One of jury member Jon Rafman's Google Earth pieces. (Courtesy the artist)

Art and tech bloggers nearly lost it last month when the first piece of “Vine art” sold at the Moving Image Art Fair, and now they have something else to get excited about. Starting today, Rhizome and Tumblr are accepting project proposals for their new Internet Art Grant, an award that will underwrite the production of three winning entries. (The size of each grant will depend on the proposal, and Tumblr declined to say how much money they will be willing to offer.) The jury, which includes Massimiliano Gioni, associate director and director of exhibitions at the New Museum, artists Laurie Anderson and Jon Rafman, and Christopher Price a.k.a. Topherchris, Tumblr’s editorial director, will choose commissions based on their innovation and feasibility.

Projects may assume many forms ranging from performance to sound art, but they must involve Tumblr in some capacity. What makes a winning submission?

“We’re looking for proposals showing a really native understanding of the internet and the web," Rhizome's Executive Director Heather Corcoran said. "People who have a sophisticated understanding of, not just how Tumblr works, but how the internet works and how languages on the internet work.”

"We’re looking for something that engages the platform in a new way and highlights the creative use of Tumblr, said Annie Werner, Tumblr’s art evangelist (a title of her own design). "But we’re certainly loose in how that is. I wouldn’t want to project an idea on to the submissions at all.”

Rhizome, the New Museum’s nonprofit new media organization, has collaborated before with Tumblr. David Karp, Tumblr’s young CEO and founder, participated in the 2010 edition of Seven on Seven, Rhizome’s annual pairing of artists and techies. Mr. Karp worked with Ryan Trecartin to create a project called River the Net.

“That’s where we recognized there was a lot of synergy between our organizations, and we really just kept in touch since then, trying to find ways of working together,” Ms. Corcoran said.

The three winning proposals will be announced next month, at which point the artists will have half a year to realize their projects. The winners will be shown at an event at the New Museum in 2014.

Ms. Werner said she was thrilled to partner with Rhizome because “they’re interested in the kind of things that are happening on Tumblr and not just what the art world says is happening in art… My bottom line is to promote the arts on Tumblr, and when you have a really credible, legitimate arts organization interested in that kind of stuff, that’s really exciting for us.”

1993 is calling. (nicholaspaulsmith/Flickr)

It's apparently going to start raining or snowing at any moment in New York, if it hasn't already. So, move quickly, find your nearest pay phone, and ring 1-855-FOR-1993 (that's 1-855-367-1993). You'll be greeted by a recording of someone telling a story about living in the neighborhood you're calling from in 1993. The campaign, titled "Recalling 1993," is part of the New Museum's "NYC 1993" exhibition, and apparently works from any of the roughly 5,000 public telephones in Manhattan.

We just tried to call from our landline and got a very polite gentleman telling us to call back from a pay phone. (He was working as a city tour guide 20 years back, he said.)

The New Museum has a map to help you locate your local pay phones, as well as a few sample recordings. In one, former club kid James St. James talks about living in an apartment that was once home to a murderer who cooked his girlfriend and fed her to homeless people in Tompkins Square Park. In another, store owner Dave Ortiz talks about the intense smell that the Meatpacking District used to have, and recalls the days when rats were as big as cats.

(Courtesy newmuseumstore.org)

The New Museum announced today that Saul Dennison will now serve as the chairman of the museum's board. James-Keith Brown, a trustee since 1998, will replace Mr. Dennison as president.

In addition, Paul T. Schnell will serve as vice chairman; Mitzi Eisenberg, Lonti Ebers, David Heller, and Toby Devan Lewis have been named vice presidents.

The museum's director Lisa Phillips has also named four new trustees: Hank Latner, Leonid Mikhelson, Gael Neeson and José Olympio Pereira.

"As part of our evolution, we have actively sought out new leaders who represent active cultural centers around the globe," Ms. Phillips said in a statement. "We welcome our new trustees to the museum at a great moment in its history.”

Art Club 2000, 'Untitled (Conrans I),' 1992–93. (Courtesy the artist and the Estate of Colin de Land)

Named for a Sonic Youth album, this exhibition, part of which opened last week (the rest opens on Feb. 13), is a madeleine opening onto memories of the grunge era. Gathering artworks that were made or shown in New York in 1993, the curators—Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Jenny Moore and Margot Norton—make the case that art-making had a vastly different role at that time.

