I heart event listings

Thursday, March 13:

Rob Conger “Feeling Lucky?” at Mixed Greens
W 26 street, 531, floor 1, 6-8 pm

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.”

Vick Muniz Talk and Book Signing
92nd Street Y, 8:15pm

“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.”

Friday, March 14:

Peter Hujar “Second Avenue” at Matthew Marks Gallery
W 24 street, 523, 6-8 pm

“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.”

Adam Ward “For the Ones Who Had a Notion” student exhibition at ICP-Bard
Queens, Jackson avenue, 24, 7-11pm