The Coltrane centennial at Car Part Time runs tonight, so I put it first. Saturday is the crowded one. A jewelry opening, a woodshop giving away its offcuts, and a guitar competition all land within a few hours of each other, and they are different enough that which one you want tells you something about how you like to spend a Saturday.
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TADDEO, a Brooklyn collector, walks through a hundred years of John Coltrane in about sixty minutes, with sound built for the room by House Under Magic and records pulled from Freakout Spot. Car Part Time is an automotive concept space on Grand Street, which makes it an unusually good room to sit and listen in. Tickets are $38 and I am going to this one.
Wed 6:30–8:30p -
Signal screens We Live in Public, the documentary about Josh Harris and the internet surveillance experiments he ran on himself and on other people, and Harris sits on the panel afterward. Doors are at 7, the film starts at 8, and the panel follows at 9:30.
Wed 7p doors, 8p film -
Silo opens its main room to Input X and 1st Generation on Friday night. The show is free if you RSVP in advance, which is worth knowing before you plan the rest of the evening around it.
Fri -
Kerianne Quick's show is three bodies of work that share one subject. There is jewelry shaped like body armor in titanium and vegetable-tanned leather, an installation of three hundred titanium crosshair pins that makes the viewer both target and witness, and mirrors shrouded in leather and plexiglass that turn a reflection into an act of mourning. It opens Saturday and hangs until November 8, so there is real time to go back.
Sat 7–9p -
Makeville opens its scrap pile to the public for three hours on Saturday morning. The woodshop is in Gowanus and the offcuts are free or close to it, which is the cheapest way I know to start a project you have not planned yet.
Sat 11a–2p -
Matt Sweeney hosts his annual guitar competition at Union Pool, backed by John Stanier on drums, Brad Truax on bass, and Ryan Sawyer on the decks. It is a competition in roughly the way a potluck is a competition.
Sat -
Al of Dettmann Designs teaches bundle dyeing, where plants and botanicals are wrapped into silk and cotton and left to hand over their color. You go home with bandanas you dyed yourself. Materials are provided, tickets are sliding scale, and no one expects you to have done it before.
Sun 12:30–3p -
Seven artists in ISCP's Ground Floor residency open their studios on Metropolitan Avenue for two hours of visits and conversation. Zoë Pulley is one of the seven, and you will find her name again at the bottom of this issue.
Wed Sep 30, 6–8p -
Over two evenings you build a six voice oscillator synthesizer out of salvaged potentiometers and switches. It starts on September 30 and finishes on October 5, and no experience is necessary.
Wed Sep 30, 7–10p
Industry City fills its courtyard on Saturday with independent vendors, makers and vintage dealers
Her first presentation at the Armory is also her first gallery presentation in New York, with Superposition in the Presents section at Booth P10. The work comes out of the archive of her grandmother, Sandra Olivia Moon Hightower, who staged her own fashion shows in Philadelphia in the early 1980s, outside the institutional calendar and mostly outside its record. Public days are Friday through Sunday. Thursday is invitation only.
The Disengineering Society is a hardware hacking collective that has been building musical instruments out of electronic waste since 2022. The Vape Mic, the Beep Phone, the Screambox Distortion Amp, the Pot and Switch synthesizer: every one of them starts from something somebody already threw away. They publish handmade zines alongside the workshops, and they state the position plainly, which is down with planned obsolescence, long live repair culture, make weird electronic sounds. I like that the argument and the object are the same thing.
See you out there,
Sam