Zingmagazine publisher Devon Dikeou’s 10 directory boards (all artworks dated 1993 unless otherwise specified), displayed in the museum’s lobby gallery, set up the era’s art scene. White plastic letters on black felt spell out the title, venue, dates and names of artists of every group show Ms. Dikeou participated in that year. They were at alternative venues like the bar Flamingo East and PS1; some were curated by art gadabout Kenny Schachter. Among those on the circuit were Marilyn Minter and Paul McCarthy; the young Spencer Finch and Ricci Albenda appear next to Barbara Pollack (who is now better known as an art writer). Many of the names of the participants—like Jutta Koether, Matthew Richie, Dan Asher, Adrian Piper and Craig Kalpakjian—are familiar today, but many more have been lost to time.

These boards riff on what was then the mecca of art, the Leo Castelli Gallery at 420 West Broadway, which displayed the same make and model of board in its building’s lobby to announce its shows. Ms. Dikeou was 30 in 1993, and the golden keys inserted in the locks of each directory board, making it look as if you could easily reach out and change the names yourself, speak of her longing to be in the Castelli context, a world away from her own. Could you just make yourself a star?

If Ms. Dikeou’s work is a meditation on the center of gravity and the fringes of the New York art world, autobiographically self-lacerating ’90s wunderkind artist Sean Landers gets at the heart of what it felt like to make and show art in New York in 1993 with [sic], a confessional ramble about ambition and uncertainty scrawled in all caps on 451 sheets of yellow legal paper displayed in a grid on the wall. “There really seems to be no point to my life these days,” reads a typical passage. Listening to soft rock on the radio, musing about his Catholic hometown’s strip bars (“bottomless is legal in this state unlike New York”), watching the TV show Roseanne and the movie Soylent Green, scribbling in notebooks at diners, philosophizing about breasts and Vito Acconci, smoking too many Marlboros—Mr. Landers’s embarrassing and canny portrait of the artist as a young man recalls Rembrandt’s and looks forward to confessional blogs. When he writes “I have to watch TV to escape ... I can’t write here I feel like an idiot,” his angst is performative, both sincere and put on. “Am I a manic depressive?” the text asks. “I wonder when I am finally forced to be alone what I’ll discover.”

Jutta Koether, 'Antibody IV (All Purpose Substance),' 1993. (Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Gallery)

People felt isolated in 1993, especially if they felt different. Sadie Benning’s grainy 20-minute video It Wasn’t Love was shot in the then-teenager’s bedroom with a Pixelvision camera, a low-fi Fisher-Price video recorder that logged moving images on inexpensive cassette tapes. A tangibly bored butch 19-year old with bleached-blond hair re-enacts her fantasy narrative of glamorous movie romance (“Yesterday night I drove to Hollywood with this chick”). In reality, she’s worlds from Hollywood: visible out a window is the snowy landscape of the suburbs of Milwaukee.

Ms. Benning, a lesbian, was pulled out of school at 16 because of homophobic bullying. She uses her toy camera and props (blond wigs, cigars, berets, leather jackets, makeup and drawn-on tattoos) to make videos about women like herself and their desires. She creates characters that morph through fluid gender identities, and her use of video as a diary feels political—the work examines the role media plays in constructing images of masculinity and femininity. The soundtrack ranges from rockabilly to Joan Jett and Nirvana’s “Negative Creep.” Her video is ultimately optimistic: you are the star; media isn’t a one-way street but can be put to personal purposes. The work, dedicated to “Bad Girls Everywhere,” was included in both the famous 1993 Whitney Biennial and the 45th Venice Biennale that year; Ms. Benning went on to co-found the band Le Tigre.

