Events Calendar

Craft was once at the margins of the art world, but no longer. Today it is front and center in art galleries, museums, and fairs, widely recognized for its expressive potential and cultural significance. Assembled from the eclectic richness of MAD’s permanent collection, Craft Front & Center brings together more than 70 iconic and lesser-known works to highlight key thematic touchpoints in craft’s history that have brought us to this moment. Challenging traditional thinking of craft as separate from fine art, the exhibition reveals the field's deep engagement in art’s major movements, such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Postmodernism, while also launching its own revolutions, particularly the elevation of women and people of color as significant artists.

The Museum of Arts and Design collection comprises over 3,000 artworks in clay, fiber, glass, metal, and wood, dating from the post-war studio craft movement through to contemporary art and design. With an aim to subvert traditional hierarchies in the arts, the collection advocates for the central role of craft in art and society. Toward that end, Craft Front & Center is organized into eight themes exploring craft’s impact. Each section is punctuated with pivotal and rarely seen works from iconic makers, such as Betty Woodman, Marvin Lipofsky, and Magdalena Abakanowicz. The exhibition also casts a fresh eye on craft’s pioneers; celebrating Olga de Amaral, Charles Loloma, Patti Warashina, and others who pushed the boundaries of materials and sought more inclusive sources of inspiration. Showcasing the diversity and expressive power of the handmade as only MAD can, the exhibition affirms craft as one of the most exciting spaces for experimentation and wonder in art today.

EXHIBITION THEMES

In the Formation of Identity
From the personal to the political, craft stimulates important conversations around race, gender, and sexuality.

In the Gallery
Beginning in the 1950s, artists engaged with traditional craft materials created powerful assertions of materiality and process that attracted museums and collectors alike.

In the Home
Handmade objects are potent receptacles of emotions and memories, infused with human warmth that enliven and enrich the home.

What Can You Do with an Object?
A look back at the seminal exhibition Objects: USA, and the works displayed whose innovations still resonate. 

What Can You Do with a Thread?
Fiber artists past and present have generated works of amazing complexity and conceptual ingenuity. 

What Can You Do with Clay?
The funny and eccentric “Funk” movement was embraced by California ceramicists in the 1960s and remains a major influence on younger makers today.

What Can You Do with Glass?
A focused retrospective of the career of studio-glass pioneer Marvin Lipofsky.

What Can You Do with Craft?
A look at the modern and contemporary artists who have absorbed studio craft’s legacy and expanded its boundaries.

Streaming Event

The Philharmonic returns after a year like none other. Music Director Jaap van Zweden conducts Anna Clyne’s fragile elegy, inspired by texts recited by poet Mahogany L. Browne, who also declaims her own poem. The concert also includes Copland’s Hopperesque cityscape; a moving blend of modernism and romanticism by George Walker, the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize; and Beethoven’s glorious Fourth Piano Concerto with Daniil Trifonov as soloist.

This international observance of this day is officially on September 21. YEE will learn about its history, imagine its future, and create its present. We will practice being Ambassadors of Peace, creating Peace Day posters to offer to our school and home communities, and we will contemplate the question, “Can every day be Peace Day?”

YEE has moved online with Zoom, and as always, newcomers and visitors are welcome! To join, please RSVP to Youth Programs Director Audrey Kindred at youngethicalexplorers@gmail.com. For more information about our youth and family programming please visit www.ethical.nyc/youth.

Ethics for Children is our Humanist Sunday school, designed for youngsters from ages 4 to 13, and takes place concurrent with our Sunday Platform meetings. Sessions raise issues of personal identity and integrity, appreciation and respect for others, and knowledge of religions, philosophies, and social concerns. Topics are explored in an age-appropriate way through discussion, storytelling, dramatization, music, art, games, and field trips. RSVP is essential to guarantee your place and for planning purposes. If you are enrolled for the season or are members of Ethical NYC your spot is guaranteed.

Humanists often see their beliefs in opposition to religion. Religion is the foil. It is superstitious, irrational, given to authoritarianism, and politically too often a purveyor of misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia. It often at times serves as a justification for violence. All these things are too often true. But I contend that religion is far more than that. After all, Ethical Culture was founded as a religious movement, though on the far-left end of religion.

There is also a side to religion, the more philosophical side, that speaks to the sublime. It asks questions about life’s deepest meaning and points to values that lie beneath the superficial manifestations of our consumer-driven lives.

