Events Calendar

Pushing Boundaries: 60 Years of AFAM Exhibitions. This installation in the Audrey B. Heckler Gallery looks back at over six decades, highlighting key exhibitions in the history of the American Folk Art Museum. It features a selection of beloved works of art and rarely seen documents from the Museum’s archives.

Organized on the occasion of the Museum’s 60th anniversary, MULTITUDES will showcase some 400 stellar works, including recent gifts and new acquisitions that will be exhibited for the first time. The exhibition will feature a wide range of works – from dazzling early American portraits, needlework, and quilts, to idiosyncratic creations of the 20th and the 21st centuries, such as sculptures made of recycled materials, color-tinted photographs, and fragments of art environments. Presented non-chronologically, the works in the exhibition will be visually clustered to reveal not only their individuality but also their commonalities.

During the past decade, Chris Schanck has emerged as a leading figure in the design world for his otherworldly fusion of sculpture and furniture. Skirting the line between refinement and camp, the strange, unfamiliar forms of Schanck’s chairs, sofas, lighting, mirrors, and more suggest coral reefs, extraterrestrial worlds, and artifacts from ancient civilizations, to name just a few of the designer’s inspirations. Each piece is meticulously handcrafted in Schanck’s Detroit-based studio, where his community of artists, students, and Bangladeshi craftspeople plays a key role in the designer’s egalitarian studio practice. Deftly melding innovative material experiments with an expressive yet rigorous refinement of form, Schanck’s elaborately carved, colorfully hued, and lustrous objects are contemporary talismans of stories from the past, present, and future.

Join the artist and be a part of the ritual on the select dates:
May 21: 4:00pm–5:00pm
May 22: 12:00pm–1:00pm
July 2: 4:00pm–5:00pm

The installation will also be open all day for viewing May 14–July 3. 

This participatory installation is a part of GATHER: A series of monuments and rituals

Hope shapes our future and lifts us up. It allows us to access peace and catalyzes resounding change. Hope is what revolutions are built upon. This installation is a tribute to hope, drawing inspiration from Thai culture, where wishes and prayers are often tied to trees, an acknowledgement that an individual has asked something of the universe. Seeds of Hope encourages participants to share a vision for the future on shades of gold ribbon—which are then tied around the rows of plane trees on Hearst Plaza. In essence, we seed hopes and dreams, planting a flag of aspirations that may serve as bright beacons of change. It has often been said that hope is a “thing with feathers.” In this installation, we see the hope of thousands flutter softly in the wind.  

If you have any questions about this event, please contact Guest Services at 212-875-5456 or guestservices@lincolncenter.org.

The Naked Spur (1953)

Howard Kemp (James Stewart) has been tracking killer Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) for a long time. In the Colorado Rockies, he teams up with prospector Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell) and former Union soldier Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker). Thinking Kemp is a sheriff, they agree to help for a small fee. When they catch Vandergroat, he tells them Kemp is pursuing a $5,000 bounty. After demanding equal shares, the uneasy alliance heads for Kansas as Vandergroat tries to turn them against each other.

100% Rotten Tomatoes Score

What comprises the field and study of “American folk art”? In the early twentieth century, scholars, curators, artists, and dealers developed the concept of folk art as an expansive and sometimes contradictory framework to characterize a vast array of works from paintings and sculptures to samplers, quilts, and furniture. This virtual symposium will present new research exploring the many perspectives through which the study of folk art is currently approached, looking in particular at historically overlooked or understudied relationships between themes of identity, nationalism, and American folk art.

To sign-up, please click here.

Drawing inspiration from the Museum’s wide-ranging MULTITUDES exhibition, talks will share new insights into 19th-century portraits and samplers, 20th-century quilts, and other artworks while revealing cross-disciplinary connections and expanded understandings of this field.

Objects of Inquiry: New Perspectives on American Folk Art is a symposium organized in honor of Elizabeth and Irwin Warren, dedicated advocates of the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), and in connection with the exhibition MULTITUDES, which will be on view from January 21–September 5, 2022. The program will be held over Zoom between 1:00 and 5:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, May 22, 2022.