The rest of the exhibition will bring more on the AIDS crisis, gay rights, and race and gender politics. Rirkrit Tiravanija will serve Thai food; Hans-Ulrich Obrist will talk about his series of do-it-yourself artist instructional works. The questions of the ’90s were: Who are you, and who am I? This show makes the case that isolation and how personal and political identities and alternative media made connectedness possible were major themes of art in this pre-Internet era. In the 1990s, it was hard to find people like you or to explain how you felt and get those feelings out there. (Through May 26)

Ellie Ga, 'The Fortunetellers.' (Courtesy Bureau, New York)

World travel for most New York-based artists born during the Ford administration consists predominantly of trips to Venice, London, Paris, Berlin and maybe Sharjah or Hong Kong for a residency or a biennial. Not so for Ellie Ga, whose work in the last few years has focused on archival material gathered during a five-month expedition to, of all places, the North Pole—about as far away from the art world, not to mention civilization, as one can hope to get. In September 2007, Ms. Ga took a Twin Otter plane from Svalbard, an archipelago (pop. 2,394) halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and joined a small crew aboard the Tara, a 90-foot-long ship that was shaped like an olive pit and was drifting in the Arctic ice. Its rudders had been removed and the engines shut off, so that the boat and its crew were left at the mercy of wherever the frozen ocean took them. Last week, as part of the monthlong group exhibition “Walking Drifting Dragging” at the New Museum, Ms. Ga presented a performance piece about the expedition called The Fortunetellers, a kind of roving lecture series/vacation slide show combining overhead projections, photographs, maps, charts and sound installations—mostly the sound of the Tara scraping against the ice and, in Ms. Ga’s words, “the slow swell of the ocean.”

The joke among her crewmates was, “Well, what’s she going to do, paint all day outside?” Ms. Ga said in an interview at the museum on the day of the performance. “At first everyone was really skeptical. My first idea was that I’d just gather material and work on it later, but I realized I had to make work for these people in order to be accepted socially. Because, being from New York, I had no polar skills or anything.”

Life on the ship was regimented—when Ms. Ga first arrived, some of the crew had already been there for five months—but the weather was another story. Forecasts from headquarters in Paris said the ice would spit the ship out in three weeks. That didn’t happen. Then, just before Christmas, it seemed like they’d be out in a day. They were in the ice for another six weeks. “For the most part, we rely on the weather forecast to shape our sense of the future, which makes me wonder if there isn’t a prophet held in higher esteem by our society than the weather forecaster,” Ms. Ga says in her performance.

The one thing the crew could count on weather-wise was a total absence of daylight. On Oct. 4, not long after Ms. Ga boarded the ship, the sun rose at 9:43 a.m., set at 12:19 p.m. and then disappeared below the horizon for months. The crew eagerly awaited the full moon, the only available natural light, which gave Ms. Ga some options for photographing her surroundings. Otherwise, she would use a headlamp to light the fissures that formed in the ice and hope for the best. In either case, she had to use a tripod, which she doesn’t normally care for much, because the shots required such long exposures. But this meant she’d have to take her gloves off to fiddle with the buttons on the camera. She was astonished at how quickly her fingers would start to freeze.

Ms. Ga took a photograph every day from the hull of the ship, but for the most part, her duties fell in the category of housekeeping. Her first task was to dig frozen parachute cords out of the ice, left there by a Russian crew that had dropped a tractor and supplies by plane the season before. There were also cooking duties and cleaning duties. She took ice core and plankton samples (the only living thing in the ice, besides the crew) and, her most consistent task, cut up snow, stashing it in Ikea bags and bringing it back to the ship to use for drinking water. There was a crew of 10 and no common language between them.

“Of the six French, two spoke English well,” Ms. Ga told The Observer. “The others, not so good. Of the non-French-speakers, one spoke really good French. The Russian and the Norwegian didn’t speak any French. The Russian barely spoke English. And I decided to learn French. That was my mission. I was really low on the totem pole. I was the only artist, the only single woman, and I spoke French like a 2-year-old. I was so insistent on learning French that there was so much I didn’t know that was going on. The chief of the expedition, he came out with a book, and I read it and thought, ‘Oh, that’s what we were doing.’”

During her performance, sitting at an overhead projector and pushing photographs of the crew aside with her hand, Ms. Ga said, “the sunless days are marked by established routines: the sauna every four days, a shower every seven days, night watch every five days. Sometimes I mark the days of the week by the amount of alcohol I get: Monday, none; Tuesday, two glasses of wine; Wednesday, a pre-dinner drink; Thursday, none; Friday, none (but I get to take a shower); Saturday, a pre-dinner drink; Sunday, one can of beer.” It wasn’t a matter of not having things, but rather not having agency. The ship was stocked with food and a “beautiful” wine cellar. They’d find any excuse to break out the booze (a “crossing 80 degrees north party,” for instance), but there were lots of limitations. She had brought red pepper flakes with her from New York, because she likes spicy food. She handed them over to the cook—“the true chief of an expedition,” Ms. Ga said—and the first night at dinner, she got up from the table and grabbed them from the kitchen. Later, the ship’s doctor told her she’d really screwed up. The red pepper flakes were no longer hers to use as she wished; they belonged to the boat now.

