Open House New York opens three hundred sites across the five boroughs this weekend, and I built most of this issue from the ones you can reach without leaving Brooklyn. My rule for choosing between them is to go where people are making something, because a working shop on a Saturday tells you more than a lobby does. On Sunday evening a block of Broadway becomes Billy Jones Way, and that is where the week ends.
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The Amant team leads free Open House New York tours of Sentient Earth and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy's The Mud Room, and on Friday and Saturday GRT Architects take the group across Maujer Street into Zoli, the restaurant they designed for the campus. Zoli has a Pierre Huyghe aquarium inside it, so the architecture tour ends at an artwork. Tours meet in the courtyard at 315 Maujer and need no RSVP.
Fri Oct 16 and Sat Oct 17, 4p; Sun Oct 18, 2p (Amant only) -
Monumental Labs mills stone with robots and finishes it by hand, and the shop has carved more than a hundred modillions for the Frick Collection and rebuilt a fractured limestone tympanum at Carnegie Hall from its surviving pieces. Its Greenpoint facility joins Open House New York this year, unticketed, for one afternoon. It is the site on the whole list I most want to see.
Sun Oct 18, 12–4p -
The yard's annual open house is the afternoon you walk into the tenants' shops instead of past the gates, with makers at work and the site's history on show. It starts at Building 77. Entry is free, and the yard asks you to RSVP.
Sat Oct 17, 12–5p -
Powerhouse Arts opens its Gowanus building for both Open House New York and Gowanus Open Studios, with the Turbine Café running both days. Sunday is the day to aim for, because the new artists in residence are there to meet and the recipients of the Artist Subsidy Program sit for panels.
Sat–Sun Oct 17–18, 12–5p -
Studios across Sunset Park open on Friday night and through the weekend, and a free shuttle runs between them from one o'clock on Saturday and Sunday. Normal New York fills MADE Bush Terminal with more than forty-five makers, artists and designers on the same three days, so one trip covers the people making things and the people selling them.
Fri Oct 16, 6–9p; Sat–Sun Oct 17–18, 1–5p -
The Detroit boutique eugenie takes over Kinspace on Wythe Avenue for twelve days with independent labels chosen for material and process, among them Rachel Comey, No.6, Cordera and Lauren Manoogian. The room also holds original work by the Detroit and New York artist Maxine McCrann and copies of the eugenie edit, the shop's print publication on sustainable designers in Detroit.
Opens Thu Oct 15, through Oct 26 -
DB Burkeman, who co-founded the NASA parties and pushed jungle in America before most clubs would book it, launches ILLEGAL: Rave Flyers of the 90s, a 536-page collection published by his own Blurring Books. The flyer was the whole graphic design department of early American rave, which is why this belongs on a design list. The book is on sale at the door, and DB plays with DJ Miss Parker, DJ Three and S4M23.
Thu Oct 15, 9p -
The city has co-named Broadway between Bedford and Driggs for Billy Jones, who co-founded Baby's All Right in 2013, along with Nightclub 101 and Funny Bar. The dedication comes first, and the free block party after it brings back acts from the room's history on a lineup the venue is keeping secret. I'd go for the speeches as much as the sets.
Sun Oct 18, 5:30p -
Davidson headlines with Xeno & Oaklander and Andi, on a bill that moved from Xanadu to Saint Vitus. The bar reopened in September at 428 Troutman Street in Bushwick, so the Greenpoint address you remember is out of date. Tickets are twenty-nine dollars.
Fri Oct 16, doors 8p -
The Goods Mart holds its last Wharf Market of the year on the waterfront at Kent Avenue and South 11th Street, with produce from Natoora, pizza paninis from Cosmic Crust, and tables from small local makers. It is free, and the hosts ask you to bring the dog and a kite.
Wed Oct 14, 4–7p
McDowall, a former member of Coil, performs the group's 1998 album Time Machines live after a talk with Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor. It is the first of two nights opening Kou's new home on the sixth floor of 151 Lafayette Street, and Saturday brings A Thread, Silvered and Trembling with a string and horn ensemble led by the cellist Brent Arnold. Tickets are twenty-five dollars, or fifteen for students.
John Edmonds is a photographer born in Washington, DC, in 1989 and based in Brooklyn, and his work is in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum. The Space Between, his second solo show at Company Gallery, comes out of George Nelson Preston's Museum of Art and Origins, a Washington Heights brownstone that is a home, a bed-and-breakfast and a collection of Classical African art at once. Edmonds photographed sitters beside Preston's sculptures, matching a tilt of the head or a hand at rest, and the gallery sets sculptures from the collection in the room with the pictures. He talks about it with Zoë Hopkins at the Brooklyn Rail on Monday the 19th. I would see the show before the talk, because it closes on the 24th.
Read the full profile →See you out there,
Sam