COURTESY DAVID ZWIRNER
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30
Opening: Hanna Liden at 56 Henry
The inspiration behind this exhibition, titled “No Weather Data Available,” is curbside detritus and abandoned urban material—specifically umbrellas. Two cast-concrete umbrella sculptures, colored in charcoal and orange, dangle at varying heights from the ceiling, while a third is hung from a noose attached to the ceiling. According to a press release, “Her objects are tragicomic follies, slapstick approximations of quotidian objects, or possibly fossils from an extinct civilization.”
56 Henry, 56 Henry Street, 12–6 p.m.
THURSDAY, MARCH 31
Opening: Michael E. Smith at Andrew Kreps Gallery
After a memorable and totally weird show at SculptureCenter last year, Michael E. Smith gets his first show at Andrew Kreps this week. It’s sure to feature more of his creepy-strange sculptures, which feature used objects like nail guns and soda bottles that the New Hampshire–based artist finds on the street or on eBay. Understated yet also moving, Smith’s work is evocative of Detroit, the economically strained city where he was born. And, though his largely monochromatic work is mournful, Smith’s sculptures are also beautiful—they seem to have organic matter growing on them sometimes, which might mean that, in the wake of extreme tragedy and failure, it’s always possible to start over.
Andrew Kreps Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.
COURTESY NEW MUSEUM
Panel: SOPHIE at New Museum
Enigmatic artist and producer SOPHIE will host Pupture, an evening exploring synthesis in art. Joined by multi-hyphenate artists including Gerry Bibby, Travis Boyer, Hayden Dunham, FlucT, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, and Henrik Oleson, the discussion will be punctuated by live performances and original music. The group—which offers experience in areas of dance, sound, music, video, photography, painting, and performance—will discuss the role synthesis plays in the creation, structure, and meaning of a work.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Tickets $20/15
Talk: William Wegman at the Strand
To celebrate the release of William Wegman: Paintings—a book that takes postcard images and constructs bizarre and humorous worlds around them—the artist will be present to discuss his career with Robert Krulwich, a Peabody Award–winning Radiolab cohost, NPR science correspondent, and general fan of Wegman’s.
The Strand, Rare Book Room, 828 Broadway, 7–8 p.m. Attendees must buy a copy of William Wegman: Paintings or a $20 gift card to attend
Opening: Stan Douglas at David Zwirner
For his 13th solo show in New York, Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas will present a new film titled The Secret Agent. Douglas has been making work about specific locations and past events since the late 1980s, and often uses both new and antiquated technologies as well as the frameworks of existing Hollywood genres such as film noir and the Western. Accompanying the exhibition on West 19th Street, the gallery’s West 20th Street location will present an overview of Douglas’s photographic career from the late 1980s to the present.
David Zwirner, 519 West 19th Street, 6–8 p.m.
FRIDAY, APRIL 1
COURTESY ICARUS FILMS
Screening: No Home Movie at Brooklyn Academy of Music
Last year, one day before No Home Movie had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, Chantal Akerman died at age 65. She was one of film’s greatest feminist voices, and also one of its most underrated, and now BAM and Film Forum have gotten together to give the Belgian director the massive retrospective she deserved. BAM’s retrospective kicks off with a two-week theatrical run for No Home Movie, a documentary about Akerman’s mother that relies on a Blackberry camera and other devices for its cinematography. Formally ambitious and somewhat confounding, the film was booed when it premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival and received gentle praise in America, but it’s a can’t-miss film for fans of Akerman, who once called No Home Movie “the center of my oeuvre.” —Alex Greenberger
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, 2 p.m. (also screens 4:30 p.m., 7 p.m., and 9:30 p.m.). Tickets $14/$10/$7
SATURDAY, APRIL 2
Opening: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts
At this point in her career, Maggie Lee is still known mainly for just one work—Mommy, her 2015 feature film that parallels the loss of her mother with the discovery of herself as an artist. That kind of subject matter can be treacly, but, in Lee’s hands, it’s a very stylized, smart affair. Partially a visual essay about how the Internet constructs memory, and partially a very moving documentary, Mommy has understandably been shown in a number of settings, and was even screened theatrically in New York in December. Now, Lee follows her film a solo show at Real Fine Arts. Titled “Fufu’s Dreamhouse,” the show will feature a series of vitrines that act as homes for Japanese Barbie-like dolls. Each vitrine will act as a different personality and is, in a way, a self-portrait for Lee. “Think a teenage girl’s bedroom crossed with hamster cage, if you will,” a gallery spokesperson said in an email. —Alex Greenberger
Real Fine Arts, 673 Meeker Avenue, Brooklyn, 7–10 p.m.
SUNDAY, APRIL 3
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FEUER/MESLER
Opening: Brad Troemel at Feuer/Mesler
The phrase “network of production” is thrown around a lot in press releases, but rarely ever is it as literal as when used to describe Brad Troemel’s work. Troemel has become famous for his Internet-based art about how objects get produced and consumed—he cocreated a Tumblr called the Jogging, in which Troemel and others photographed quickly made works, destroyed the objects, and left the images online to get re-blogged by others. (The rapper Gucci Mane used one the Jogging’s images as an album cover.) He continues his interest in how the Internet spurs production with this new show, titled “New and Handmade By Me,” for which Troemel used Pinterest to find techniques that interested him and learned how to make works using glycerin soap, bath bombs, handmade gingerbread houses, and other things. In a very endearing release, Troemel writes, “The idealistic hope for making a healthier world together and the nihilistic paranoia that the world will end at any second once again arrive at the same practical conclusion: doing it yourself. And for this exhibition, ‘New and Handmade by Me,’ that’s just what I’ve done!” —Alex Greenberger
Feuer/Mesler, 319 Grand Street, 2nd Floor, 6–8 p.m.
Opening: Sara Greenberger Rafferty at Rachel Uffner
Sara Greenberger Rafferty turns her attention to external interiority in the form of plastic consumer works, specifically those which fall in the realm of shopping. Images of books, diaries, online clothes shopping, and designer dresses and underwear all serve to represent the notion of “global capitalism and so-called individuality that are worn on the body until stained, frayed, or otherwise worn-out,” according to a release.
Rachel Uffner Gallery, 170 Suffolk Street, 6—8 p.m.
Update, March 30: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the opening date for Stan Douglas’s show at David Zwirner, “The Secret Agent,” as March 30. It is on March 31.