We live in fraught times, filled with polarizing ideologies, political tribes, and “political correctness.” These dynamics suffuse our political world and are spoken in a secular idiom. Yet, I would argue that that religions at their best provide values and a vocabulary that are much needed but seldom employed in our political and secular world. Among the values I am thinking of are forgiveness, repentance, atonement, and even versions of the sacred.

I contend that we humanists would be better off if we adopted such values that people look for in religion but not often in the secular realm. We will explore these values and how our lives would be enriched if we were to embrace them.

Live and Livestreamed for Climate Week NYC 2021!

All of us alive today will determine the future of life on this planet. What we do or fail to do will affect generations to come. Will we have been Good Ancestors?

This is the moment to embrace collaboration, compassion and community - the inherent qualities of female leadership which have been missing at decision-making tables worldwide. All can embody these qualities to create the changes needed, with the urgency the crisis demands.

Please join our three globally recognized youth activist leaders: co-hosts, Xiye Bastida, Jerome Foster II, Alexandria Villasenor and other extraordinary presenters and performers for an intergenerational and illuminating evening.

Speakers include:

Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland

Bill McKibben, Founder, 350.org

May Boeve, Executive Director, 350.org

Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States

Katharine Wilkinson, All We Can Save Project

Deepak Chopra, founder, The Chopra Foundation

Lynne Twist, Co-Founder, Pachamama Alliance

Sherri Mitchell, Indigenous Rights Attorney

Sally Ranney, Founder, Arctic Angels and Global Choices

Emily Atkin, Climate Journalist, HEATED

Avery Schlicher, Director, Sustainability Solutions, Salesforce

Jacqui Patterson, former Director, NAACP Environment and Climate Justice, Founder, Chisholm Legacy Project

Dianna Cohen, Co-Founder, Plastic Pollution Coalition

Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, Founder, Dayenu

Harriet Shugarman, Executive Director, Climate Mama

Karen Washington, Founder, Rise & Root Farm

Michelle Wyman, Executive Director, Global Council for Science & Environment

Apricot Tang, Management Consulting Manager, Accenture

Hear from these men and women global climate leaders: activists, journalists, scientists, indigenous leaders, business champions, farmers and innovators. They will share what they are doing, what you can do and how leadership that embraces these feminine qualities holds a powerful key to solve the climate crisis.

Inspired by the recent collection of essays in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions to the Climate Crisis, the event will celebrate and amplify the unique voices and approaches of women leading the climate movement and men who recognize and manifest that powerful and practical difference.

The science is clear; we must rapidly and radically take action to save the planet for future generations. We have the solutions. Discover, re-ignite and add your passion to solving the climate crisis.

The only way we rise is together.

Hosted at The New York Society for Ethical Culture, in collaboration with 350NYC, Pachamama Alliance, Drawdown NYC and Climate Reality NYC

Co-Sponsored by Salesforce + Accenture: A Partnership in Sustainability

COVID-19 NOTICE: Proof of COVID-19 vaccination and mask is REQUIRED for in-person attendance.

The Folk Art Reflections Music Series offers free live music programs designed for adults living with memory loss, their families, and care partners. This special performance will take place via Zoom, with an opportunity to speak in both English and Spanish to the musician after this live, interactive music event. Join The Folk Art Reflections Music Series virtually on Monday, September 20 from 1:00pm - 2:00pm for a live concert with the international guitarist and singer, Julia Patinella, who will be singing Spanish language songs. This program is free, but space is limited—registration is required, and a Zoom invitation will be emailed to you. For more details, or to register: egronke@folkartmuseum.org or (212) 265-0605.

Following an unprecedented hiatus from live performances, New York City Ballet makes its long-awaited return to the stage with a one-time-only Opening Night program kicking off the 2021-22 Season. There is perhaps no more fitting work to mark this historic homecoming than George Balanchine’s landmark creation Serenade, with its familiar Tschaikovsky score heralding the end of a long journey back as the curtain rises on ballerinas in iconic blue tulle, hands raised to the sky in reverence. The quiet intimacy of Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain Pas de Deux achieves new poignancy following more than a year of enforced separation, and the Theater’s reopening culminates in the season’s only performance of Balanchine’s glittering Symphony in C, amassing over 50 dancers onstage to commemorate the joyous occasion.