She did have her methods of maintaining control. Since most of Ms. Ga’s artistic duties were accomplished in off hours, she was usually the first one up and the last one to bed. She’d gotten into the habit of taking everyone’s leftover alcohol from a party, pouring it into a glass and stashing it in a cupboard in her cabin so it was there if she wanted it. Beyond that, her work broke up most of the monotony.

“I remember thinking about myth and metaphor a lot,” Ms. Ga said, “and realizing that everyone was seeing the same symbols. The collective unconscious becomes very palpable when you’re in the middle of nothing. I guess that’s how mythology starts—people in a limited world, with limited knowledge. You have to invent why it thunders. The guy pumping kerosene has to be a symbol of something, because he’s doing it every day.”

The expedition happened somewhat accidentally for Ms. Ga, who, through a friend, had found work photographing oversized prints at the New York Explorers Club. The job turned into a residency, with Ms. Ga researching early attempts at photography in the high north in daguerreotypes from the club’s extensive, disorganized archives. Eventually she decided she wanted her own archive instead of living vicariously through somebody else’s and found an expedition looking for an artist through the club’s head archivist. She compares her work in the arctic to an earlier project, “Classification of a Spit Stain,” an attempt at organizing the stains on New York sidewalks through a “micro exhibition of the city streets and where the stains form,” like cracks in the ice. She said, “It’s about banality. That’s where the poetry is.”

Still, there is no precedent in her life for her experience in the North Pole.

“I’m from Staten Island,” she said. “I’ve never even been camping.”

mmiller@observer.com

2 Pretty performs at the party. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)

On Friday night downtowners crowded the New Museum for a very special edition of its Next Generation party hosted in part by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin, co-curators of the 2015 New Museum Triennial. At the ground level, attendees mingled with DIS Magazine media companions (those full-body-spandexed creatures who wear advertisements and like to pose for pictures), but for the most part the party took place on the museum's top floor, where DJ sets were interspersed with performances by artists like Lauren Devine, a YouTube sensation, who, as it was painfully explained to an older attendee, doesn't actually have that many hits for her videos. She doesn't need them! Parody would be the wrong word, but she's described her music as "Fro-Yo Pop," like the music they play at Pinkberry.

Mr. Trecartin, and his ilk, tend to bring a certain style to parties like these, and their contributions remained the most memorable parts of the evening. Right by the coat check, for example, attendees were greeted with little bottles of what appeared to be urine, wrapped in the Chase Bank logo, each carrying the suggestion, in Chase font, that we "Taste."

"It is locally sourced," said Babak Radboy, the man behind the bottles, when we found him upstairs. (By that he meant he'd filled the bottles with water and food coloring in the museum's basement, thankfully.) His collective, Shanzhai Biennial, focuses on the art of counterfeits and plans to soon partner with James Franco on making advertisements for a line of underwear they'd found in Chinatown, underwear featuring his name, for some reason, as if it were a real brand.

The media companions could be slightly off-putting, and even MoMA PS1 Director Klaus Biesenbach, who had them at the opening of Mr. Trecartin's show there in 2011, said he wasn't quite used to them. "I had my picture taken with Ryan tonight, because I am his curator," he said, "And even I was a bit scared by them. It's that they don't have any faces, I think. They're very inhuman."

We'd spotted Gallery Girl Liz Margulies on the ground floor (and would have said "hi!" but couldn't find you later!) and asked Mr. Biesenbach if he watched that show. He said he hadn't seen it, or the other Bravo art show, Work of Art, because he doesn't "know how to find programs on [his] television."

Near the exit, as things wound down, a woman who worked for Calvin Klein solicited opinions on the name for a clothing line she wanted to start, and advised a man who works for Jeff Koons to get a colonic. The clothing line would take its name from a friend of hers who is Danish, and whose name is a homonym for a racial epithet in English. "I don't know," said the Koonsman, not so sold on the colonic. "What's it like?"

