1. Greer Lankton: Love Me is on view at Participant Inc. until December 21.
Upon entering Participant Inc, you’re welcomed by an array of icons: Edie Sedgwick, Diana Vreeland, Candy Darling, Jackie Kennedy and many more. Some of them are photographed and some are real life-size dolls. The thing they have in common is that they have all been eternalized by the late American artist, Greer Lankton. The Michigan-born artist became known for blurring the line between folk art and fine art with her radical lifelike dolls. Considered an icon of downtown New York, Lankton was a friend of the famed photographer Nan Goldin, who documented the stylish woman in dept—some of which are also on display at the first New York-based survey of Lankton’s work, Love Me.
2. Antony & the Johnsons: You Are My Sister (Turning) is on view at Times Square until December 31.
A letter from Antony Hegarty:
“Dear Friends,
I am writing to invite you to a very exciting event in my life.
At 11:55 pm every night in December they are showing TURNING for 3 minutes on almost every single screen in Times Square.
Portraits from TURNING the size of football fields, like butterflies taking over the insane corporate overload of Times Square.
It is shocking to see all those giant advertising screens suddenly synchronize and reveal gorgeous TURNING portraits on New York City’s underground beauties such as Johanna Constantine, Kembra Pfahler, Joie Iacono, Joey Gabriel, Honey Dijon, Connie Girl, Lola Naise, Julia Yasuda, Eliza Douglas… the list goes on.
PLEASE MEET ME THERE!!!
Come and spend 5 minutes with us. We meet at the red staircase at 7th avenue between 46th and 47th street at 11:50pm. The projections span boards from 47th to 43rd street. It starts at 11:57 and it’s over by midnight.”
3. Sturtevant: Double Trouble is on view at MoMA until February 22, 2015.
Though her “repetitions” may appear to be simply mimetic exercises in proto-appropriation, Sturtevant is better understood as an artist who adopted style as her medium and took the art of her time as a loose score to be enacted and reinterpreted. Far more than mere copies, her versions of Johns’s flags, Warhol’s flowers, and Joseph Beuys’s fat chair are studies in the action of art that expose aspects of its making, reception, circulation, and canonization. Working primarily in video during her last decade, Sturtevant extended her interest in simulation to the media environment, incorporating footage from Hollywood films, television, and advertising to make literal reference to larger considerations of politics, truth, and violence—concerns that animated her work from its inception. MoMA presents the first comprehensive survey in the U.S. of the 50-year career of Sturtevant (American, 1924–2014), and the only institutional presentation of her work organized in the U.S. since a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in 1973. Sturtevant: Double Trouble brings together over 50 key artworks from all periods of Sturtevant’s career in almost every medium in which she worked—including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, and video—identifying her as a pioneering and pivotal figure in the history of modern and postmodern art.
4. Serge Alain: Morphings in Black is on view at Marianne Boesky until December 21.
Serge Alain Nitegeka repurposes modernist preoccupations with line and the picture plane, utilizing these formal concepts as a foundation from which to address larger social issues such as the forced migration of peoples and the political and cultural borders that define us. For this exhibition, Nitegeka presents new paintings that refer directly to the series of sculptural site-specific installations that he has created since 2008. These installations – large-scale and ephemeral – bisect space and choreograph the viewer’s movement, proposing the physical and conceptual conditions that the artist, as a refugee, has himself encountered. Rather than illustrating these events, the resultant paintings are documents of them. Sourced from photographs taken by the artist, the paintings are aestheticized memories of past events, re-addressed and re-worked into a new and wholly autonomous form.
5. Steven Sebring: Study of Pose: 1000 Poses Coco Rocha is open at Milk Gallery until December 21.
Study of Pose is an innovative exploration of photography, time, light and the human form. Shot exclusively on a photographic apparatus known as “The Rig,” a silver, geodesic dome structure conceived and created by photographer/artist Steven Sebring that contains 100 synchronized cameras that shoot in predetermined sequences, allowing Sebring to capture form and movement from numerous perspectives simultaneously. The equipment is designed to capture the entire silhouette and dynamism of the subject from every imaginable angle—offering the capacity capture a moment in time, which results in being able to present numerous forms of media, including photography, film, interactive apps and sculpture. The 1,000 diverse poses are inspired by everything from Botticelli’s Venus to Michael Jackson. Pulling references from art history, film, dance, fashion and beyond, Sebring’s images luminously capture Coco Rocha’s myriad of subtle poses, by turns theatrical, elegant, athletic and otherworldly.