Your Week Untapped: Best Events for April 22-28

Our curated events picks for this week: JR’s Inside Out Project arrives in Times Square, Here and There by Maya Lin opening, Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s annual cherry blossom festival.

MONDAY, APRIL 22: For INSIDE OUT NEW YORK CITY, JR and his team invite New Yorkers and visitors to take self-portraits in a specially designed photo booth stationed in Times Square, the site of the world’s first ever photo booth almost 100 years ago. The black-and-white self-portraits will be overlaid on a backdrop designed by JR and printed on the spot as a 3’ x 4’ poster. The posters will either be displayed in Times Square or in the home community of the portrait’s subject. The goal of the project is to allow each portrait-taker to express through his or her face a message to the world. Also check out the Documentary Inside Out: The People’s Art Project at the Tribeca Film Festival. 5:30pm at AMC Loews Village 7, Screen 3, 66 Third Avenue. $11.50. Buy tickets here.

TUESDAY, APRIL 23: Bert Stern: Original Mad Man exhibition. In this exhibition of photographs by Bert Stern, the full sweep of his remarkable career is revealed; from the work that signaled his meteoric rise in the advertising world of the 1950’s through the 1960’s and 70’s when he became the prototype of the fashion photographer as the embodiment of glamour: a legend himself. Groundbreaking images of the great personalities of the world, from Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Marilyn Monroe and Twiggy to Louis Armstrong and Frank Lloyd Wright, made Bert Stern a celebrity in his own right. The release of the documentary Bert Stern: Original Mad Man will coincide with the Staley-Wise exhibition. The film is a particularly American and totally honest story of self-creation, a fall from grace, and reinvention. 11am-5pm. Exhibition on view until May 18. Staley-Wise Gallery, 560 Broadway. FREE.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24: The Center for Architecture‘s Urban Parks & Plazas. Explore the landscape designer’s palette as we trace the history of landscape design and analyze the design ideas behind seminal projects like Central Park. Get an insider’s look at a new project by Michael Van Valkenburgh’s landscape architecture firm, renowned for their transformational NYC projects like Brooklyn Bridge Park. Then try your hand at creating a city green space in a model-making activity that will strengthen your understanding of how designers give form to their ideas. 6-8pm at the Center for Architecture, 536 La Guardia Place. $35. Buy tickets here.

THURSDAY, APRIL 25: The Poor of New York. Bitingly relevant and radically entertaining, this lost American classic powerfully dramatizes the world’s first global financial crisis, the New York Panic of 1857. The play follows the banker Gideon Bloodgood and the intertwining fates of the families he imperils, casting an uncompromising eye on characters in every strata of society, from Park Avenue privilege to Dickensian squalor. 8pm at the Connelly Theater, 220 East 4th Street. FREE with student ID; $15 general admission. Buy tickets here.

FRIDAY, APRIL 26: Here and There by Maya Lin opening at Pace Gallery. New work by Maya Lin exploring her longtime interest in environmental issues, including rising currents and climate change, and expanding her engagement with natural and geographic forms. Employing technological methods to study and visualize topographies and geographic phenomena, Lin creates sculptures that interpret the natural world through a twenty-first century lens. By abstracting natural forms into a single material – marble, wood, silver, or steel – she reveals things that are often hidden below the surface or beyond sight, merging rational order with notions of beauty and the transcendental. Opening reception 6-8pm at Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street. FREE.

SATURDAY, APRIL 27: The Vanderbilt Republic presents “Masters” curated by George Del Barrio as part of the Forward Festival. From 1975-1979 the Khmer Rouge enslaved and killed 1.7 million Cambodians in a systematic assault on culture. “Masters” are the artists who survived this persecution, guardians of a culture thousands of years in the making. 3pm at Gowanus Loft, 61 9th Street, Brooklyn. $25 includes BBQ + open bar. Buy tickets here.

SUNDAY, APRIL 28: Sakura Matsuri, the annual cherry blossom festival at Brooklyn Botanical Garden, offers over 60 events and performances that celebrate traditional and contemporary Japanese culture. The festival marks the end of Hanami, the Japanese cultural tradition of enjoying each moment of the cherry blossom season. 10am-6pm at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, 150 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. FREE for members & children; $15 students/seniors; $20 general admission. Check out the full schedule and buy tickets here.