Speakers include: Glenn Adamson, Ph.D., curator, writer, and historian, Mariah Gruner, Ph.D., Recentering Collections Curatorial Fellow at Historic New England, Joseph H. Larnerd, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Design History at Drexel University, Yinshi Lerman-Tan, Ph.D., Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art at the Huntington, Janneken Smucker, Ph.D., Professor of History at West Chester University, and Trevor Brandt, Ph.D. Student in Art History at the University of Chicago, with opening remarks by Emelie Gevalt, Curator of Folk Art and Curatorial Chair for Collections at the American Folk Art Museum, and closing remarks by William D. Moore, Ph.D., Associate Professor of American Material Culture, Department of History of Art & Architecture and American & New England Studies Program, Boston University.

Space is limited; advance registration is required. Please consider making a donation when you register to support ongoing virtual programming.

Instructions for joining with a Zoom link and password will be provided by email upon registration confirmation under “Additional Information.” Closed captioning will be provided in English. For questions or to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@folkartmuseum.org.

Schedule

1:00–3:00 p.m. | Session 1 Papers and Q&A

Welcome Remarks

Elizabeth Warren, President, American Folk Art Museum
Emelie Gevalt, Curatorial Chair for Collections and Curator of Folk Art, American Folk Art Museum and co-curator of MULTITUDES

Objects of Dispute

Glenn Adamson, Ph.D., curator, writer, and historian

High Style Folk Art and New Deal Values: Quilts in the Index of American Design

Janneken Smucker, Ph.D., Professor of History at West Chester University

Ghosts of a Whimsey’s Woodyard

Joseph H. Larnerd, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Design History at Drexel University

3:00 p.m. | Break (15 minutes)

3:15–5:00 p.m. | Session 2 Papers and Q&A

Stitching a Feminine Terrain: Authority, Property, and Home in American Schoolgirl Needlework

Mariah Gruner, Ph.D., Recentering Collections Curatorial Fellow at Historic New England

More than Memory: New Perspectives on the Klaus Stopp Fraktur Collection

Trevor Brandt, Ph.D. Student in Art History at the University of Chicago

Sheldon Peck: Radical Folk Artist?

Yinshi Lerman-Tan, Ph.D., Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art at the Huntington

Closing remarks

William D. Moore, Ph.D., Associate Professor of American Material Culture, Department of History of Art & Architecture and American & New England Studies Program, Boston University

5:00 p.m. | Symposium concludes

Music in a Garden ~ Join us for a series of outdoor concerts every Sunday. West Side Community Garden, 123 W 89th St (between Amsterdam and Columbus). FREE.

Bring awareness to your breath and explore yoga poses while seated in a chair. Benefits include stress reduction, flexibility, and balance. Led by Nobue Hirabayashi, Certified Yoga Instructor

To register and to receive the Zoom link, please click: Gentle Chair Yoga

This event will take place in person at the Library for the Performing Arts.

The Tony-nominated musical Mr. Saturday Night includes the first full Jason Robert Brown score on Broadway since Honeymoon in Vegas opened in 2015. To mark the occasion, and in honor of over a quarter century of scores that have introduced a generation of artists and fans to musical theatre, the Library for the Performing Arts celebrates the musicals of Jason Robert Brown in a live event. The evening will include an interview with Brown and feature video clips from his shows documented in the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive.

The program will include a special performance by Mr. Saturday Night's Shoshana Bean.

William Wolfram piano
Winner of the William Kapell, Naumburg, and Tchaikovsky competitions ~ “Wolfram’s technique is flabbergasting; fiendishly difficult octave passages were as child’s play, and his strength is tempered by an easy poetry.” The New York Times ~ “Wolfram is a dazzling performer.” Kalamazoo Gazette

Oliver Neubauer violin
Recipient of the Gold Award at the 2018 National YoungArts Competition and winner of the 2017 Young Musicians Competition at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Njioma Grevious violin
Won a Keston-Max Fellowship to study and perform with the London Symphony Orchestra in April 2020, a Silver Medal with the Abeo Quartet at the 2019 Fischoff competition, and First Prizes for Performance and Interpretation at the 2018 Prix Ravel chamber music competition in France ~ described by the Boston Musical Intelligencer as a “thoroughly confident and mature violinist”

Maurycy Banaszek viola
Winner of numerous violin, viola & chamber music awards

Iona Batchelder cello
Founding member of the Unison Quartet, which won an Honorary Mention award at the 2021 Bartók World Competition in Budapest, Hungary

Vadim Lando clarinet
Winner of the CMC Canada, Yale and Stonybrook competitions ~ “consistently distinguished...vibrant, precise, virtuosic playing” The New York Times