Pre Covid-19 we searched the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you didn’t have to.” We made it as easy as 1-2-3. Covid has required some changes.

NYC-Arts Top Five Picks: May 28 – June 3

Interesting. Unusual. Uniquely NYC. Highlights of this week’s top events include A Year with Children 2021, DOWN AND DIRTY, Everything that Wasn’t White & More and more. Get the NYC-ARTS Top Five in your inbox every Friday and follow @NYC_ARTS on Instagram or @NYCARTS on Twitter to stay abreast of events as they happen.

FilmAfrica & DanceAfrica Festival 2021

BAM Rose Cinemas

Brooklyn / Tue, May 04, 2021 – Mon, Jun 14, 2021

From Friday, May 28 through Thursday, June 3, BAM presents “FilmAfrica,” in partnership with African Film Festival, Inc, showcasing the best contemporary narrative, documentary, and short films from Africa and the diaspora. “FilmAfrica” is the cinematic companion to BAM’s 44th annual “DanceAfrica Festival,” which includes a special virtual dance performance, workshops, a virtual bazaar, and virtual art, running May 4—June 14. This year, in coordination with “DanceAfrica’s” celebration of Haiti, “FilmAfrica” highlights films from and about the ..

Everything that Wasn’t White & More

Parrish Art Museum

Westchester / Sat, Apr 24, 2021 – Mon, Sep 06, 2021

In five weeks, Holley created over 100 works, including sculpture made largely from objects found on the property. Titles of the work—such as “Fragile like a Child,” “Working to Loosen our Chains, Battered,” “Blood from the Fields Back Home,” and “I Can Always Fly”—read like lines from an epic poem describing struggle, defeat, yet resolute constancy and grace. Born in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Alabama in 1950, the seventh of his mother’s 27 children, Holley experienced a …

A Year with Children 2021

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Manhattan / Fri, Apr 30, 2021 – Sun, Jun 20, 2021

Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its landmark education program, Learning Through Art (LTA), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum proudly presents the annual exhibition “A Year with Children 2021.” On view through June 20, “A Year with Children 2021” showcases select works of art by New York City public school students in grades two through six who participated in LTA during the 2020­–21 school year. Over one hundred collages, drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, objects, and installations …

JEANNE SILVERTHORNE & BONNIE RYCHLAK: DOWN AND DIRTY

Duck Creek Arts

Long Island / Sat, May 01, 2021 – Sun, Jun 06, 2021

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to announce “Down and Dirty,” a two-person exhibit featuring sculpture by artists Bonnie Rychlak and Jeanne Silverthorne. Jeanne Silverthorne and Bonnie Rychlak create sculptures that share a tale of disruption and playful decrepitude. When they met in the 1980s, New York was suffering from a historic market crash. Still, the city was teeming with resourceful artists. These conditions shaped Rychlak and Silverthorne’s approach to making art, and …

Lewis Hine: The WPA National Research Project Photographs, 1936-37

Howard Greenberg Gallery

Manhattan / Thu, Apr 15, 2021 – Fri, Jul 02, 2021

A tale of collective ingenuity and individual perseverance in the shadow of national crisis is the subject of “Lewis Hine: The WPA National Research Project Photographs, 1936-37,” on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery. The Great Depression ravaged the United States in the 1930s, producing extreme levels of poverty and unemployment with a deep and penetrating social pessimism to match. Whereas some photographic endeavors of the time sought to document the misery and misfortune of those …