MARCH 22–APRIL 29
“Color Photographs from the WPA (1939-1943) at Carriage Trade: “Largely forgotten until the mid-seventies when they resurfaced in the Library of Congress archives, the color photographs of the Works Project Administration (1939-1943) document the later period of FDR’s New Deal, an ambitious series of government programs designed to address the brutal effects of the Great Depression on the social and economic fabric of 1930’s America. While the Library’s archive of black and white depression-era photographs is more familiar and more often reproduced, the color images, taken within three years of the invention of Kodachrome film, are striking for their rich, saturated colors and rigorously formal compositions.”

THROUGH APRIL 14
“Karnal,” a joint exhibit by (former pro wrestler) Phillip Thies and Uccello, is at Tachi Gallery.

THROUGH MID-JULY
“News Paper Spires” at the Skyscraper Museum: “The first chapters in New York’s high-rise history were written in the 1870s through the early 1900s when the city’s great newspapers—the Times, Tribune, and World, among others—erected tall towers as signature headquarters. […] The modernity of these towers lay not in their ornate facades or structural design, but in the advanced technology of their building systems, state-of-the-art presses, and typesetting machinery. […] This exhibition celebrates paper, the substrate of history. Photographs, architectural drawings, books, magazines, and crumbling pages of newsprint are in most cases the only surviving records of the monumental tower factories of the great metropolitan dailies—many of which themselves are now long vanished. Paper Spires attempts to create a collage of this lost or fading world.”

MARCH 22
Marketa Irglova (Once, The Swell Season) plays 92YTribeca.

APRIL 5–MAY 19
“The World We Have Lost” by Thomas Lail is at Masters & Pelavin: “In his new exhibition, titled after the pathbreaking and highly-popular publication of Peter Laslett, Lail continues to examine history and political thought through a series of works centered on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map—a projection of a world map onto the surface of a polyhedron. […] Variations of Fuller’s Dymaxion Map are directly depicted in each of Lail’s xerography paintings and works on paper, which are created from fragments of distorted reproductions of communes, ‘drop cities,’ High Modernist housing projects, Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ and Courbet’s ‘Burial at Ornans.'”

APRIL 10
“Sing Me a Song of Jazz: New Discoveries” at BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center: “Just in the last few years a treasure trove of video has appeared with great performances by jazz singers. Some of this footage takes us back to early cinema and old concerts, but much of it is recent. This program includes memorable footage of Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Jane Monheit, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Joe Williams and Anita O’Day.”

JUNE 22–23
John Waters (yes, that John Waters) is bringing his one-man show to City Winery. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “At first I thought he was walking his dog—then I realized it was his date!”