9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 21

Exhibition: “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now)” at Met Breuer
Featuring 120 works created over a span of 700 years, “Life Like: Sculpture, Color, and the Body” considers how artistic ideals, concerns, and techniques for sculpting the human body have shifted since the 14th century. The exhibition brings together works of diverse temporal and geographical origins, juxtaposing forms and calling into question the usefulness of figuration as an artistic mode. In addition to pieces by Donatello, El Greco, Edgar Degas, Louise Bourgeois, Fred Wilson, Bharti Kher, and Robert Gober, the show includes wax figures, mannequins, reliquaries, and anatomical models.
Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Opening: “The Metropolis in Latin America, 1830–1930” at Americas Society
Comprising maps, plans, blueprints, and photographs, “The Metropolis in Latin America” presents a visual history of various Latin American cities, from colonial rule to the modern era. Transplanted from the Getty Center, where it showed during the fall as part of the initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the exhibition explores the process of purging colonial symbols from cities and the ways in which industrialization, advances in infrastructure, and the rise of the bourgeoisie affected the development of urban layouts and spaces.
Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, 7–9 p.m.

THURSDAY, MARCH 22

Exhibition: “Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro” at Museum of Arts and Design
Miriam Schapiro, who died in 2015, was a leader of the feminist and decorative art movements of the 1970s. With a particular focus on her “femmages” (works that combine painting and collage), “The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro” situates her practice and politics among contemporary artworks made by Sanford Biggers, Edie Fake, Jasmin Sian, and others. A meditation on the decorative that promises a vibrant display of colors, patterns, and shapes, the exhibition celebrates the once-derided crafts that Schapiro strived to legitimize in the art world. Also included are pieces from the artist’s estate, including needlework, folk art, and fabric swatches.
Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, 10 a.m.–9 p.m.

Opening: “In Tribute to Jack Tilton: A Selection from 35 Years” at Jack Tilton Gallery
Nearly a year after the death of Jack Tilton, the dealer’s New York gallery will memorialize its namesake with a survey of more than three decades of shows. Tilton helped to assist in the development of a long list of influential contemporary artists, and his gallery, which opened in 1983, staged seminal shows for Nicole Eisenman, Marlene Dumas, and David Lynch, just to name a few. This tribute show boasts a strong artist list that includes David Hammons, Huang Yong Ping, Betty Parsons, Kiki Smith, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Xu Bing.
Tilton Gallery, 8 East 76th Street, 5:30–8:30 p.m.

Performance “MindTravel with Bowie” at Brooklyn Museum
Billed as not just a performance but rather a “musical experience,” “MindTravel with Bowie” will use wireless headphones and additional visual components as the core environment for the composer Murray Hidary’s sprawling improvisational piano pieces. Part of a larger series of “silent” direct-to-headphones concerts thrown by Hidary, the night is inspired by everything from non-Western philosophy and metaphysics to David Bowie’s own outlook on life.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 7–9 p.m.

FRIDAY, MARCH 23

Performance: Constance DeJong and Tony Oursler at the Kitchen
After a 20-year period apart, Constance DeJong and Tony Oursler will reunite for a new staging of their 1988 performance w Relatives. (Having first debuted at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 1988, the performance was first staged at the Kitchen in 1989.) The piece utilizes spoken text and video to create a back-and-forth between a performer and a television, to explore a genealogy of history’s minor figures charted through appearances in painting, photography, film, television and video games.
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 8 p.m. Tickets $15/$20

SATURDAY, MARCH 24

Screening: The Exorcist at Guggenheim Museum
A horror-movie classic comes to the Guggenheim Museum this week courtesy of Danh Vo, who is currently the subject of a major survey at the institution. In the past, Vo has made work inspired by The Exorcist (1973), which follows a priest charged with exorcizing an ancient demon that’s inhabited the body of a girl, but apparently his choice to screen the Oscar–nominated film comes from a personal place. “[The Exorcist] was shown to Vo by his horror-film-obsessed mother at the age of seven, when it no doubt made a terrifyingly indelible impression,” Katherine Brinson, the show’s curator, said in a statement. “The film’s interrogation of religious faith and doubt, its depiction of the appropriated and dislocated body, and its themes of parental nurture and neglect can all be similarly traced in the artist’s work.”
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, 2:30 p.m.

SUNDAY, MARCH 25

Opening: Matana Roberts at Fridman Gallery
Matana Roberts has called her work “panoramic sound quilting,” or the cobbling together of images and sounds to create versions of personal histories. Her past work has brought together everything from blank musical scores to appropriated images of Harriet Tubman and Sioux Native Americans. With this new show, titled “jump at the sun” after a passage from a Zora Neal Hurston novel, Roberts will debut new mixed-media works that deal with the “colonization of form,” or the way places absorb objects with political meaning, according to the artist.
Fridman Gallery, 287 Spring Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Jonathan Lyndon Chase at Company Gallery
In Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s work, thinly painted figures appear to commune with one another. Sometimes, they seem to be having sex; in others, the figures simply lounge next to one another. For Chase, these are images of what intimacy—both in the view of the public eye and outside it—might mean today. “I think about identity and masks,” Chase has said. “Roles we take on in private spaces and in public spaces.” At this exhibition, titled “Quiet Storm,” Chase will show new and recent paintings.
Company Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, 6–8 p.m.