Recommended from Leslie-Lohman Museum, December 2019

Ben Cuevas, Reinserted: Show Center, 2019, as part of ON OUR BACKS: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work. ON VIEW THROUGH JANUARY 19, 2020

EXHIBITIONS

Gracie Mansion She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York, 1919-2019 Through December 2 She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York City coincides with the centennial year of women’s suffrage and is the first of its kind in Gracie Mansion. The exhibition brings together more than 60 works by 44 women across 10 decades. It includes emerging and established artists including: Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman, Alice Neel, Diane Arbus, Faith Ringgold, Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel. She Persists is intended as a forward-looking celebration of the 19th amendment which granted women the right to vote on June 4, 1919. >>>

The Java Project Ian Lewandowski: Community Board Opening: Saturday, December 14th 6-9PM December 3, 2019 – January 10, 2020 Most of the photographs in Community Board are test shots from portrait sessions, made on the long discontinued Polaroid Type 50 series 4x5 instant film. Their chemistry is largely expired, causing the color and contrast to shift significantly among other errors, and rendering them useless as tests for sheets of color negative or slide film. These "tests" instead invoke a Polaroid's characteristic properties: they are singular in nature, attempts built on precarious foundations. >>>

Performance Space New York Slipping Into Darkness December 7, 9 - 13, Performance, December 12, 10PM Tolentino’s new durational work, Slipping Into Darkness, plays out in both the Day and the Night. In the daylight of the winter sun, movers breathe, labor, and shift while sheathed under the cover of a thick “horizon” made from leather, scented oils, reflective surfaces, and dense sound. In the evening, participants join in an intimate one-to-one exchange immersed in a dark pool of mineral water. Working with and below these evocative opaque surfaces, Tolentino reaches for the sensual, the subjective excess of each encounter. >>>

PARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN The Museum of Capitalism, NYC Through December 10 The Museum of Capitalism is pleased to announce a new exhibition in New York City, the culmination of a yearlong residency of Museum curators at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School. The exhibition features exhibits, artifacts, and artworks created and collected by Daniel Bejar, Dr. Jeffrey Caren, Center for Tactical Magic, Maia Chao, Cheyenne Concepcion , Mark Curran, Jennifer Dalton, Sharon Daniel, Burak Delier, Clare Dibella, Blake Fall-Conroy, Paul Farber, Gabriele Galimberti and Paolo WoodsMarisa Jahn, Nina Katchadourian and Julia Meltzer, Matt Kenyon, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Jessica Kingdon, Michael Mandiberg, Nyeema Morgan, Tim Portlock, Related Tactics, Eva Rocha, Sayler / Morris, Jesse Sugarmann, Igor Vamos, Walmart and Banksy. >>>

Queer Thoughts Paul P: Slim Volume Through December 14 In Paul P.’s exhibition, Slim Volume, a photocopy of Stephen Tennant’s portrait is featured in a small collage on notepaper, which hangs alongside works from P.’s ongoing repertoire of oil paintings, drawings and sculptures. Like the person of Tennant himself, P.’s collage offers a codex for the indirect modes of presentation and signification that inform the artist’s work, such as the relay of affinities across time, the filigree that encodes inclinations, and the oblique queer reasoning that doesn’t necessarily require the effable and the plastic to perform its seditious role. >>>

Rubber Factory Pacifico Silano: Time Is An Ocean But It Ends At The Shore Thought December 15 Pacifico Silano is a lens-based artist whose work is an exploration of print culture and LGBTQ identity. In Time Is An Ocean But It Ends At The Shore, Pacifico continues his exploration into queer melancholy, desire and loss. Playing with representations of masculinity, he fragments, reveals and conceals the pages of vintage gay erotica. Expanding on his previous work, Pacifico creates intricate, formal presentations of large scale photographs exploring the multiple lives of a printed image. Nature features heavily in the work, acting as a silent witness to the bodies that once occupied magazine centerfolds. >>>

P.P.O.W Hunter Reynolds From Drag to Dervish Through December 21 Drag to Dervish, is an exhibition chronicling the life of Hunter Reynolds’ alter-ego Patina du Prey through historic installations, sculptural gowns, photographs, and performance documentation. An activist, muse, and healer, du Prey performed throughout the United States, Western Europe and Canada during the AIDS crisis. Whether worn on the artist’s body or presented on a male-form mannequin, du Prey’s series of rotating, suspended or sunken dress-sculptures embody a dual-gendered spirit. >>>

Galerie Buchholz Monica Majoli: blueboys Through December 21 Inspired by mokuhanga, Japanese woodblock printing, Monica Majoli’s large-scale Whiteline woodcut watercolor paintings are based on images from Blueboy magazine, circa 1976-79, a period she considers “the halcyon years of gay liberation, when homosexuality was understood to be politically charged and under threat, presaging the trauma of the aids epidemic.” Halcyon provides a way to understand the aesthetic of the soft-core centerfolds of the magazine: the lighting is sun-kissed, the palette warm with rose-golds’ ember glow, the bodies toned and unmanscaped. >>>

Company Gallery: 88 Eldridge Street Tiona Nekkia McClodden: Hold on, let me take the safety off Through December 22 Hold on, let me take the safety off Let me correct you. What you may only perceive as discipline I can describe as luxury. You will learn an economy of movement, body binding color to object. It’s breaking contact, the final thrust which colors the ballon. Articulation affects the character of the jump. When the leather rests sans intercession... >>>

Smack Mellon Idol Worship Through December 29 Organized by guest curator Emily Colucci, the group exhibition Idol Worship celebrates the ongoing cultural, social and political significance of role model adoration as an essential survival strategy. Self-identifying women, in particular, are often overlooked as figures to be emulated, exempt from the label of “genius” so readily bestowed upon men. >>>