A punk on his way to the door overheard the conversation and jumped in. "Oh man you've gotta try it," he advised. "Have you ever done ecstasy? It's like that, only way worse."

R.E.H. Gordon, 'The Observants,' 2011, with AJ Durand, Edie Fake, Rami George, R.E.H. Gordon. (Oli Rodriguez/SculptureCenter)

If you're a fan of live art, clear your calendar this weekend. It looks like it's going to be a wild one.

In Long Island City, SculptureCenter, which is in between exhibitions, is hosting a full afternoon of performance on Saturday. Titled "Reverberations," it will include pieces by Park McArthur and Yve Laris Cohen (whose mysterious-sounding work will include a large black curtain and the museum's gantry), R. E. H. Gordon, Paul Clipson and Joshua Churchill, and Woody Sullender.

SculptureCenter's assistant curator, Kristen Chappa, is handling curatorial duties on the project, which "mines an inherent materiality within the ephemeral moments of dance, film, and sound," according to a statement from the museum. Its organized under the auspices of its "In Practice" program, which commissions emerging artists to make new work. The museum's annual "In Practice" show arrive Jan. 14. Full details here.

And there's more! The Studio Museum in Harlem is hosting a series called "perFOREmance" as part of its new exhibition, "Fore," over the next few days. (Disclosure: I wrote an essay for the catalogue about an artist who is not performing.) Narcissister is up tonight, Kevin Beasley arrives tomorrow and Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle will appear on Saturday. More on that here.

Downtown, at the New Museum on Sunday afternoon, AUNTS, luciana achugar, Maggie Bennett, Bureau for the Future of Choreography, Walter Dundervill, Moriah Evans and Ximena Garnica will perform and debate as part of a program organized by Movement Research about the legacy of the legendary Judson Dance Theater. Read more here.

Finally, MoMA PS1 on Sunday has an action-packed lineup as part of its Pasolini retrospective. Expect performances by Barbara Hammer and Lovett/Codagnone and a reading by Kate Valk of a text by Paul Chan. More here.

That's a lot of activity. Thankfully, Momofuku Milk Bar is giving away cookies on Saturday, which you can use to stay energized throughout the performance–filled weekend.

'Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969-1989' at the New Museum. (Jesse Untracht-Oakner/New Museum).

The most prominent item in “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969-1989,” on view at the New Museum now through Dec. 30, is the door to Keith Haring’s loft at 325 Broome Street. The front of the door is painted bright red, except for one dull patch where painters have preserved a trademark Radiant Baby. The back boasts tags from Haring as well as his graffiti-writing houseguests: Futura 2000, Fab Five Freddy, Kenny Scharf and LA2.

The door comes courtesy of landlord Saul Fried, who attained it through luck, according to the art historian Marc H. Miller, whose archival website, 98bowery.com, takes its name from his former address and forms the backbone for the show.

“He’s kind of an Old World Jew,” Mr. Miller said of Mr. Fried, his own former landlord. “He was always just a little suspicious. Even though he’d been renting to artists for all these years, unlike some landlords he’s never really let any pay their rent with art.” Not that this mattered, since Mr. Haring was subletting anyway. “So ironically he ends up with a Keith Haring door… he doesn’t even have Keith’s name on the lease!”

Haring’s inscription, marking the artist’s studio to any passerby, is but one work that, in the words of exhibition curator Ethan Swan, “either brings the Bowery into the studio or extends the studio out into the Bowery.” In the former category are Martin Wong’s painting of a nearby tenement and Eve Sonneman’s photograph Spring Street Girls. In the latter are Charles Simonds’s miniature “Dwellings” sculptures and Christy Rupp’s Rat Patrol posters, both, originally, surreptitiously installed throughout the streets.

“It wasn't like you were gonna put up a painting and then sell it for $80,000,” said Mr. Miller, “so artists were first of all looking for an audience.”

A D.I.Y. spirit prevailed: Coleen Fitzgibbon opened her own storefront gallery at 5 Bleecker; John Holmstrom started Punk magazine.

