These are our top picks for the weekend of March 15th-17th. For more event listings and reviews, check out Goings On About Town.
Art
Caleb Considine is a realist painter of lapidary precision and leftist perspective, which you might guess from the labor he lavishes on Everyman subjects, including subway interiors as exalted as any cathedral. His first curatorial effort, “Vista View,” at Galerie Buchholz, on the Upper East Side, unites pictures by eighteen artists, spanning seventy-five years. The earliest work is Ben Shahn’s exquisitely weird 1944 tempera “Bountiful Harvest,” in which two giant hands cup grain in the sky above a Lilliputian industrial-agrarian scene. But, to Considine’s credit, this uncommonly absorbing show is no primer on progressive politics. Abstraction rules, too.—Andrea K. Scott
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Night Life
In the records that he produces outside of his cerebral dance band Hot Chip, Alexis Taylor proves a stylistic flirt, adding his voice to lonely piano or, on last year’s “Beautiful Thing,” Eno-literate pop. One connective thread is the British sangfroid of Taylor’s vocals: if a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster were to take up singing, it would sound like this. At the Cloisters on Friday and Saturday, Taylor leads an ensemble that includes the Beastie Boys keyboardist Money Mark and the visual artist Nick Relph.—Jay Ruttenberg
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Food & Drink: Tables for Two
At my first meal at Oxalis, a roving pop-up turned permanent, I was charmed by the warm, gracious service, and thoroughly impressed by the food: six incredibly tight, precise, and interesting courses, as part of a sixty-dollar tasting menu that’s one of the city’s best bargains at the moment, at least in the context of fine dining. A quartet of miniature squares of shredded potato, each fried to a russet hue and topped with a dollop of bay-leaf-egg-white emulsion and a jaunty little beret of nori—the sort of canapé for which I’d chase a cater waiter around a wedding reception—made me feel at once elegant and nostalgic for the rarely allowed Burger King hash browns of my youth.—Hannah Goldfield
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The Theatre
“Marys Seacole,” a revelatory new drama by Jackie Sibblies Drury, for LCT3 at the Claire Tow, revolves around the life of its namesake, the nineteenth-century Scottish-Jamaican nurse and businesswoman Mary Seacole (the outstanding Quincy Tyler Bernstine), who was determined to live a life of adventure. The play takes us to colonial Jamaica and a Crimean War battlefield, and to a nursing home and a playground in the present-day United States, its six actors shifting roles as they travel. Under the inspired direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, the play achieves something rare: a seamless blend of naturalistic representation and conceptual daring, in which each element enhances and elevates the next. Drury’s art conveys her ideas as powerfully as a hurricane.—Sarah Larson
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Movies
The MOMA series of restorations from the Fox studio features a generous helping of sharply political works by John Ford, including his 1933 drama “Pilgrimage” (screening Sunday), an antiwar film that apportions blame for war-mongering widely through society. It’s an agonized story of morality to a fault—of a mother who pushes her son into battle and regrets it forever. It’s also a story of small-town insularity and the rise of federal authority and American internationalism, which Ford hopefully envisions as more than just military.—Richard Brody
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Classical Music
In 2016, two impressive young New York musicians, the violinist Maya Bennardo and the pianist Karl Larson, set out to learn and perform the complete works composed by Charles Ives for their paired instruments. They gave their new venture a cheeky title, the “Ives of March,” and it soon became an eagerly anticipated tradition. On Friday night, in their fourth annual concert, they play Ives’s four violin sonatas at the Owl Music Parlor.—Steve Smith
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Dance
In Soledad Barrio, the New York-based company Noche Flamenca has one of the most dramatic presences imaginable—a dancer of singular intensity and focus, who cedes nothing for the sake of effect. In the program “Entre Tú y Yo” (“Between You and Me”), at the Connelly Theatre, the company offers three works. “Refugiados” was inspired by the poems of refugee children, combined with a poem by the Chilean writer Pablo Neruda. “La Ronde” is an exploration of the duet form, touching on themes of love, passion, jealousy, and death. The evening closes with Barrio’s memorable “Soleá,” a semi-improvised solo flamenco dance that builds toward a cathartic finale.—Marina Harss
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