New Delhi-based artist Nitin Mukul's work negotiates the tense and productive spaces between geographies, visual cultures, and identities. Mukul paints with the sensibility of a postcolonial transplant, combining pop cultural references from India's media-saturated visual environment with biological structures, ritual images, and architecture.


The Guild, NY
45 West 21st Street
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10010

Listening to Our Ancestors explores how Native people along the coast of Washington State, British Columbia, and Alaska continue time-honored practices in an ever-changing modern world. The exhibition features more than 400 ceremonial and everyday objects, as well as commentary from representatives of eleven contemporary North Pacific Coast Native nations. Each object reflects the creativity of people whose art has been collected by museums worldwide for more than a century.


Image: Detail of mask to be worn in the Clam Dance, ca. 1900. 9/2227. Photo by NMAI Photo Services.

National Museum of the American Indian
Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House
One Bowling Green
btw Broadway & State Streets
New York, NY 10004

Sosua: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic
On view through July 25


In 1938, when openings for Jewish refugees were hard to find, the Dominican Republic offered to resettle 100,000 Jews. Sosúa, an abandoned banana plantation, would become a refuge to hundreds of Jews, and grow into a town that still thrives today.

This exhibition tells how the settlers were recruited, what awaited them in Sosúa, and how they worked with their Dominican neighbors to establish the settlement. Sosúa speaks poignantly to one chapter in a shared  Dominican and Jewish story.




Museum of Jewish Heritage
36 Battery Place
New York, NY 10280

Zhang Huan  first began developing his Ash Paintings upon moving to Shanghai in 2006, after eight years of living in New York City. Back in China the artist was struck by the number of Buddhist devotees who would pray to the deity for hours on end and burn incense as offerings. The ash soon became the medium for both his paintings and sculpture.

For Huan, "all the dreams, aspirations, all the spiritual longings, all the ideas that people have" are infused into the ash. "It's the collective spirit and collective thinking, and collection wishes of the people in China."

Image: Wang Jie, 2007, ash on linen
 

Pace Wildenstein
534 West 25th Street
Manhattan, NY 10001

South African artists are teasingly subverting contemporary politics and societal norms with a liberated sense of detachment and satiric self-reflexivity. The resultant works are consciously current, sometimes self-consciously hip, and self-consciously oppositional.

Bringing together the work of six artists, Nandipha Mntambo, Michael MacGarry, Maja Maljevic, Themba Shibase, Nina Barnett, and Robyn Nesbitt
who share an affinity for a particularly vulgar aesthetic, The New Spell invites viewers to consider relations of power in South Africa with a greater sense of intimacy - and perhaps even humour - by moving beyond the binary categories such as autonomy versus subjection or resistance versus passivity.

Image: Michael MacGarry

David Krut Projects
526 W. 26th Street
btw 10th & 11th Avenues
Chelsea
Manhattan, NY

"Reflections on Community Development: Stories from Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation" provides a local and national narrative of the rise and importance of community development corporations (CDCs) from their inception during the late 1960s into the present.

Using the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, one of the first CDCs in the country, the exhibit will present the story of how federal and state elected officials joined with local community activists, politicians,  and business leaders to create a truly cooperative public-private partnership whose mandate was nothing short of completely transforming an economically depressed, physically blighted urban community into a vibrant, dynamic, safe, stable place to live and work.

Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street
@ Clinton Street
Brooklyn, New York 11201

The Jews of Yemen have always oriented themselves towards Israel throughout their history. The Silwa settlement in the late 19th century preceded the Aliyah Bilu (1881-1903.) The well-known Magic Carpet or "Eagles' Wings" of 1949-1950, the major modern Yemen aliyah operation, is thus only one episode, albeit a significant turning point, in the history of Yemenite Jews in the Land of Israel.

This exhibit will focus on the last Jews to make aliyah in 1992, with the considerable efforts of the then U.S. Senator Alphonse D'Amato to gain their freedom.

Photograph: Sampson Giat, 1992

The Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
btw 5th & 6th Avenues
New York, NY 10011

Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City features the work of five contemporary New York-based photographers whose works intersect and resonate with current concerns about the reorganization of urban space, and its public use, in New York City. Between 1949 and 1973 urban renewal, a program of the U.S. government, bulldozed 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 American cities and dispossessed one million people.

Marshall Berman, Mindy Fullilove, Tom Angotti, Brian Berger and Michael Galinsky discuss  the American Dream. Does it mean having a "better life" by creating a home and a community, living together for generations, building and tending relationships to one another and to a place? Or do we create a "better life" by moving up, moving out, removing the old, replacing with the new?

