This is the week I've been waiting for. NYCxDESIGN, New York's annual citywide design festival, officially kicks off Thursday and runs through May 20 — more than 250 exhibitions, open studios, talks, and parties across all five boroughs, with a focus on the city's design, architecture, fashion, and craft communities. The festival has historically been Manhattan-heavy, but a real slice of it sits in Williamsburg and Greenpoint this year, and I've pulled four of the strongest local picks into their own section below. Plus the Brooklyn Museum opens its Iris van Herpen retrospective Saturday and Sounds That Move takes a block in Bushwick from Friday through Sunday — two more anchors I would not want anyone to miss.
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Amant's For Your Reference season closes with Display Distribute, the Hong-Kong–and–New York–based independent publisher I've been interested in since their newsstand at e-flux. They'll be joined by Bungee Space, Canal Street Research Association, Fei Liu, and Jen Liu. It's free, and the room is small, so go early.
Wed May 13, 7–9p -
This is the first weekend of Awita's monthly summer market, with forty-plus artists, designers, and makers across indoor and outdoor stalls selling jewelry, prints, ceramics, and objects. Awita is the Williamsburg studio founded by Gulsum Keskinoglu in 2023, this week's featured creative below. I'm planning to walk over Saturday. The series runs again Jun 20–21, Jul 18–19, and Aug 15–16.
Sat May 16 – Sun May 17, 12–6p -
Eli Escobar, one of the New York DJs who routinely turns a regular booking into something worth dressing for, takes the Good Room main room for an all-night Friday. Kels and Shawn Dub open. The Bad Room programs separately, so it's worth checking the calendar before you go.
Fri May 15, 10p -
Drummer and composer Matt Evans premieres Aquatic House live at Roulette in Boerum Hill, with Chris Ryan Williams opening. Roulette is the experimental-music institution in Brooklyn, and Evans has been steadily building a body of work between the academic and the ambient. It's a sit-and-listen counterprogram to Good Room across town.
Fri May 15, 8p
Gulsum Keskinoglu is the artist and curator behind Awita New York Studio, five blocks from my apartment in Williamsburg. She founded the space in 2023, trained as a sculptor in Bodrum, and has built it into one of the most consistent platforms for emerging and underrepresented artists I know in the neighborhood. She runs open calls and monthly programming, and she launched a print magazine last year. Her current group show, Practice of Persistence, marks the studio's third anniversary and runs through May 30. This weekend she opens the Summer Artist Market, the first weekend of a monthly run through August. Hope you can visit.
Read the full profile →See you out there,
Sam