The Very Best of NYC Art

Brainwave, The Whitney Biennial and more…

-ART-

Guess what? Drinking doesn’t kill brain cells. Find out infinitely useful (and relieving) facts such as this in BRAINWAVE, an extravaganza of art, music, and ideas running at the Rubin Museum of Art through June. BRAINWAVE asks how art, music, and meditation affect the brain and offers countless answers in more than a hundred public events, ranging from an exhibition of contemporary art and a cinema series to cutting-edge concerts, performances, talks and panels.

Now through June 1, the Whitney presents its 2008 Biennial featuring over 81 artists working at a time when art production is above all characterized by heterogeneity and dispersal. Across media, much work in this year’s Biennial concerns politics although its mode of address is often oblique or allegorical. Persistence, belief, and a desire to locate meaning threads through these many modes and activities rooted in what feels like a transitional moment of history. Rather than positing a definitive answer or approach, these artists exhibit instead a passion for the search, positioned in the immediate reality of our uncertain sociopolitical times.

Now through May 12, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art. WACK! focuses on the crucial period of the 1970s, during which the majority of feminist activism and artmaking occurred internationally. The exhibition includes 120 artists and artist groups from all over the world, with work by women who operated within the political structure of feminism as well as women who did not necessarily embrace feminism as part of their practice, but were impacted by the movement. Comprising work in a broad range of media—including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art—the exhibition is organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic and political impulses.


What Do You Think?