9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

TUESDAY, JULY 4

Screening: Point Break at Brooklyn Academy of Music
Few action movies have made more a mark on their genre than Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991), which is a heist film of sorts. Keanu Reeves plays Johnny Utah, an FBI agent who is assigned to infiltrate a group of surfers who have been holding up banks. That group, known as the Ex-Presidents because of the masks they wear during robberies, is led by Bodhi, played by Patrick Swayze. The film was met with a lukewarm critical response initially, but in the two decades since its release, a cult following has developed. It screens here as part of a series organized by Edgar Wright, the director of the new film Baby Driver, whose 2007 cop-movie parody Hot Fuzz pays homage to Point Break’s campy ending.
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, screens at 6:45 and 9:30 p.m. Tickets $7/$14

WEDNEDSAY, JULY 5

Opening: “So I traveled a great deal…” at Matthew Marks Gallery
This group show, organized by Jordan Stein and artist Vincent Fecteau, brings together work by six Northern Californian artists. All the work on view carries what the curators call “ecstatic anxiety,” or the feeling of chaos or indeterminacy. Many of the pieces here have never been on view before. Some of the work will be trippy, if not downright hallucinatory—drawings by Jordan Belson, better known for his abstract experimental films, will offer patterns that resemble space imagery. Pieces by Isabella Kirkland, Joanne Kyger, Jack Mendenhall, Robert Strini, and Tisa Walden are also included.
Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, JULY 6

Opening: “Feedback” at Marlborough Contemporary
What better subject for a summer group show than collaboration? Curated by actor-turned-dealer Leo Fitzpatrick, “Feedback” is almost entirely devoted to artworks made by at least two people. Richard Prince and Robert Gober, Hanna Liden and Klara Liden, and Ray Johnson and Joseph Rafael are just a few of the duos who will have work in this exhibition. Also on view in this three-floor show will be what is said to be Marcel Duchamp’s final readymade, Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts), 1967, a heart-shaped print that was made by Alison Knowles and signed by the Dada master.
Marlborough Contemporary, 545 West 25th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: “The Roger Ailes Memorial Show: Fair and Balanced” at Yours Mine & Ours
The press release for this group show is simply Monica Lewinsky’s New York Times op-ed about Roger Ailes, the former Fox News CEO who had been accused of sexual assault and who died this past May. Lewinsky wrapped up that piece by writing, “The late Fox chief pledged Americans fair and balanced news. Maybe now we’ll get it.” The artists in this exhibition—Rochelle Feinstein, Sam Jablon, Tony Lewis, Siebren Versteeg, David Wojnarowicz, and more—use the issues that surrounded Ailes’s career as a jumping-off point.
Yours Mine & Ours, 54 Eldridge Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: “Remains” at Fergus McCaffrey
This group exhibition consists almost entirely of live performances. Taking its cues from the Gutai movement, the Japanese avant-garde from the 1950s that imploded the boundary between everyday life and art, “Remains” features artists who rely on performance as “a way of effecting change both materially and conceptually,” a news release notes. Artists in show include Hee Ran Lee, who will perform 50 Bulbs, a piece in which viewers hold a light bulb hanging from the ceiling and are instructed to throw it at the artist, Máiréad Delaney, Daniel Neumann, Clifford Owens, Nigel Rolfe, and Liping Ting.
Fergus McCaffrey, 514 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, JULY 7

Opening: Bunny Rogers at Whitney Museum
Bunny Rogers’s subjects often feel dated, as if they are from a not-too-long-ago time that’s just barely irrelevant. That’s often her subject: how an image, person, or things gets forgotten, and how its memory lingers on, if not in our everyday lives, then on the web. A memorable show last year at New York’s Greenspon Gallery used computer-generated versions of characters from the short-lived MTV show Clone High to ponder the grief leftover from the Columbine shooting, for example. Her Whitney show, her first major museum exhibition, will feature new work from the young artist. Based on a teaser image, Rogers appears to have updated a piano-playing character from her Greenspon outing, this time in a video where she performs on an empty school stage.
Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

Opening: Nora Berman at Downs & Ross
At a recent show at Ellis King gallery in Dublin, Nora Berman debuted a series of double-sided monumental paintings. The paintings weren’t hung on walls, but were instead exhibited standing up in the middle of the gallery, so that viewers could see their fronts and backs. On one side, they feature photos of the artist that have been painted over in areas; on the other, large gestural abstractions appear. For Berman, it’s up to the viewer to find the relationship between figurative and abstract styles, between personal and impersonal elements. She will continue thinking about those linkages with new work at this two-venue solo show, her first in New York.
Downs & Ross, 55 Chrystie Street, #203, and 106 Eldridge Street, 6–8 p.m.

SATURDAY, JULY 8

Talk: Aki Sasamoto at the Kitchen
As part of an its series called “New York Close Up,” Art21 will premiere a new film about Aki Sasamoto, a performance artist known for bringing a makeshift maze to the Frieze New York art fair and doing an entire series of works about washing machines at SculptureCenter. Earlier this year, Sasamoto presented a new group of works at the Kitchen about the point at which an elastic object finally breaks when stretched. Sasamoto will return to the space for this screening, and afterward will talk about her work.
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, 5:30 p.m.

Screening: Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song at Metrograph
Melvin van Peeble’s incendiary 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song bore the tagline “RATED X BY AN ALL-WHITE JURY” when it was initially released, and even 40-plus years after its release, it remains potent. One of the defining Blaxploitation films, this movie follows Sweetback, a sex worker of sorts whose boss is murdered by LAPD police officers. Sweetback is blamed for the crime, so he goes on the run, gradually moving closer and closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. Critics of all races were divided by the film when it first came out, and it continues to be discussed by historians because of its radical politics and its ambiguous ending.
Metrograph, 13 Ludlow Street, 5 p.m. Tickets $15