Three of this week's entries are really about the same thing, which is what happens when you take a material apart to see what is inside it. The materials are copper, stone, and colored slip, in that order. The rest are not, and the best of those is Amant, which opens two shows on one Thursday night. I would start there and work outward.
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Sentient Earth brings twenty-eight artists and more than sixty works into the rooms at Amant, all of it circling what extraction does to a landscape, and it stays up until February. Matthew Lutz-Kinoy's The Mud Room puts a working pottery studio at the center of the AZ gallery and surrounds it with painted backdrops, and runs through November. Four of the Sentient Earth artists, Isaiah Davis, Maren Karlson, Clare Koury, and Marina Xenofontos, come back to Maujer Street on Saturday afternoon for a roundtable, so the work and the argument are two separate trips.
Thu 6–9p -
Biała etches copper and zinc with acidic water drawn from former mining sites, which means the contamination does the drawing. Orving works in textile at the scale of a room. Aether's Long Roots opens Friday night on Waterbury Street and hangs through October 24.
Fri 6–9p -
The top is a sheet of glass with stones UV bonded onto it, silvered from behind by pouring on a silver nitrate solution. They mix too little on purpose, so the mirror runs out partway across and leaves a live edge that fades back to clear. The stones run below the surface of the glass, and the top rests on a minimal blackened steel base. They make it to order in their own Brooklyn shop, and it goes on view at The Future Perfect on Wednesday.
Wed -
Howard spends one Saturday on underglaze, which is the colored slip that goes onto clay before the glaze covers it. She teaches it as watercolor crossed with tattooing, on mugs that have already been bisque fired. The studio is in Prospect Heights.
Sat -
EXCLAIM! is a national juried show of work that argues for something, and BWAC hangs it on the third floor of the Whale Building on 53rd Street. The reception runs Thursday evening and the show stays up through October 18. The building earns the walk to Sunset Park on its own.
Thu 5–8p -
Julie Raskin of the Waterfront Alliance moderates, and Dan Wiley, who runs the district office for Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, sits on the panel. The subject is the policy and the money rebuilding the Brooklyn waterfront, with climate resilience on the agenda. It is free, there is a reception after, and I would go for the part about who it all gets rebuilt for.
Wed 6:30p -
Kaa learned to crochet from her grandmother at four years old and now works across metal, textile, and paint. She teaches casting on, crocheting, and casting off in one evening on Union Street, materials included for $68. This is the useful end of the maker calendar and the end that mostly goes uncovered.
Wed 6:30–8:30p -
The Monkathon is Okazaki playing the complete works of Thelonious Monk. Roulette premieres the concert film made out of it on Tuesday night.
Tue 8p
the Brooklyn Flea Record Fair sets up at Smorgasburg Williamsburg on Saturday, free and all ages
The two designers behind Benson & Benson argue for book design against generative AI, from a room on Lafayette Street. They set four hundred years of the printing press against the last four.
This talk covers how Midtown became the headquarters of corporate modernism, and why that version of the city came apart. It runs on 42nd Street, close enough to the subject to walk out into it.
Chen Chen and Kai Williams met at Pratt and founded the studio in 2011. In 2012 they made thirty knives in thirty days from whatever the shop turned up: a saw blade, a toothbrush, a pencil fitted with an X-acto blade. Their Homasote furniture is laminated from compressed recycled paper board, CNC-cut and bolted through with brass. The method holds across the work: find the material nobody is looking at, then make the thing that proves they should have been. The range is the unusual part. The same studio makes one-off collectible pieces represented by The Future Perfect and production goods manufactured for West Elm, Areaware, and Craighill, and treats both as the same problem. They have shown at the Museum of Arts and Design and the Venice Architecture Biennale, and taken commissions from the Whitney, Kvadrat, and Warby Parker. The studio is on 23rd Street in Brooklyn. The Geology work is where all of that lands.
Read the full profile →See you out there,
Sam