(Image courtesy of Bowery Film Festival via Facebook)
There are summer film festivals aplenty in New York, but none with quite so much local flavor as the new Bowery Film Festival, which kicks off for its inaugural run this evening at the Bowery Bar (one of the festival’s few free events) and goes through Saturday, August 18th. The festival focuses on “films that dissent radically in form, technique, or content from the mainstream,” according to the website.
The display Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photographs. (Photo by Diego Lynch)
The New Museum is taking a deep dive into the role of gender in contemporary art. With an emphasis on the word “contemporary.”
The vast majority of “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” opening today, consists of pieces from after 2010, with a sizable contingent from this year. The exhibit was curated with the goal of creating a snapshot of the current moment of “political upheaval and renewed culture wars,” a seeming reference to the increased prevalence of right-wing populism.
We reported last week that beloved Cajun eatery and longtime Bowery hangout Great Jones Cafe was temporarily shutting down — and, according to cryptic information from an employee, would or would not return. Fearing that the Great Jones had become yet the latest victim of rising rents, New Yorkers swarmed onto social media to pay their respects and lament the loss of a neighborhood institution that has served as an indispensable cultural hub for local artists, musicians, and writers — some of whom, like Basquiat, have become quite famous.
231 Bowery. (Photo: Daniel Maurer)
To celebrate New Museum’s 40th anniversary (contemporary art museums, they grow up so fast!), two new gallery spaces and several exhibits will be added this fall. The temporary galleries will open on September 27 and showcase work by Peter Halilaj and filmmaker Khalil Joseph.
The galleries will connect the museum’s ground floor to 231 Bowery, which the museum purchased in 2011, and will operate for an indefinite period of time, according to a museum spokesperson.
‘Soundlessness,’ 2016 (Courtesy of Lorna Simpson and Salon 94
Lorna Simpson is returning to Salon 94 for her third exhibition at the Bowery gallery. The Brooklyn-born artist became well-known in the mid-’80s for her large-scale works combining photography and textual elements with watercolor, ink, or acrylic paint, and creating nuanced statements on contemporary society’s perception of race, gender, and identity. Her show at Salon 94, opening September 8, will feature a number of paintings that premiered in the 55th Venice Biennale.
(Photo: Luisa Rollenhagen)
New York is facing an infestation. And we’re not talking about bed bugs nor are we referring to flying cockroaches– although apparently both of these nasties are really lovin’ this gnarly blast of heat and humidity so impenetrable you start thinking the guys from The Thing didn’t have it so bad because – hey, at least they were in Antarctica. Could it be the ever-rising mounds of boiling trash? That’s a thing too, sure. But what we’re talking about are co-working spaces.
(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
After a false start three weeks ago, street artist Logan Hicks is ready to give his Bowery Graffiti Wall mural another shot. The stencil mural, entitled Story of My Life, was supposed to go up the last week of July, but was scrapped after the wood panels that held the canvas shifted positions overnight, ruining the half-finished piece. More →
(Photo by Kavitha Surana)
(Photo by Kavitha Surana)
Back in 1970 Michael Netter was a recent graduate, soaking up the big city’s vibrant art scene. A striving painter, he fell in with Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd after showing up to a party with his brand new Sony Portapak video camera (20-pound backpack and all). The new technology instantly attracted the pop-master. “Before, ‘Hello, how do you do,’ it was: ‘Can you do that for me?'” Netter says of his first interaction with Warhol. For the next few years, he followed him around, filming bits and pieces of Warhol’s world, from random conversations at the Factory, to the infamous first meeting between David Bowie and Warhol (“He was miming! And miming badly!”), and interviews with the likes of Cybill Shepherd, Brigid Polk and other Warholian superstars.
credit: Hayes Davidson.
While low-income tenants at 83-85 Bowery have been fighting tooth and nail to stay put in their rent-stabilized tenements, just up the street it’s easy to see why pressure to evict them is at a fever pitch.