Arts In The City 040908

Before opening last month, the Van Gogh and Expressionism exhibition at the Neue Galerie was one of the season’s most anticipated shows. Thankfully, museum-goers have until July 2 to check out the 80 drawings and paintings in this exhibition, which features highlights from the famed Post-Impressionist’s career as well as the German and Austrian art it inspired. Visitors to the museum will also have the chance to see “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” the Gustav Klimt masterpiece the museum bought last year for a record-shattering $135 million.—H.C. 10 • Resident The Week Of April 9, 2007

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

SPOTLIGHT

Vincent van Gogh, “Self-Portrait,” 1889.

DINNER THEATER

Theater buffs and foodies alike will have something to smile about on April 16, when some of the city’s top chefs and theater stars team up to support The Play Company at the fourth annual Cabaret Gourmet gala at the Lower East Side’s Angel Orensanz Foundation. Expect performance by Tonynominated actor Malcolm Gets and food by Gramercy Tavern’s Nancy Olson, plus many more food-inspired acts.—H.C.

art & architecture

Last week, protestors, police helicopters and bulldozers faced off in Harlem, all over a neighborhood garden. A community hub since 1988, The Nuevo Esperanza Community Garden just happens to sit on what has become one of the most valuable pieces of land in the city’s portfolio, the corner of 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, at the northernmost tip of Central Park. Now, the garden is a gated lot with trampled dirt and a security trailer, complete with a guard on the lookout for

trespassers. Trespassers like the activists from More Gardens! who had been encamped in the garden since January, in an attempt to halt construction. Harlem, which has lagged behind the rest of the city’s development boom, is catching up and the plot – the last undeveloped piece of park-front property on Fifth Avenue – is slated to become the new, permanent home of the Museum for African Art. “I think the notion of the museum between the East Harlem community and the rest of the East Side is one that we feel really strongly about,” said

dance

LAND FIGHT

WEEKLY PICKS

music

A model of the proposed building, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, not including the upper, residential floors.

museum spokesperson Margot Streeter. The museum, which is currently based in Queens, has bounced around the city throughout much of its 22-year history, and will now have a home at the end of Museum Mile. The museum is the first to be added to the famed cultural corridor since the Guggenheim was built in 1959. But what really has neighbors upset is the 19-story residential building going up above the museum, luxury condos developed, they feel, without the community in mind. “What we’re losing is a sense of community,” said Anthony Bowman, the garden’s president. “A community garden is a place where everyone in the community can learn from each other. It’s a place where urban children can learn that tomatoes don’t come from a grocery store.” Bowman, has worked with the garden since 1992, and has seen the impact it has had on the neighborhood. “In 1988, that corner was a crack corner. It was a dumping ground; it had been an old gas station and some of the neighbors went and started cleaning it up. We took back the corner, took the drug dealers out,” said Bowman. “And so the people that built the community got pushed out. We can see it community to community, but we can really see it here in Harlem.” —H.C.

theater

AP Photo/Tina Fineberg

Arts In The City Two shows at the Guggenheim celebrate the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2009. “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum: Restoring a Masterpiece” runs through July 8, and the accompanying “The Shapes of Space” will be on display through Sept. 5. The second exhibition explores how artists – including Pipolotti Rist, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Piotr Uklanski – have dealt with the representation, creation and division of space over the last 100 years. guggenheim.org

The Eifman Ballet of St. Petersberg begins its three-week season in New York to celebrate the corps’ 30th anniversary. At the New York City Center April 13 – 29. nycitycenter.org

Singer Art Garfunkel brings his solo take on 20th-century standards for Jazz at Lincoln Center, April 13 and 14. lincolncenter.org Acclaimed actor Kevin Spacey returns to the New York stage with the Eugene O’Neill play “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” imported – cast and all – from London. At the Brooks Atkinson Theatre through June 10.