Grey Art Gallery, NYU Violet Holdings: LGBTQ+ Highlights from the NYU Special Collections at Bobst Through December 31 New York University Libraries present Violet Holdings: LGBTQ+ Highlights from the NYU Special Collections, an exhibition surveying queer life from the mid-1800s to the present day through a sample of materials drawn from NYU Libraries’ special collections and archives. Violet Holdings is part of NYU’s yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising. >>>

The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice Utopian Imagination Through December 31, 2019 Utopian Imagination brings together works by artists who are imagining our existence on an imperiled planet. With the understanding that (radical) love is the answer to the violence presented in Perilous Bodies, this exhibition recognizes the difficulties of the task ahead. Utopias are increasingly hard to imagine in a world torn asunder by conflict. Using science fiction to frame this interrogation, this exhibition presents objects, bodies, vessels, and fragments created by artists over time that when pieced together, offer a vision of a future that includes all of us. Artist include Lola Flash, Moreshin Allahyari, Juliana Huxtable and many more. >>>

The Bureau of General Services-Queer Division How do we know what we need you to know Through January 9, 7-10 PM The Bureau of General Services-Queer Division and Queer/Art|Mentorship are proud to present How do we know what we need you to know: Intimate access and collective care, the 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship Annual Exhibition, curated by current Fellow Jeanne Vaccaro. This special exhibition will present new work by the graduating Fellows of the 2018-2019 Queer|Art|Mentorship program, Queer|Art’s celebrated year-long intergenerational creative and professional development program, now entering its ninth year. >>>

Throckmorton Fine Art MARCUS LEATHERDALE:OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Photographs New York City 1980 - 1992 Through January 25, 2020 Taken from his new book, Marcus Leatherdale, OUT OF THE SHADOWS – Photographs New York City 1980-1992, (ACC Art Books) the show features dozens of black and white portraits and photographs of the celebrities and characters who peopled the often chaotic and clamorous Downtown Art Scene of the 1980s. >>>

Bronx Museum The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop Through February 9, 2020 The exhibition features over 120 photographs drawn from the Bronx Museum’s permanent collection and from private collections. In addition, the artist’s personal archive, housed at the Bronx Museum, will be shown to the public for the first time. A quiet man who supported himself doing odd jobs such as street vendor, jewelry designer, photography printer, and cab driver, Bronx native Alvin Baltrop left an important body of work after his untimely death in 2004 that only now is garnering the serious attention it deserves. Like the startling images of Peter Moore, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Gordon Matta-Clark, the photographs of Alvin Baltrop memorialize New York City at a breaking-point moment amid ruin and chaos. >>>

Queens Museum Nicolas Moufarrege: Recognize My Sign Through February 16, 2020 Nicolas Moufarrege (1947-1985) was an artist and writer born to Lebanese parents in Alexandria, Egypt and raised in Beirut. During a career that lasted just over a decade, he created an original and idiosyncratic body of embroidered paintings made in Beirut; Paris, France; and New York City. Recognize My Sign—the artist’s first solo museum exhibition—traces the development of his work from the lap-scaled portrait-tapestries he began making in the early 1970s to the final works he created while living in New York between 1980 and 1985. >>>

PROGRAMS AND EVENTS

Pioneer Works The Trans Sounds of Black Freedom Roundtable III Tuesday, December 3 Scholar, critic, and professor Fred Moten has long drawn on the notions, theory, and practices of radical black aesthetic traditions—both as political thought and, more significantly, as an aesthetic critique to hegemonic notions of power. As he once proclaimed, “Exhaustive celebration of and in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is black study.” Ballroom comes out of this tradition. This roundtable session will examine the House-Ballroom Community’s (HBC) use of performance—vogue as a hermeneutics of the body; a reading of a sacred text; a story-telling; an apparatus to conceptualize pain, joy, and desire—and the use of lip sync performance—as a homiletics; a means of ministry; a holding of space; a spiritual formation. >>>

IFC Felipe Baeza presents "MOSQUITA Y MARI" Monday, December 2, 8PM  Join QUEER|ART|FILM for the final screening of their fall season: Chicas y Fantasmas, organized by guest curators Vivian Crockett, Camilo Godoy, and Carlos Motta.  Yolanda Olveros and Mari Rodriguez are high school classmates who discover they live in the same predominantly Mexican neighborhood in Los Angeles. The two teenagers forge a friendship while negotiating the expectations of their migrant parents. The intense social and personal pressures to belong bring them both intimately closer to one another. As visual artist Felipe Baeza notes, “MOSQUITA Y MARI i s not your standard coming out story,” but rather a layered meditation on migration, sexuality, and working-class family life, all themes that are near to Baeza’s personal experience. >>>

The New School: Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Collage An Evening with Carmen Maria Machado Wednesday, December 4, 6:30-8:00PM Carmen Maria Machado reads from and discusses her story collection, Her Body and Other Parties. Her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. >>>

The New School: Starr Foundation 30 Years of Theorizing Justice: Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory and Contemporary Challenges (Hans Maeder Lecture by Kimberlé Crenshaw) Thursday, December 5, 6-7:30PM Looking back on its journey in the 30th year, in this talk, Prof. Crenshaw expounds on intersectionality through the lens of personal narrative. She reflects on formative experiences that shaped her political consciousness as a woman and as a Black person, and how those anecdotes directly informed her theorization and application of intersectionality. >>>

CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies Kessler Award Ceremony: Honoring Jasbir Puar