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Museum of the City of New York
March 4 – May 16, 2010

Charles Addams’s New York is an exhibition of original artworks by the legendary New Yorker cartoonist that capture Addams’s quintessentially idiosyncratic and slyly subversive view of the city, depicting his signature macabre characters, twisted situations, and distorted reimaginings of the cityscape. The works in the exhibition include watercolors, preliminary pencil sketches, completed cartoons, and examples of published work from the cover of the New Yorker. The subjects are gleefully varied, ranging from charming to creepy; they include depictions of life on New York’s subways and buses, in offices, department stores, museums, parks, streets, and homes. A special section will look at the evolution of the creepy assemblage of characters who were dubbed “the Addams Family” as they developed as mainstays of Addams’s cartoons, moving through the streets of his New York and adding to the sense of mischief and deviancy that characterized the world as he saw it.

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The Public Art Fund has commissioned six emerging artists to put MetroTech Center through a process of “modification or metamorphosis.” Expect pixilated chain-link, bonfires, bent lampposts and a ghost. While you’re in the area, don’t miss Jeff Zimmerman’s live glass-blowing performance at UrbanGlass (6:30pm) or Kiki Smith’s ongoing exhibition, Sojourn, at the Brooklyn Museum (gratis thanks to Target Free Saturdays). Over in Bushwick, the two-day arts and music festival SITE Fest kicks off, while Brian Conley enacts his tabletop war game, Miniature War in Iraq…and Now Afghanistan, from 9 to 11pm at the Boiler in Williamsburg. Also, the members of the Williamsburg Gallery Association are keeping their doors open late (until 11pm).

Ever since Deitch Projects touched down in Queens two years ago, Long Island City has been one of the hottest art annexes in New York, evident by the abundance of programming today. Ride the train to Queens Plaza station where MTA Arts for Transit staff will be on hand to discuss Ellen Harvey’s sky-filled 2005 mural, Look Up, Not Down from 5 to 7pm. LIC Artists, who have been holding Open Studios exhibitions for more than 20 years, will launch their Armory Fest with a three-venue exhibition at the Clocktower Building, the Holiday Inn Manhattan View and the Space Realty Group. Other openings will take place at AES Gallery, Dean Project, climate/gallery and Dutch Kills Gallery. Elsewhere, P.S.1 hosts three ongoing exhibtions—Between Spaces, 1969 and 100 Years—and the Noguchi Museum will have its long-running Noguchi ReINstalled on display. Be sure to save room for the third annual showing of MoFA (aka the Museum of Fake Art), sponsored by LIC arts nonprofit The Space. The Chelsea satirists are offering “a unique opportunity to dress up and fake interest vis-à-vis the complex issues facing international Contemporary Art and simulate a direct involvement in the Curatorial and Exhibition process.” Only a square realist would miss it.