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9 Pop Culture Homages at Fringe Festival, From Lena Dunham to Patrick Bateman

August 5, 2015 By Rob Scher

Jacqui Rêgo (Photo by Bailey Carr)

Next week thousands of theater patrons will once again descend on Lower Manhattan for the 19th annual NYC Fringe Festival. “Fringe theater” usually denotes plays located on the edge of something (the mainstream, the city, a performer’s sanity). With 200 shows on offer, several seem to occupy the fringe between high culture and low, floating somewhere between stage, screen and page. These nine offer you the chance to Kill Dunham, Channel Spock and “Van Gogh Fuck Yourself.”

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Tags: David Foster Wallace, fringe theatre, fringenyc, lena dunham, This is happening, Van Gogh

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Greece Yourself Up and Dive into the Mediterranean at These Two Arts Festivals

August 4, 2015 By Rob Scher

Live Sand Art (Photo: Between the Seas Facebook page)

Live Sand Art (Photo: Between the Seas Festival Facebook page)

With Greece going through a bit of a rough patch, now seems as good a time as any to remember the days before it all went a bit pear-shaped. And what better way to do that than through the time-honored tradition of theater. Next Monday, Classic Stage Company will put the awe back in austerity as its “Greek Festival” plunges into a month of celebrated dramatic productions, workshops, readings and seminars. Speaking of plunging, the fifth annual “Between the Seas” festival is also going down in September (8th to 13th), bringing contemporary Mediterranean dance and theater to The Wild Project.

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Tags: greek tragedy, Lower East Side, Theatre, This is happening

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See What Happens When 111 Artists Find Each Other Through Facebook

August 3, 2015 By Rob Scher

GOING BIG (photo: Rob Scher)

Occasionally, the bottomless procrastination pit of Facebook serves a greater purpose than stalking exes. Sometimes the social network affords a community of strangers the chance to share in a common cause. And sometimes that translates into something tangible, like 111 artists from all across the country exhibiting together at CENTRAL BOOKING on the Lower East Side. Appropriately, curators Susan Carr and Suzan Shutan have titled the resulting show “GOING BIG.”

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Tags: Arts + Culture, gallery scene, Lower East Side, This is happening

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Go Watch an Orchestra and Circus Perform Together in a Bushwick Warehouse

July 27, 2015 By Rob Scher

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. This Friday night in a Bushwick warehouse, almost 1,000 people are gathering to watch a performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, a 19th century piece of classical music. Before you ask — no, this is not a fad (baroquecore?). Rather, it’s an event hosted by Groupmuse, a social media platform single-handedly bringing classical music back into #relevance.

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Tags: Bushwick, Classical music, Groupmuse, Muse Circus, This is happening

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Wanna Fake Stab Someone in Dumbo On Friday? Come Out and Play!

July 14, 2015 By Rob Scher

Come Out and Play 2014 (Photo: Lia Bulaong)

Stick with me here for a sec. OK, so you’re blindfolded and holding a “knife” (retractable) in a “graveyard” (technically, Manhattan Bridge Archway Plaza), stalking out an opponent you need to “impale” (prod) for victory. For those still reading, as you may suspect I’m describing a kind of game. Specifically, it’s titled Rose Macbeth and forms one of the many “big games” on offer this Friday evening at the 10th annual Come Out and Play: After Dark festival.

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Tags: big game, come out and play, dumbo, This is happening

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Nolita Just Got a Pop-Up Beach With Artsy Towels and 7,000 Pounds of Sand

July 10, 2015 By Rob Scher

Welcome to Nolita Beach (photo: Tictailerooni)

Hot damn, it’s summer in the city. In celebration, a pop-up beach just appeared for the weekend at 171 Elizabeth Street. “Nolita Beach,” reads a blue neon sign outside the tiny gallery filled with 7,000 pounds of beach sand. Appropriately draped along its walls, like a set of functional tapestries, are beach towels created by ten prominent New York designers such as Jessica Walsh and Damien Correll. The crazed brain behind this bohemian beach is Tictail, an online marketplace where designers and artists create their own stores (think a less crunchy Etsy.)

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Tags: beach, soho, summer, This is happening, Tictail

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Feeling Down? Pop Into This Williamsburg Therapy Bubble

June 12, 2015 By amiltonnymag

(Photo: Rob Scher)

The doctor is in (a plastic igloo opposite McCarren Park).
As if feeding, entertaining and educating weren’t enough, earlier today Northside Festival added “solving existential ennui” to the list. Now you can duck into an inflatable plastic dome for the talking (or rather, messaging) cure.
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Tags: northside festival, Talkspace, therapy, This is happening, Williamsburg

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This New Arts Endeavor Hopes to ‘Change the Way We Engage With Africa’

June 5, 2015 By amiltonnymag

Kehinde Wiley’s donated artwork – After Pontormo’s ‘Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s ‘On Friendship’, 2009

More often than not, the presence of a message or cause in art doesn’t carry far past the considered stares of gallery patrons, their necks made stiff from nodding. But when art truly intersects with social activism, the slow moving gears of change can be felt. A couple of cogs might just be set in motion tonight at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, with the launch of the Africa’s Out! campaign and a benefit in support of East African LGBTQI rights.

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Tags: Arts + Culture, kehinde wiley, lgbtq, This is happening

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These Guys Have Camped Out All Week For a Williamsburg Art Show

June 5, 2015 By amiltonnymag

Joe Wong, Paul Aftanas, Dan Hamburger.

At 2:30am this past Tuesday, having just flown in from San Diego, Dan Hamburger pulled up to Cotton Candy Machine’s rain-soaked curb. With the Williamsburg gallery’s annual Tiny Trifecta art show just four short days away, Hamburger was taking no chances. More →

Tags: Arts + Culture, cotton candy machine, dan hamburger, This is happening, Williamsburg

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Eduardo Sarabia Turned Mexican Narco Imagery Into Fine Art

June 3, 2015 By amiltonnymag

Eduardo Sarabia, “Ballads” exhibit. (photo: Rob Scher)

Paper holds much value, even when it’s not green, with Franklin’s unsmiling mug on it. A recent MoMA exhibit, for instance, showed Henri Matisse’s appreciation for the potential beauty of tree pulp. Another fellow who seems to have received the memo is Mexican-based artist Eduardo Sarabia, whose most recent exhibit, “Ballads,” opens today at Other Criteria gallery in Soho.
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Tags: art, Damien Hirst, Drugs, Eduardo Sarabia, mexico, soho, This is happening