Marie Antoinette-Era Fashion Plates
It is a fashionable time to visit the Frick. The museum, which is housed inside an ornate Upper East Side mansion that once belonged to the Gilded Age industrialist Henry Clay Frick, reopened last April after a two-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar renovation effort, a four-year project that greatly expands access to the space and lets in fresh air and shafts of light. This spring, the focus is less on the building itself and more on what one can see inside of it; the museum’s current exhibition, “Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture,” runs through May 25 and features the work of the eighteenth-century British painter Thomas Gainsborough, a true maverick when it came to rendering clothing on canvas.
On April 1, the Frick débuts another new show, “Ruffles & Ribbons: Fashion Plates from the Time of Marie Antoinette,” a collection of twenty-four fashion plates, hand-engraved, from the late seventeen-hundreds, pulled from the museum’s Art Research Library. Such engravings, which depict the wackily maximalist style à la mode, including oodles of feathers and furbelows, were, in essence, early precursors to modern fashion magazines. Many of the original French fashion plates, considered passing fancies in their day, have been lost to time, so to see the real specimens up close is a true treat indeed. A perfect Sunday? Take a stroll through the show, sit for a while in the Frick’s serene courtyard, then pop around the corner to Ladurée for a rose macaron.—Rachel Syme
About Town
Nearly fifty now, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has long been, for good or ill, a best-in-class purveyor of trends in contemporary dance. Its latest moves, though, hark back to its roots in the commercial style known as jazz dance. For its two-week run at the Joyce, the company brings a pair of pieces by Bob Fosse: a suite of wryly insouciant TV routines he made for and with his then wife, Gwen Verdon, in the sixties, and “Percussion IV,” a 1978 solo of dramatically framed, slam-bang virtuosity that Hubbard Street staged in the nineties. More recent works by Nacho Duato and by Aszure Barton fill out the programs.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; through April 5.)
In the titular film of Ralph Lemon’s show “From Out of Space,” we spend about twenty seconds looking at a funerary hearse covered in fallen branches. Death covers death. We might call this the credo of the exhibition, which includes photographs and videos from Lemon’s travels through the American South in the late nineties and early two-thousands and focusses on dilapidated sites marked with histories of anti-Black violence. There is Medgar Evers’s home; the decaying storefront of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, where Emmett Till allegedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant; the piled-up remnants of a church where Mose Wright (Till’s great-uncle) was a pastor. One senses in these images both the passage of time and the piercing stillness of a catastrophe that remains with us.—Zoë Hopkins (Paula Cooper; through April 11.)
Robert Plant will be remembered by most as the enduring voice of the iconic rock band Led Zeppelin, but in the twenty-first century his output has been shaped by smaller collaborations. Backing bands have been key to his solo work during this span, and his twilight career has been defined by a daring, sublime turn toward Americana with Alison Krauss, with whom he won the Grammy for Album of the Year, in 2009. Since 2019, Plant has played with Saving Grace, and last year they released their first self-titled album together. It sounds like the singer-songwriter recommitting himself to roots music and its participatory nature, and he invokes the power of both at an uptown Gothic cathedral.—Sheldon Pearce (Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine; April 7.)
“Every Brilliant Thing” is putatively a solo show performed by Daniel Radcliffe, but its incorporation of the audience—some of whom get recruited as characters—makes it feel bigger. Written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe, the original star, it premièred in the U.K. in 2013 and transferred Off Broadway the following year; now Macmillan co-directs a Broadway revival, with Jeremy Herrin. They send Radcliffe bounding around the stage and into the audience, a savvy deployment of the actor’s prodigious energy. The upbeat handling of a serious subject—a boy trying to cheer his suicidal mother and, later in life, himself with a list of things to live for—approaches glibness (“Kazoos!” “Skinny-dipping!”), but the story is redeemed by a poignant refusal to downplay depression’s insidious power.—Dan Stahl (Hudson; through May 24.)
Beuford Smith (1936-2025) was a member of the now legendary Black photographers’ collective the Kamoinge Workshop and a founding editor of “The Black Photographers Annual,” a four-volume anthology (1973-1980) essential for anyone interested in the medium’s history. That Smith’s work remains little-known is all the more baffling considering the strength and depth of a retrospective now up at Keith de Lellis. Like Roy DeCarava, Smith worked most effectively in the dark, with silhouetted figures and shadowy spaces. The tonal depth in his prints is rich, dense, and moody—not a void but a presence. A group of small images made in the turmoil and anguish of the day after Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s assassination is the emotional core of the show. In one, a Black man in tears emerges from the darkness, his bared teeth glinting like gold.—Vince Aletti (Keith de Lellis; through April 16.)
The Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze used his old-school cellphone, a Sony Ericsson, to make the three-hour mini-epic “Dry Leaf,” which is both an intimate travelogue through his homeland and a metaphysical adventure. In Tbilisi, a teacher named Irakli (David Koberidze, the filmmaker’s father) learns that his twenty-eight-year-old daughter, a sports photographer, has run away while on the road for an assignment—taking pictures of rustic soccer fields—and he sets out in the hope of finding her. His companion, a young man named Levan, is never seen (he’s represented by a voice, and not the only one Irakli talks with). The lo-fi video renders the grand, rugged landscapes in fiercely expressive images that play like cinematic Fauvism, as Irakli’s encounters with country people thrum with memory and mystery.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)
Bar Tab
Taran Dugal mingles at a West Village art-salon-cocktail-lounge.
“I like large parties. They’re so intimate,” Jordan Baker says in “The Great Gatsby.” “At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” Baker would probably love People’s, a new referral-only cocktail lounge in the West Village. On a recent Saturday, two invitees with a friend on staff walked through the velvet-lined entryway into the parlor, a dimly lit space with a sputtering fireplace. Their first round consisted of the Dove, a delicious spin on a whiskey sour, made with plum, five spice, and Armagnac, and the Kuniyoshi, a sharp mix of mezcal, shochu, vermouth, and pineapple. A cast of ostentatious characters filled the room. Here was a bespectacled man with a stentorian mid-century voice, urging the initiates to try the Calabrian tuna toast (scrumptious), the cheeseburger (heavenly), and the shrimp cocktail (not so much). “I never go out,” he said, with a breathy chortle, “but when I do it’s here.” Next came a real-estate heiress, who, between sips of the Edith (a heady blend of vermouth, sherry, and rum), beckoned one of the guests to the club’s back room. Under a skylight installed by Abby Rockefeller, who helped bankroll the place a century ago, when it was an art gallery, dozens of danced-out revellers rested against a backdrop of white silk curtains and striking art works; the lounge, which bills itself as an “art salon,” encourages patrons to place offers. The guest didn’t hear anyone do that, but he did eventually find his friend, sitting among two painters, a venture capitalist, and an Instagram influencer. By now, the space was packed, and conversation progressed at shouting volumes. The influencer was headed to a party in Chelsea. Did the guests want to join? They did—and so the three marched into the crowd, elbows against the current, borne forth ceaselessly into the evening.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet: