Weekend Gallery Recap 2/9/25

Ok I failed to get this out on Thursday but it has been such a busy week, and I should back on track next week! Last week felt light compared to other recent ones, but I guess 25 shows is still a pretty hearty number, and that the last couple of weekends were extra dense. I had ambitions to go to the Upper East Side (which is now on this weekend’s agenda) but ended up staying downtown.

I did a thing I don’t normally do, which was reversing the order of the Lower East Side portion of the crawl, and starting in the Henry Street Corridor, and then winding North from there. This was basically because I was more intent on seeing shows around there, and didn’t want to run out of time if I went further north. Map linked above and sheet linked here!

Best show: Bride of the Far Side at Post Times. If you asked me if I could have guessed that I’d like this show just from the exhibition page, I would have said “absolutely not!” — it’s a big group show with no artists that I especially feel personally invested in, and the press release is a poem. It’s the kind of show that shouldn’t work but really somehow does, and manages to be about a sensibility rather than a theme or motif. More or less, it’s a show of weirdo artists — loosely those inspired by the Chicago imagists, and / or Bay Area funk — doing their own weird, specific things that amounts to a eclectic bacchanalia of creatures and color. It’s marvelously fun and funky and just the kind of spirit lifting thing we need right now.

Also worth seeing: Traces of Us: Recent Photography at Peter Blum, Jan Baracz: twilight mechanics at Peninsula Art Space, Fred Lonidier: N.A.F.T.A. (Not A Fair Trade for All) at Maxwell Graham

Geography brief (new spaces, relocations, etc.):
Dutton has taken up residence at 48 Hester Street where My Pet Ram is usually located, though MPR’s website indicates that they’ll resume programming in March.

Gripes and grievances: I’m not going to name and shame here, but there was a press release at one of the shows I visited that literally did not discuss the the work itself at all. C’mon guys, it’s not 2010 anymore…

This week’s podcast rec:
I listened to roughly 20 podcast episodes covering current events in some way this week where the host / guest were like “Well…shit is moving so fast that even though we recorded this a day ago everything will probably be different and more fucked up by the time it airs!” Luckily this is not one of those episodes. I follow tech industry discourses fairly closely and have admittedly been much less interested in crypto, so this was a really great primer that was not overly cynical — I had no idea what a “meme coin” was before listening and now I know!