Image: Thomas Holton

New York Public Library
South Court Auditorium
Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street
Enter at Fifth Avenue

Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Zoe Wicomb's celebrated novel, Playing in the Light,  revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. Playing in the Light is as powerful in its depiction of Marion's personal journey as it is in its depiction of South Africa's bizarre, brutal history.

Zoë Wicomb was born in South Africa in 1948 and returned in 1991, after twenty years of voluntary exile, to teach at the University of the Western Cape. The author of two previous works of fiction, she currently lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland.


The Studio Museum in Harlem
144 West 125th Street
New York, New York 10027

If there is one word that defines the spirit of Susan L. Taylor, it is love. It's how she branded a magazine: first as editor - in - chief of ESSENCE for 19 years and then as its editorial director, making the publication not only a must-read for Black women but also a guiding light for a people still too often stumbling in the dark.

She instinctively understands love's transforming power-that love affirms and motivates; it heals and is redemptive. In the Spirit, Susan's monthly column, is filled with this power. In this space, Susan has never been afraid to tell us her own stories-of struggle, of uncertainty, of tripping before she found her way to higher ground. True love, Susan has said repeatedly, begins with the love of self. This is the God love, the supreme love from which all other love will flow, natural and healthy. Love marks her personal style of humility.

RSVP. Limited Seating.

Harlem Arts Salon
1925 Seventh Avenue
Apt. 7L,
Harlem, NY 10026

bodies that matter

Abakuá Afro-Latin Dance Company (Abakuá) is the first dance company in history to successfully combine Mambo ("salsa"), with elements of Afro-Caribbean folkloric dances. The resulting creation resonates Latin and urban tones with notes of Modern, Jazz and Ballet; a unique performance art simply entitled Afro-Latin Funk.

After thrilling and entertaining audiences all over the world, Abakuá is poised to deliver its first official New York performance of the year, featuring the US premiere of "Island Fever."

Led by world-acclaimed dancer and choreographer Frankie Martinez, Abakuá will take audiences on an unforgettable journey through an eclectic blend of inspired choreography that will excite the mind, body and soul.

TRIBECA Performing Arts Center
199 Chambers Street
Manhattan, NY 10007

Algerian-born Ameur-Zaďmeche, whose previous film played in the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, crafts a tale set in the depths of a desolate industrial park. A Muslim owner of a truck repair company opens a mosque, designates the imam without consulting his workforce, and then demands that they pray there. When some of his workers refuse, violence erupts.

Opening Night, U.S. Premiere & Meet the Director Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche

French Institute Alliance Français (FIAF)
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
Manhattan, NY 10022

BAM
Peter Jay Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Nazreen's life is turned upside down at the tender age of seventeen. Forced into an arranged marriage to an older man, she exchanges her Bangladeshi village home for a block of flats in London's East End. In this new world, pining for her home and her sister, she struggles to make sense of her existence and  her duty to her husband. A man of inflated ideas (and stomach), he sorely tests her compliance.  Set in multicultural Britain, Brick Lane is a truly contemporary story of love, cultural difference, and ultimately, the strength of the human spirit.

Join the Abyssinian Directed Paths Film Ministry for a screening of  the  film "Redemption" starring Jamie Foxx, as Stanley "Tookie" Williams (co-founder of the Crips Gang).

An in-depth discussion about gang violence, incarceration, black identity, and redemption will follow the screening.



Abyssinian Baptist Church
132 Odell Clark Place
138th Street & Adam Clayton Powell, Jr Blvd.
Harlem
New York, NY 10030

Gospel/Jazz Convergence is an exploration of gospel and jazz and the lament, triumph and celebration common to both genres. The Tyrone Birkett Group re-interprets the work of gospel pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey, along with original selections ranging from gospel shout, Coltraneish excursions, and smooth ballads to electric jazz adventures.

Members of the Tyrone Birkett Group have played with artists ranging from Cassandra Wilson to Shirley Caesar to Barbra Streisand. 




The River Room of Harlem
Riverbank State Park
Riverside Drive @ 145th Street ·
New York, NY 10031

Sergio Mendes, the man who introduced Brasil 66 to the world, is back in town with a new CD and opening-act partner! Performing music from his latest recording, Encanto, the King of Brazilian Samba is joined by the Grammy Award-winning group Zap Mama, which brings together musical cultures from around the world with its irresistible brand of "Afropean" music.

Photo: Thomas Rusch


Carnegie Hall
57th Street & 7th Avenue
Manhattan, NY 10019