizawa in America. (His work was introduced to European audiences in a 1976 exhibition in Paris, made possible at the urging of his close friend and promoter, the famed painter Balthus.) From the beginning of his career, Serizawa was a major figure in the mingei (people’s crafts) movement, which promoted functionality, ordinariness and artistic anonymity within the traditional Japanese crafts. Ironically, what separated his work from the others was his ability to synthesize influences from other non-Japanese cultures –– most notably Korean ideograph painting, known as munjado, which allowed for the seamless combination of text and motif—creating pieces that were at once common and approachable yet always uniquely identifiable as his.

Aside from the obvious beauty of Serizawa’s work, what is particularly compelling is his ability to straddle the worlds of craft and fine art.

He draws strength equally from both camps, creating thoroughly modern, self-contained works of art every bit in-line with contemporaneous artistic developments. It’s not a stretch to say Serizawa’s “Papermaking Village in Ogawa” (1941), has traces of Derain’s late woodblock prints, or his “Nawa Noren (Straw Rope Curtain)” (1955), reflects Myron Stout’s precise calibrations.

His illustrations for Don Quixote, “Ehon Don Kihote” (1937), find a home in the livres d’artist tradition, and even “Bandori (Padded Carrying Harness)” (1957), a straightforward, horizontally arranged depiction of the tools of his trade, presages Jim Dine’s hammers and brushes.

But what ultimately pushes Serizawa’s work out of the realm of simply good viewing and into a more engaging place is his primary

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“Seashells” kimono (1963) medium of choice, the textile. Until recently, textiles were relegated to the dustbin of the arts and afforded little respect or attention from the Fine Arts community. This is changing.

Serizawa understood how the inherent qualities of textiles—a comforting tactility, a sense of ownership and everyday familiarity, and a link to ancient origins (dyed flax fibers date back some 30,000 years)—could add layers to a work ordinarily not available to a painting on a rectangle.

Just look at his kimono “Abstract Designs” from 1976. Oversized, washy-colored lozenges run head to tow, creating a soothing vertical rhythm, while tiny, remedial-looking markings of triangles, squares and plus signs skitter around in between. If Paul Klee had designed a kimono, it could have looked something like this. Because it references the human body as functional clothing, the entire experience of looking and wearing becomes an elegant metaphor. It’s as if Serizawa has created a visual echo of Walt Whitman’s famous line, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Serizawa: Master of Japanese Textile Design, through Jan. 17. Japan Society, 333 E. 47th St. (betw. 1st & 2nd Aves.), 212-832-1155.

PainttheTOWN

By Amanda Gordon

Christie A. Butler

TV PARTY

Photos by Patrick McMullan

Howard and Marie Phipps

Rachael Feinstein and John Currin

Louise Grunwald and Emily Rafferty

Philipe de Montebello and Anne Poulet

“I’ve never seen the Frick at night,” artist Rachel Feinstein said, and what a night this was: The $2,500-a-ticket Autumn Dinner. The 230 guests took in French drawings and Maiolica, then supped on Griggstown Farm pheasant breast, chestnut gnocchi and wilted kale—an itinerary not too far off from how the museum’s creator, Henry Clay Frick, might have entertained. The event honored Philippe de Montebello, the recently retired director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, now the host of WNET’s Sunday Arts. “It’s not too much work,” de Montebello said of his on-camera gig. Art lecturer doyenne Rosamond Bernier is a fan. “I watch him on Sundays, and I say, ‘Bravo!’ It takes one to know one,” Bernier said. In accepting a silver charger, de Montebello noted his favorite paintings in the Frick Collection: Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” and Velazquez’s portrait “Philip IV.”

GAME ON

Chuck Close, Suzanne Scott and Leonard Lauder

At left, Glenn Ligon and Thelma Golden

Sisters-in-law Liz Swig and Julie Macklowe

Photos by Patrick McMullan

The special exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe at the Whitney seemed to inspire the women’s dress code at the museum’s annual gala.

There was Liz Swig, in a short turquoise dress that showed off a tan — it was as if she’d brought O’Keeffe’s Santa Fe with her. She also warmed the room when she announced that the event had raised $2.5 million. The director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Thelma Golden, had perhaps the hottest artist date: Glenn Ligon, whose work is now hanging in President Obama’s White House. As for the men, Claus Oldenburg sat on the bench in the museum lobby observing celebrity arrivals. “This is the best seat in the house,” he said.

Tetris butterscotch brownies and Domino’s pizza were suitable eats at the party for members of Carnegie Hall’s Notables. The group for music hall supporters in their twenties and thirties gathered for a panel on video games and music, then headed Pizza score!

Brad Hargeaves to the Nintendo store and Matt Brimer for a reception. “We’re just guys who had an adolescent fantasy of eating pizza at a store full of video games,” attendee Andrew Cedotal said. To make sure they could bring the pizza into the party, Cedotal and crew arranged for the chief executive of Harmonix (the makers of Rock Band), Alex Rigopulos, to vouch for the pies.

Carter Hudson Rigopulos obliged, but didn’t eat any. He was however happy to talk to City Arts about how Rock Band is inspiring people to learn to play musical instruments. Rigopulos himself has a degree in music and composition (his senior thesis was a composition called “Martial Suite”), and his older son is studying the contra bass at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. With the release this month of a Lego version of Rock Band, he’s hoping more young people will take the same path.

Photos by Amanda Gordon

SANTA FE SCENE

For more party coverage, visit www.cityarts.info.

To contact the author or purchase photos, email Amanda.Gordon@rocketmail.com; bit.ly/agphotos November 3, 2009 | City Arts

19

AVENUE Shows

Antiques & Art at the Armory

Exhibitor Images: Hollis Reh & Shariff, Donald A. Heald, Santos-London, Ophir Gallery

Defined by Quality & Design December 2, 2009 Private Preview Opening Benefit for The American Cancer Society HOPE LODGE NYC

December 3-6, 2009 Open to the Public

THE PARK AVENUE ARMORY 643 PARK AVENUE,NEW YORK CITY EXHIBITIONS AND LECTURES: Brooks Brothers presents “Generations of Style”

The Royal Oak Foundation For show information please visit: www.avenueshows.com or call 646.442.1627

Admission $20