If you’ve been saving up all your anger from the last two weeks and would perhaps like to slap it on a canvas in a blind rage to create art that will then be shown to the public, keep reading. Tribeca gallery The Untitled Space has put out an open call inviting women artists to submit work for a show called Angry Women, to open in mid-January. Artists are asked to “respond to the political and social climate as well as explore themes revolving around feminism today and female empowerment.”
Gallery Scene
Incarcerated LGBTQ Artists Get a Gallery Show Curated By Diane Von Furstenberg’s Daughter
The obstacles faced by the more than 2.3 million incarcerated people in the United States today are enormous, and the consequences of the prison system are felt by whole communities, families, and the 5 million children who have at least one parent either currently or previously imprisoned.
This Art Show Wants Your Election Reactions, Regardless of How Rowdy
If your blood hasn’t stopped boiling since last Tuesday, a weekend art show could be a chance to find some semblance of catharsis. This Saturday, the fifth iteration of the RE: Art Show opens, once again taking over a portion of the old Pfizer Building at 630 Flushing in Bed-Stuy. Last month’s edition of the show featured the celebrated group exhibit Fatter IRL. This month’s Re:Re:Re:Re:Re: will take place in an area of the building that perhaps most reflects the state of affairs in this country, as it appears to be in shambles. A press release states the gallery area will be a “large, open, unfinished space with chipped paint, exposed wiring, and fire alarm components dangling from the ceiling.” May we try our best to hang on to the “unfinished” aspect of that to give us a kernel of hope to keep on going. Call your senators!
The Current Museum Is a New Space Expanding the Definition of Digital Art
Nowadays, Soho is mostly known for luxury shopping rather than the groundbreaking artistic work for which it was known in the past. Earlier this month, a new space for digital art called The Current Museum opened its doors at a temporary location on Sullivan Street. Its group exhibit Test Patterns takes digital art out of the box (screen) and showcases digitally-influenced works of all mediums and forms. More →
How a Bunch of Brave New Futurists Zapped the Old Pearl River Mart Back to Life
“Preservationist” has become something of a slur, used to denigrate the old-timers and neo-hippies who’d rather save ratty old tenant buildings and dusty mom-and-pop stores than make way for clean big-box stores with cheap stuff for everyone, and skyscraping mixed-use luxury complexes with their affordable housing pittance. It’s sorta like: C’mon, New York City is, by its nature, dynamic and changing. But the ever-faster pace of development and the lightyear rate of change have made for an urban landscape where transformation takes place exponentially and squeezes out the very people who have made this city vibrant and interesting in the first place.
Over the weekend, a slew of more than 40 local and visiting artists, as well as organizations like the Chinatown Art Brigade (a grassroots effort tackling the divisive issue of gallery-led gentrification in their neighborhood) demonstrated that preservation doesn’t have to be backward-looking.
‘Style Wars’ Producer Henry Chalfant Offers Panoramic Views of Graffiti’s ‘Golden Age’
Since Thursday, the white walls at Eric Firestone Gallery have been wholly devoted to just a small portion of Henry Chalfant’s archive of “subway photographs.” Henry Chalfant: 1980 focuses on a year in which graffiti was still regarded as subversive and dangerous. At the same time, street art was at its most vibrant and anarchic. The work offers not only a trip back to the “golden age of graffiti,” but a thorough “visual anthropology,” as Chalfant describes it– a studied view of street culture back when it actually came from the streets.
Vintage Voting Machines Get a Sci-Fi Update at The Choice is Yours
This election cycle has been louder than most, with red-faced screaming, epic shout-downs, and showers of insults pummeling over political decorum. The Choice Is Yours, a new art show grown out of the clunky mechanical levers of cumbersome voting machines, feels unusually quiet by comparison, almost to the point of being meditative.
“I thought it would be fun to turn them into these choice machines,” the artist, R. Luke DuBois explained. “Maybe it makes you think twice when you get into an actual voting booth on Tuesday.”
You Can Slurp Booze Out of All of the Art at ‘Slow, Dimwitted Carnage’
Attending an art opening usually means agreeing to a trade-off: in exchange for free booze and the company of other humans, you won’t be seeing much, if any of the art work. But at “Slow, Dimwitted Carnage,” the second exhibition from newcomer gallery Coustof Waxman, guests can have their art and, um, drink it too.
Pipilotti Rist Creates Kaleidoscopic Comfort With Her Pixel Forest, at the New Museum

Pipilotti Rist, Gnade Donau Gnade (Mercy Danube Mercy), 2013/15.
Installation view: “Komm Schatz, wir stellen die Medien um & fangen
nochmals von vorne an,” Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, 2015. Courtesy the
artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Lisa Rastl
As artist Pipilotti Rist spoke to a group of journalists last week, soap bubbles floated out of a silver machine and promptly disappeared in a puff of smoke, as part of a 1999 sculptural piece playfully entitled “Nothing.”
“Thank you for your work, being a bridge to the possible audience, being a translator,” she told us. With that bit of kindness, plus a brief statement in support of letting refugees in, we were ushered into Pixel Forest, the three-floor survey of Rist’s video and sculptural work that is equal parts manically psychedelic, serenely meditative, and highly accessible. More →
Betty Tompkins’s ‘Green Dicks’ Is No Limp Attempt at Smushing the Patriarchy
A new art show at the Fortnight Institute is flipping the script on a persistent imbalance in the art world. While men still dominate the major museums, massive retrospectives, and money-makers of the art market, most of the weens found at DICKS (on view now through December 4) are actually nailed to the wall.
All but one of the eight participating artists are women, and each artwork included in the show (paintings, photography, and sculpture) is strikingly phallocentric and jarringly figurative. DICKS is so literal in its approach to the ding-dong (arguably the most hilarious feature associated with the male anatomy) that the show was announced without explanation. The title, and a glimpse of Betty Tompkins’s contribution, Dick Painting #3, said it all.