9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

MONDAY, OCTOBER 12

Opening: Walid Raad at the Museum of Modern Art
This exhibition marks Walid Raad’s first major American survey and will present the Lebanese artist’s photography, video, sculpture, and performance works—the latter of which is extremely important, along with narrative and storytelling, in Raad’s work—from the last 25 years. Special focus will be given to Raad’s two long-term projects, The Atlas Group (1989–2004) and Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–present).
MoMA, 11 West 53rd Street, 10:30— 5:30 p.m.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15

Opening: Mary Reid Kelley at Fredericks & Freiser
Mary Reid Kelley’s black-and-white, bizarro femmes return this week with her video The Thong of Dionysus, the capper to the upstate New York–based artist’s “Minotaur” trilogy. Here, Reid Kelley returns to—and shakes up—Greek mythology by focusing on stories about Ariadne, Bacchus, the Maenads, and Priapus. Using wordplay, off-kilter make-up, and history, Reid Kelley remixes an ancient tale about love and death. Alongside her new video will be 18 photographs—portraits of people, from Euripides to Lil’ Kim, who Reid Kelley finds to be “Dionysian” in some way or another.
Fredericks & Freiser, 536 West 24th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Andrea Mary Marshall at Garis & Hahn
Andrea Mary Marshall is both photographer, subject, and object in her Pirelli-style limited-edition calendar, The Feminist Calendar 2016. The calendar’s 24 photos will be on view in large format—12 are sexually explicit shots, while the other dozen are modest and fully clothed. A press release explains, “Side one of Marshall’s double­-sided calendar embraces sex, power, and consumerism, while side two strips away the superficial adornments of traditional female beauty in favor of a more raw, barefaced femininity.” Coincidentally, Pirelli announced this month that Annie Leibovitz has been commissioned to shoot 12 women selected for more than just their physical qualities for their 2016 calendar. So that’s something.
Garis & Hahn, 263 Bowery, 6—8 p.m.

Talk: Arlene Shechet at the Brooklyn Museum
Hot off her first solo museum survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, New York–based sculptor Arlene Shechet will do a talk this week at the Brooklyn Museum with Catherine Morris, a curator for the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center. Shechet has become known for her ceramic works, which are often abstract, ambiguous, and frustrating. Unclassifiable and difficult, Shechet’s sculptures take what is thought by many to be a simple process and make it mysterious, adding on references to the history of sculpture and ceramics as she does so. Then again, as she said earlier this year in an interview for this magazine, “To know more, strangely, adds mystery.”
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 7 p.m., $16

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16

Opening: Jordan Casteel at Sargent’s Daughters
Jordan Casteel’s second show at the gallery, titled “Brothers,” will feature eight oil paintings created during her artist residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s “Process Space” on Governor’s Island. Once again, her subjects are black men—but this time, the focus is their relationships with one other in their own homes, inspired by those of Casteel’s twin brother, nephew, and friends. Aiming for nuanced, rather than politicized, portraits of black men, Casteel’s paintings “[confront] us with the humanity and individuality of these men and [we] are brought into their worlds on their own terms,” according to a release.
Sargent’s Daughters, 179 East Broadway, 6—8 p.m.

Opening: Jared Madere at the Whitney Museum of American Art
New York–based artist Jared Madere may be better known for running than the gallery Bed-Stuy Love Affair than making art, but that will change after this installation at the Whitney, Madere’s first solo show in America. Designed for the museum’s first-floor gallery, Madere’s installation will involve objects like salt, flowers, and burned coats—materials which may seem familiar, if not too familiar. By using objects that have already been worn down or obviously used, Madere is able to show us the ways that we are inherently connected to the things we own, and how we always leave our mark on our possessions. Madere’s installation is free and open to the public.
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

Screening: Eric Leiser at The New School
The New School’s Kinescope series will be screening the experimental films of filmmaker, animator, puppeteer, writer, holographer, and CalArts grad Eric Leiser, as curated by Kinescope founder Pawel Wieszczecinski. Leiser will introduce each of his films, which often deal with themes of dream symbology, the sublime in nature and tragedy, stop-motion animated psychodrama, funerary parlors, spiritual mystical Christian tone poems, Czech Surrealism, and magical realism, and will participate in a subsequent Q&A session with Wieszczecinski.
The New School, Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue, 7—9 p.m. RSVP via Facebook. 

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17
Talk: McArthur Binion with Lauren Haynes at Galerie Lelong
At first glance, McArthur Binion’s crosshatched abstract paintings seem as impersonal as possible, especially since they refer to Minimalism with their drab colors and emphasis on grids. Read up on Binion’s work, however, and you come to realize that underneath these paintings are copies of items that are wildly personal to the Chicago-based artist—birth certificates, identification cards, his portrait, among other things. For Binion, abstraction, a style that was once seen as having little to do with personal histories, is borne out of the artist’s past, and he’ll be discussing that in relation to his new show, “Re:Mine,” in a walkthrough with Lauren Haynes, an associate curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, 12 p.m.

Opening: Svenja Deininger at Marianne Boesky 
Much like memory, Svenja Deininger is a consummate revisionist. For her second solo show at the gallery, “Untitled/Head,” the Viennese painter continues to build and dig deep into her own abstractions, using primer, color, varnish to uncover bare canvas, ever in flux. Higher dimensions involved—the architecture of the canvas, the physicality of the space it inhabits, the viewers themselves—are indirectly proportional to the explicit perimeters of her flat canvases. As a press release states of this unique time-space continuum, “Her resulting intimate abstractions have consistently shown the intensity that a painting can have within a larger space, its edges providing the only index for how it was made and its atmosphere created.”
Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street, 10 a.m.—6 p.m.