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.

Sign up today for an exclusive event only at Color Me Mine! We will be watching My Little Pony on Netflix, crafting and painting your choice of ceramic coloring book style plate! Sign up to watch + paint the new My Little Pony movie! Painters can express their individuality and their SPARKLE by painting their own pony plate! Are you curious and adventurous like Sunny? Energetic and sparkly like Izzy?

Every last Sunday of the month! 

Enjoy creative time and save with our monthly "Friends and Family Paint Date!" Devices Down, Brushes Up! Make Art...Make Memories! EVENT SPECIAL!! $20 for a table of up to 4 painters. Additional painters are only $5 extra each! Pottery is additional Seatings are available between 10 AM - 12 PM

Performance and visual artist playwright/actor LuLu LoLo brings to life memories of her Italian immigrant grandfather Giovanni Pascale who died before she was born. Through family lore, he was a man of myth to her. Grandpa Giovanni loved opera, the poetry of Dante, and shined shoes for a living.

This performance celebrates his life with operatic arias and accordion performed by tenor, Aaron Halevy; and with poet Angelo Zeolla reciting in both Italian and English an excerpt from Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia (commemorating the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death September 14, 1321). Dancers Sara Grassi, Maria Hochnowski, and Rathi Varma will highlight his story of immigration and shining shoes (choreographed by Anabella Lenzu with musical accompaniment by Aaron Halevy). The struggle of the immigrants of the past is the struggle of the immigrants of today.

Performed in the shadow of Dante Alighieri’s statue and the Metropolitan Opera House at Dante Park, Columbus Avenue at 63rd Street.

Seating is limited.

This program is made possible by the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented by The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) as well as Queens Theatre.

Admired for her dazzling technique and sincere artistry in a vast array of Balanchine works and premieres, Abi Stafford will bid farewell to the NYCB stage after 21 years with the Company, 14 as a principal dancer. Abi will fittingly take her final curtain call in the first of her many collaborations with Alexei Ratmansky, which was also his first ballet for NYCB.

Abi is scheduled to appear in Russian Seasons.

Join us for Art Alive, an intergenerational drop-in gallery visit and art-making experience inspired by MAD's current exhibitions. 

Taking cues from Something Special (1968), a paper jewelry series by Wendy Ramshaw and David Watkins, 2020 Artist Studios resident Kazue Taguchi will lead a jewelry-making activity in the exhibition 45 Stories in Jewelry: 1947 to Now.

Art Alive is free with Museum admission. Discussions and activities are ongoing, so visitors can join at any time between 11 am and 1 pm and stay as long as they like. The program is offered in accordance with the Museum’s safe social-distancing practices.

There will be no subscriptions this season due to ongoing CoVid-19 uncertainties. However, if you’d like to attend the concerts, be it one or all 20 or any number in between, please reserve tickets ahead of time—either before each concert (as you did last season) or anytime at your convenience. Reservations are required. Call 212-799-1259 or email admin@jupitersymphony.com

Seating will be limited to a flexible percentage of capacity depending on changing circumstances. Chairs will be distanced accordingly. There may be 2 seating configurations:

A: if seating capacity expands (better acoustics) Chairs will be arranged along the length of the hall, with a few seats in the “Organ”—as they were pre-CoVid, but there will be fewer rows to accommodate distancing.

B: if seating capacity shrinks Chairs will be arranged as they were last season—from the Altar (front) to the Stained Glass Dividers (back). A few seats will be available in the “Organ.”

September 27  Imparting Wisdom

Drew Petersen piano

Hao Zhou violin

Claire Bourg violin

Natalie Loughran viola

Christine Lamprea cello

Vadim Lando clarinet

Throughout the centuries, the musical universe has had great teachers passing on their knowledge and skills to gifted musicians. This has provided meaningful building blocks to prize pupils who created wondrous and varied compositions. Examples of this process of ”Imparting Wisdom” are evident in Robert Fuchs and Antonín Dvořák teaching Rubin Goldmark, who in turn taught Aaron Copland and George Gershwin.

FREE performance

"...two iconoclastic virtuoso composer-performers whose past collaborations have proved unpredictable, whimsical, and consistently gratifying."  (The New Yorker)

Conrad Tao has appeared worldwide as a pianist and composer and has been dubbed a musician of “probing intellect and open-hearted vision” by the New York Times. A 2020-21 Kaufman Music Center Artist-in-Residence, he is the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and was named a Gilmore Young Artist—an honor awarded every two years highlighting the most promising American pianists of the new generation.

Charmaine Lee is a New York-based vocalist from Sydney, Australia. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, feedback and microphones to augment and distort the voice.

RSVP strongly recommended. Tickets are available on a first come, first served basis.
RSVP

Proof of COVID-19 vaccination and masks are required to enter Merkin Hall.
View our current COVID-19 health and safety protocols.