In 2008, Mr. Swan interviewed Mr. Miller for the Bowery Artists Tribute, the oral history project he runs under the museum’s aegis. At the time Mr. Miller was just beginning to build his website. “I guess there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg thing here,” says Mr. Miller, “because I was just in the process of beginning to put it together and then I found myself talking on the tape here.” Meanwhile, Mr. Swan credits Mr. Miller with the inspiration for turning the project into a museum show.

“I had never really thought of the Bowery Artists Tribute as being able to really communicate through art objects, because I think it’s more about the stories,” Mr. Swan said, “Less about what was made and more about how the neighborhood facilitated that. And it was actually Marc’s website that first made me think that those objects could be used to tell that story.”

The Bowery Artists Tribute was started when the museum moved in 2007. The point was, as Mr. Swan puts it, “to point out that the museum isn’t here to establish an arts district or create something new but actually is entering into a very long story.” (Or as Mr. Miller puts it: “to inoculate the museum from charges of gentrification.”) The history it documents begins with the 1955 demolition of the Third Avenue elevated train, whose absence allowed adequate light into the nearby lofts for Abstract Expressionists to set up studios.

“By 1957, John Opper and Mark Rothko are in this building across the street, 222 Bowery, and Lichtenstein was down the street at 190,” Mr. Swan explained, speaking at the museum. “This idea of these men that need these wide open spaces to make their giant paintings, I think it’s such a really incredible story that I’m really interested in, but I do think part of what stands out to me about the '70s and '80s is the artists during those times didn’t need space or light in the same way. The relationship with those key elements of the Bowery, at least that initial wave, is much murkier. The show is an opportunity to look more in-depth at why artists continued to come to the Bowery during those decades when it’s not as clear-cut a story.”

The dates of the show are also those of Mr. Miller’s residence on the Bowery. A graduate of the University of California at Riverside (where his classmates included poet Billy Collins), Mr. Miller moved to New York to pursue a Ph.D. and NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, but his encounters with his roommates’ works (five of Come Closer’s 20 artists lived at 98 Bowery at one time or another) inspired him to produce art of his own. Included in "Come Closer" is Harry Mason, Harry’s Bar, 98 Bowery, NYC (1974), a series of photographs by Mr. Miller depicting a day in the life of a local barman, who annotated each by hand in all-caps (sample text: “I AM RINGING UP A SALE ON MY REGISTAR [sic]”). Also in the show are “paparazzi self-portraits” that depict Mr. Miller and collaborator Bettie Ringma posing with ’70s celebs like Andy Warhol, George McGovern and the Ramones.

Those punk legends are heavily represented, with drawings by Joey and Dee Dee and T-shirts designed by Arturo Vega, who shared his Second Street loft with the musicians. There are also flyers for shows by the likes of E.S.G., Liquid Liquid and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s band Gray. The show’s public programming includes a performance on Nov. 30 by Arto Lindsay of DNA and a panel on Dec. 13 called “Parallel Lines: Visual Art, CBGB and Downtown Nightlife.”

Mr. Swan—who himself played in the band Silk Flowers—cited Arleen Schloss’s performance salon, A’s, as an example of the way artists of different media used to interact.

“On one night it could be a slide show film, a band playing, somebody doing performance, a Xerox flyer show—you know, like people making Xerox art, and then they’d be taped up to the wall for one night,” Mr. Swan said. “The Coachmen, which was Thurston Moore’s band before Sonic Youth, played all their first shows there. Gray played their first show there. Because it was so informal and because it was a little bit off the beaten path and because none of the neighbors were ever gonna complain about noise, it was a place where a lot of artists were able to get their start with performance because there was just no parameters of what could happen there. [Ms. Schloss] really wanted to let anything that wanted to happen there happen there.” An 8mm film in the exhibition shows Ms. Schloss postering in the area.

It’s difficult to compare the Bowery of 2012 with that depicted in "Come Closer." There’s a “certain romanticizing of an artist community in the midst of that kind of decay,” Mr. Miller said, and compared the neighborhood to 19th-century Montmartre. The galleries that blossomed around the New Museum in the past few years are more hidebound than 5 Bleecker, and few of their artists work in the area. Just this week, Sperone Westwater opposed the construction of a highrise hotel just behind the gallery, which is just down the block from the museum.

“An artist who’s coming to this neighborhood now,” Mr. Swan said, “a young artist, is gonna have a much different relationship with why they’re here or what’s happening here.”

