This issue is built around hand work: lace in Ridgewood, MIG welding at the Army Terminal, a block-long potluck on Driggs where the run clubs carb-load for the marathon, and a featured artist who has spent more than twenty years cutting up MetroCards. I'd start Thursday in Clinton Hill and finish Tuesday in East Williamsburg.
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Eight artists, most of them ISCP alumni, treat borders as something you can see in the material, in sculpture, photography, prints, film and video where images split and fragile forms get stitched back together. Lang takes the title from Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Kara Springer and Simon Liu are in it. I'd go to the opening and come back, since the show runs until February.
Tue Oct 27, 6–8p -
e-flux has two free nights in Clinton Hill this week, five days apart. On Thursday the Berlin architect Tim Altenhof is launching Breathing Space, his Zone Books history of how the science of breathing shaped factories, houses and hospitals, in conversation with Peter Szendy and Emily Apter. On Tuesday, as part of Unsound New York, Steve Goodman and Bogna Konior talk about noise, silence and deception, from shell shock to the fear of drones, and both nights ask for an RSVP.
Thu Oct 22, 7p; Tue Oct 27, 7p -
Visual designers plug in their USBs and play what they listen to, and the evening runs as half dance night and half conversation about how sound and design feed each other. It is the same night as Altenhof at e-flux, so you can hear about air at seven and dance in Greenpoint afterward. I want to find out whether a designer's playlist sounds like their portfolio looks.
Thu Oct 22 -
Shayna Strype and Dane Manary's room-sized paper dollhouse, which I wrote about in Issue 25, closes this week. Friday is the closing night, with performances starting around eight, and the gallery is open Thursday through Saturday afternoons until the show comes down on the 24th.
Fri Oct 23, 7–10p; open Thu–Sat 1–6p, closes Sat -
The Ridgewood shop runs a textile class every day of the weekend. Rhiannon Platt teaches Appalachian shuttle tatting on Friday, Pear Wear leads a walk for discarded street finds on Saturday and turns them into charms and brooches, and Olivia Henry teaches Armenian needlelace on Sunday, with part of the money going to the Artsakh Fund. Every class is sliding scale, and at six on Sunday the Pincushion Puppet Club leads a puppet parade around the block.
Fri Oct 23, 4–6p; Sat Oct 24, 3–5:30p; Sun Oct 25, 4–6p, parade 6p -
MakerSpace NYC teaches a half-day introduction to MIG welding in its shop at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Four hours is enough to learn whether metal is your material.
Sat Oct 24, 10a–2p -
Pastry Runners NYC, the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance and The Longest Table set one long table down Driggs Avenue between North 12th Street and Lorimer, seat each run club together, and kick off marathon week with a carb potluck. Everyone brings bread or pastry to share. It is free with an RSVP, and you don't have to run to sit down.
Sat Oct 24, 12–2p -
AIA Brooklyn's Emerging Professionals group spends the afternoon photographing color in the buildings of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, starting from The Riverie. I like an architecture tour that asks you to take pictures rather than notes, and this one covers the streets most of you walk every day.
Sat Oct 24, 1–5p -
Big Crown Records marks ten years with a night in Elsewhere's Hall built from its own roster. El Michels Affair headlines, with Homer, Marco Benevento, Dave Guy, Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, Brainstory and Thee Marloes. Tickets are about forty dollars, and the show is 16 and over.
Sat Oct 24, doors 6p
Diana Orving's textile sculptures and Alicja Biała's first US show close at CARVALHO on Saturday
Animal Collective plays Feels at Knockdown Center on Wednesday and Thursday
eugenie's Detroit shop has its last weekend at Kinspace on Wythe before it closes on Monday
This year's ball, Home Sweet Home, is at the Andrew Freedman Home on the Grand Concourse, which opened in 1924 to house wealthy people who had lost their fortunes and now runs residencies, workforce programs and child and senior care. TAKK, the Barcelona and New York studio of Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño, builds an installation for the night, and two Bronx DJs keep it moving. The League calls it the annual gathering of the city's architecture and design community, and tickets are on its site.
Thomas McKean has cut MetroCards into collages for more than twenty years, and the MTA retired the card at the end of 2025, so his material is now finite. He builds skylines, museum walls and water towers from the yellow and blue stock, leaving the card's "Insert this way" arrows in as trim. A native New Yorker with a studio in Greenpoint, he published a dozen books, mostly for children, before turning to art. His prints fill AG Gallery's street window at 310 Grand Street through November 30, visible at any hour.
Read the full profile →See you out there,
Sam