American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds is the first exhibition in more than four decades to highlight the beauty, historical significance, and technical virtuosity of American vanes fashioned between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries.

The exhibition includes the graceful figure of Fame blowing a trumpet and standing en pointe like a celestial ballerina, attributed to well-known manufactory E.G. Washburne & Co. in New York City, a Dove of Peace designed by George Washington for his home in Mount Vernon; and an eagle possibly made in the foundry of revolutionary patrior Paul Revere. In addition to weathervanes, the exhibiton will also include beautifully articuated wood sculptures by Harry Leach that functioned as patterns for weathevane molds for the Cushing & White and L.W. & Sons manufactories in Waltham, MA., watercolors of historic weathervanes painted for the Index of American Design, and rare archival materials that illuminate the development of the weathervane in the United States of America.

A full-color, illustrated, 224-page publication accompanies the exhibition, published by Rizzoli International Publications in association with the American Folk Art Museum. Authored by exhibition curator Robert Shaw, the book includes contributions by Jason T. Busch and Jennifer Mass, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Cultural Heritage Science at the Bard Graduate Center. This seminal scholarly work will have a significant impact on our understanding of this early American sculptural art form, serving as the authoritative text on American weathervanes for generations to come.

Robert Shaw is the guest curator of American Weathervanes. Emelie Gevalt is the coordinating curator of the exhibition.

Calling all writers! Engage in the art of writing with New York Writers Workshop!
 

This event will take place in person at Riverside Library.  Flash fiction is enjoying a golden moment—though the form dates back hundreds of years. Writing flash affords an opportunity to explore voice, sentence-making, and structure while taking creative risks and stepping outside of your comfort zone. We’ll look at several samples of great short work—and then we’ll write, share, and discuss, with an eye toward developing a strong first draft.

Space is limited | Registration is recommended.  Register above with your email address. Walkups will be permitted as space accommodates.

Strengthen your writing practice with us. JOIN US FOR OUR SECOND SESSION OF THE DAY AT 12:30 PM: REGISTER HERE!

Dawn Raffel is the author of five books, most recently The Strange Case of Dr. Couney; her other books include a memoir in flash and two collections of very short stories. Her flash pieces have appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, BOMB, NOON, Big Other, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Best Microfiction 2021, Best Small Fictions 2015, 2016, and 2021. She regularly teaches at the Center for Fiction.

New Plaza Cinema presents guest lecturer, Steven C. Smith, award winning author and film maker.

Hollywood Sci-Fi: Flying Saucers and Soviet Scares in the 1950s

Until the early 1950s, Hollywood considered science fiction stories to be kids’ stuff. No studio would be release an A-picture based on sci-fi material. But after WWII, that changed dramatically—and we’ll find out why. Using movie classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World and others, we’ll see how and why top filmmakers crafted sophisticated sci-fi thrillers that also served as allegories for American’s fears about the Soviet Union. (The title of 1952’s Red Planet Mars makes it clear who the real villains are.) We’ll also hear from a government expert on the true story behind Nevada’s mysterious Area 51, site of a supposed alien crash in 1947.

Steven C. Smith is a four-time Emmy-nominated documentarian and author who specializes in Hollywood history. He is the author of two biographies: Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer (Oxford University Press), and A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann (University of California Press). The latter received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and was the main research source for the Academy Award-nominated documentary Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann. Music by Max Steiner was recently cited by Variety and BBC Music Magazine as one of the best books of 2020.

Steven has produced and written over 200 documentaries for television and other media. They include The Sound of a City: Julie Andrews Returns to Salzburg; The Lure of the Desert: Martin Scorsese on Lawrence of Arabia; A Place for Us: West Side Story’s Legacy; and Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood.

Hosted in Parlor for the People, a site-specific installation at the center of Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times, this panel brings together artists, curators, and scholars to discuss the rich history of queer art in New York and Boston during the 1990s. The conversation will examine how Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe's practices, along with a tight-knit creative community operating at the margins of mainstream narratives, challenged oppressive norms in the art world. By centering their queer subjectivity, Moyer and Pepe brought themes of otherness and identity to the front of their artistic formal explorations and continue to influence the creation of a more expansive, inclusive, and culturally specific art language.

Before 6 pm, attendees are welcome to visit the museum with the program's ticket.

To make this event as accessible as possible, it will also be live-streamed.