Tomorrow at 7 p.m. the New Museum will present a performance by Arto Lindsay of DNA. 

Chelsea Clinton at soccer practice in Washington, D.C., in January of 1993. (Mike Marucci/AFP/Getty Images)

Today the New Museum released some details regarding the show it has in the works that is centered around the year 1993 in New York. It's going to be a blowout affair: all five floors of the museum are in play, and four curators are working on it, Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Jenny Moore and Margot Norton. The show is titled “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star," its subtitle coming from the eponymous Sonic Youth record recorded in that year. The show will run Feb. 13 through May 26, 2013.

The as-yet-incomplete list of artists includes the following names: Ida Applebroog, Art Club 2000, Alex Bag, Matthew Barney, Kathe Burkhart, John Currin, Coco Fusco, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Félix González-Torres, Ann Hamilton, David Hammons, On Kawara, Byron Kim, Alix Lambert, Sean Landers, Sarah Lucas, Paul McCarthy, Suzanne McClelland, Gabriel Orozco, Pepón Osorio, Elizabeth Peyton, Steven Pippin, Charles Ray, Jason Rhoades, Julia Scher, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Rudolf Stingel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nari Ward, Hannah Wilke, Jack Whitten.

"NYC 1993," according to the museum's release, is "conceived as a time capsule, an experiment in collective memory that attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics."

Sounds like it could end up being a great one.

Here's something to get us all in the mood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JGBNkLM9_8

At the Brooklyn Museum, Mickalene Thomas has not only upped the ante on Courbet by giving the title Origin of the Universe to her take on his painting—a black-power, pop-palette Venus vajazzled with rhinestones—but she has also given that title to her exhibition.

Ms. Thomas’s massive, French-Impressionist-inspired, rhinestone-embellished paintings of black female nudes are gaudy fun, yes, but they are also enormously ambitious. Her other great subject is her mother, a woman who obviously relishes vamping for the camera (“I always liked Pam Grier,” she confesses in a video portrait). Ms. Thomas has found her voice as an artist in addressing and overcoming origins both artistic (French painting) and familial (her mother). Her paintings may be kitschy, but they are also, as she titles several of them, “très belle,” and display a tremendous awareness of how personal the history of painting can be, or at least seem, for an artist. Four wood-panel and print fabric installations resembling sets for a 1970s sitcom, a colorful wall of miniature collages and a video (Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman from 2012, a biography of Thomas’s mother) round out the display.

At the New Museum, where her mid-career retrospective “Cosmos” just went on view, German artist Rosemarie Trockel reminds us that Courbet’s The Origin of the World was once owned by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Her take on Origin—a framed digital print titled Replace Me (2011), in which an image of a fuzzy black tarantula is superimposed on the Courbet nude’s pubes—deals in uncanny associations between people and things.

Ms. Trockel gives us an artist-curated taste of marginal works from the 19th century and earlier, as well as pieces by so-called outsider artists. Her show is full of wünderkammer-like assortments of natural objects (a 27.5-pound lobster, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka’s famous glass sculptures of flowers and sea creatures, cabinets of dried seedpods and a veritable aviary of 18th- and 19th-century bird watercolors) and oddball artworks (Günter Weseler’s animatronic wall barnacle gently expands, contracts and titters; creepy plaster dolls by Martin Bartlett pirouette in vitrines abutting wonderfully abject sculptures of birds by James Castle). The exhibition’s walls are painted a solemn green-grey; the lighting is dim. Ms. Trockel has placed her own artworks—wool-weft monochromes that hang on the wall like paintings, as well as photographs, sculptures and a library of artists’ books—in the context of these curiosities. In the catalog, her projects are classified according to the eccentric phyla “botany, textiles, zoology, ceramics, ‘odd objects,’ books.” Ms. Trockel’s diverse body of work, like the elephant of the proverb, feels different depending on what part of it you grasp first, and to have so much of her in one place creates a fuller impression of her significance than any viewer (especially one in New York, where she is seldom shown) is likely to have previously had.

