Your New York City weekend arts planner
From concerts and gallery shows, to festivals and parades, there are always so many cultural events going on in New York City it seems almost foolish to try to narrow the weekly highlights down to a mere three. But WNYC's Culture and Arts Editor, Steve Smith is ready to give it a shot. Speaking with Weekend Edition host David Furst, Steve brings us ideas for this weekend and beyond.
Steve's picks:
1. Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure - Saturday is opening day for a brilliant new exhibition devoted to the life and art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brooklyn artist who blazed a trail through NYC's graffiti and nightclub scenes before burning out prematurely. There's a lot of corporate sponsorship behind this show, which comes complete with a well stocked boutique and official Spotify playlist. But the collection includes some 200 works seen rarely or never before, and the show – arranged in close consultation with his sisters – does a genuinely fine job of illuminating the man behind the mythology.
2. The Hong Sangsoo Multiverse - The South Korean film director Hong Sang-soo has become a perennial favorite among NYC cinephiles, his work screening regularly in film festival lineups and arthouse cinemas. Since his first film appeared in 1996 he's made a staggering 27 feature films: intimately scaled, deceptively structured slices of life featuring feckless film directors and writers, women discovering their strength and self-reliance, messy relationships, and usually too much alcohol. Practically everything Hong has made so far is included in "The Hong Sangsoo Multiverse," a clever Film at Lincoln Center festival made up of double features that span his canon. If the idea of choosing from that many films is perplexing, here's a tip: most of Hong’s earliest and latest films are pretty easy to find on home video, so go for the harder-to-find middle films, like "Our Sunhi," playing Saturday, April 9 and "Hahaha," which screens Sunday, April 10.
3. Wendy Eisenberg "Eye Music" at Roulette - A new song cycle by this arrestingly quirky, flamboyantly talented jazz guitarist and indie-rock singer-bandleader -- with an excellent band of improvising collaborators. The show takes place at Roulette in Brooklyn on Thursday, April 14.
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