Curse of the Black Gold Exhibition and Reception, at the Open Society Institute
 6-8:30pm

"Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta takes a graphic look at the profound cost of oil exploitation in West Africa. Featuring images by world-renowned photojournalist Ed Kashi and text by Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, prominent Nigerian journalists, human rights activists, and University of California at Berkeley professor Michael Watts, this book traces the 50-year history of Nigeria's oil interests and the resulting environmental degradation and community conflicts that have plagued the region."

"In conversation with Robert Storr, artist critic, and dean of the Yale School of Art, Vik Muniz will discuss his work featured in his Aperture autobiography, Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer (2005) where he reveals the inventive methods of his major series. Muniz's images are created out of everything and anything: chocolate syrup, cotton, dust, spaghetti sauce, sugar, garbage, toys, and caviar. He transforms these unusual materials into objects of delight, exploring all possible modes of making photographs. Born in Brazil, Muniz has come to stand out as one of the most articulate and innovative artists of his generation."

Dawoud Bey: Class Pictures. Opening, Talk, and Book Signing
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
7:00-9:00 p.m.

Lucien Samaha "uneasy about Beirut" at Sara Tecchia Roma New York
W 20 street, 529, floor 2

"Although Samaha continues to use film on occasion, this project was the last time he used the conventional silver halide medium exclusively and
rather unconventionally. In this particular experiment, he photographed
the urban landscape with an intentional snapshot aesthetic to avoid
formal or precious images of a city that often commands a certain
expected gravity. He compounded the effects of his experiment by
breaking standard rules of film exposure and processing. The resulting
"poor quality negatives" were misinterpreted by a scanner, which in
turn yielded images that delighted the artist with their ambiguous
framing and their indexing of a photographer's movements and difficult."

"The studio on Second Avenue was where Hujar shot the majority of his many portraits of men, women, children and animals, and with a few
exceptions, all of the work in this exhibition was taken there. His
subjects were his intimates (like the artists David Wojnarowicz and
Paul Thek), his well-known artist friends (like Andy Warhol, Ray
Johnson, John Cage, and Ethyl Eichelberger), as well as people he met
on the street. Included in the exhibition is a photograph Hujar made of
a girl he found one night sleeping at the bottom of his stairs."