The museum also recently remembered its mission of giving underappreciated artists their due. Right now, in the lobby, you can see Judith Bernstein’s long-overdue first solo museum show, “Judith Bernstein: HARD.” It, too, has a riff on Courbet’s painting (thanks go to the museum’s communications director Gabriel Einsohn for pointing this out to me): the painting Birth of the Universe #4, a neon pink and orange intergalactic battle in which beings with flaming penises for eyes and vaginal-mouthed gullets full of cosmoses smolder in space. Ms. Bernstein, now 70 years old, is best known for the enormous gestural “Screw” paintings she has been making since the mid-’60s. They equate erections with flat-head screws and send off everything from phallocentric minimalism to macho (“jackoff,” as one work puts it) U.S. foreign policy. The works were censored from exhibitions in the 1970s, when Ms. Bernstein was active in the feminist collective the Guerrilla Girls and a founder of the alternative space A.I.R Gallery. Her monumental, 45-foot-long Signature Piece, installed against the glass of the New Museum’s lobby, reminds us that just getting your name out there as an artist can sometimes be a gesture of activism and defiance.

There is no Origin of the World in the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum dedicated to feminist art and conceptual art curator Lucy Lippard, unless you count the fact that Ms. Lippard’s work has been the origin of many art worlds. The show focuses on Ms. Lippard’s iconic 1972 book Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, but it also makes a case for the expanded role of women in the arts. The display of 177 objects in two small galleries examines the time span of Ms. Lippard’s book year by year, and what emerges is not so much an investigation, as the curators claim, of the way “the object dematerializes” in that period, but rather of how a new art form demanded a new kind of curator.

Conceptual art required conceptual curating. Ms. Lippard’s 1969 exhibition “955,000”took its name from the population of Vancouver; when the show traveled to Buenos Aires, its name changed to “2,972,543.” For another exhibition, 1970’s “Groups,” she asked artists to take five photographs of the same people dressed in the same clothing each day. As artists like Lawrence Weiner executed these instructions, they helped define a new role for the exhibition organizer: to initiate a project, disseminate a set of rules to a select group of participants and appoint artists as its executors. The roles could also be reversed, with artists like Sol LeWitt providing instructions for Ms. Lippard to follow. Her projects didn’t just engage with new art—they used new forms to do so, and were creative in their own right.

Ephemera comprises much of the show, and it’s crammed into every nook of the galleries: there is the exhibition announcement for Ms. Lippard’s legendary 1966 exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction,” which included organic, tactile work by Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and others as the feminist counterpoint to minimalism; an issue of Aspen Magazine devoted to minimalism; and documentation of Richard Serra’s famous molten iron piece Splashing (1968). All of this can get a bit dry; if you are the kind of person who reads the acknowledgements sections in books and watches movie credits in their entirety, this is the show for you.

But Lee Lozano’s Dialogue Piece (1969) provides some particularly good reading. Her premise was, “Call or write people for the specific purpose of inviting them to your loft for a dialogue,” and on gridded graph paper, she recorded her calls and the ensuing conversations: “May 14 1969 Call Poonsie (Larry Poons). He answers phone, we made a date for May 21.” “Call Johns at Castelli. David White at Castelli says he is busy.” “Dan Graham and I have an important dialogue.” There’s little record about what these dialogues were about (many seem to be about astrological signs and to have taken place while the participants were high), but the gossipy minutiae are scintillating: Robert Morris does it, Walter de Maria never returns Lozano’s call, Marcia Tucker stays in the loft talking for three hours.

The show, organized by Catherine Morris, the curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Vincent Bonin, an independent curator based in Montreal, is thankfully scant on biographical information. Ms. Lippard, who is now in her 70s, has curated more than 50 exhibitions but never worked as a museum curator or had a gallery; her column on art was to be found in The Village Voice, not Artforum, and she never earned a Ph.D., though she’s accumulated eight honorary degrees. She co-founded Printed Matter, among other alternative spaces, and infused her curatorial practice with activism—she was involved in anti-war and art workers’ rights movements and was a champion of women artists. Her curatorial presence helped to define an era.

With women’s issues, and women’s votes, one of the focal points of this year’s presidential election, it is heartening to see women’s work—curatorial and artistic—take center stage in our city. With Sharon Lockhart’s show newly opened at the Jewish Museum, and Martha Rosler, another mid-career activist artist, literally taking center stage at the Museum of Modern Art in November when one of her “garage sale” pieces occupies the atrium, the trend continues. Let’s hope that galleries, whose rosters still feature disproportionate numbers of male artists, start to catch up.

editorial@observer.com