44 free things to do in New York City (NYC) on Wednesday, February 28, 2018
All events are free unless otherwise noted.
The 3-hour walking and subway tour covers the Financial District including Wall Street and the World ...
more >> Trade Center, SoHo, Little Italy and Chinatown. These are neighborhoods that simply can’t be fully appreciated from a bus. There will be one or two opportunities to sample tasty treats.
Learn mindfulness techniques that bring relaxation and effortless focus to challenging situations and ...
more >> relationships. Mindfulness is the practice of bringing full, non-judgmental awareness to the present moment. The struggle of searching for a job can be overwhelming at times. See if the practice of mindfulness meditation and some easy to use on-the-spot techniques can help you during these challenging times. Instructor Laura Jackson has been practising Zen meditation for 12 years and is a UCLA-trained mindfulness facilitator.
10:30 am
free, no reservation required
More than 300 Indonesians were arrested in 2017 for alleged LGBT-associated behavior, and countless others ...
more >> were intimidated and harassed. Already, several have been convicted under the Pornography Law and sent to prison. Andreas Harsono will explore whether this trend is related to the rise of Islamic populism and more sharia-inspired regulations in Indonesia. He also will ask what the Joko Widodo government is doing to stop this discrimination. Andreas Harsono has been the senior Indonesian researcher for Human Rights Watch since 2008. He has also had a long career as a journalist and he has written several books about Indonesia. His next book is Islam, Race and Power: Democratization and Violence in post-Suharto Indonesia.
Stars: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier. The black sheep of a family and the local minister ...
more >> discover their true vocations during the Revolutionary War. 83 min.
11:15 am
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
Seeking to explain the survival of her children and grandchildren, Esther Stermer of Borszczów declared ...
more >> in her memoir: “Our family in particular would not let the Germans have their way easily. We had vigor, ingenuity, and determination to survive. Above all our family would stand together. When one of us was in danger, the others could not cower to escape. They proved their personal strength and character, time and again”. But what role did family solidarity actually play in their survival? And what were the limits of it in the survival strategies that other Jews in Eastern Galicia employed? Based on testimonies, diaries, memoirs and oral interviews, this lecture considers the family networks which could increase individual and group survival. It examines how family members managed to evade capture and deportation by relying on the intervention and support of close, distant and surrogate relatives. Lecturer Natalia Aleksiun is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York.
12:00 pm
free, no reservation required
The keyboard works of Bach offered in 30-minute meditations. Bach at Noon concerts takes place Tuesdays ...
more >> through Fridays, from September 12, 2017 to May 23, 2018.
12:20 pm
free, no reservation required
A docent-led tour of items on display, drawn exclusively from the Library’s collections, exploring ...
more >> the breadth and significance of this pivotal era. The tour last approximately 45 minutes and covers highlights of the show.
12:30 pm
free, no reservation required
Bharata Natyam and Odissi practitioner and dance historian Rajika Puri will showcase clips on Indian ...
more >> Classical Dance.
Learn about central banking functions that Federal Reserve System performs and see Bank's vault of international ...
more >> monetary gold on bedrock of Manhattan Island, five stories below street level. Learn why Federal Reserve has "Federal" in its name, while it's a private bank, not Federal at all. Tour times: 1:00pm, 2:00pm. This tour takes place Mondays through Fridays, except bank holidays.
Join this tour to learn more about the history, architecture, and sculpture of Columbia and the Morningside ...
more >> Heights campus. Whether you're an amateur New York City historian or visiting campus for the first time, you will leave the tour knowing more about our storied past. Given that the tour route is outdoors, please be aware that tours are occasionally suspended due to inclement weather.
Midday Jazz Midtown is an ongoing jazz program for the midtown community. Concerts are presented by Midtown ...
more >> Arts Common. Ronny Whyte is the producer.
1:00 pm
$10 suggested donation
Program: Round Midnight (solo) Windows Someday My Prince Will Come Pike’s Place Beatrice Joy Spring ...
more >> Fall Tidal This Is New Somewhere Along the Coastline (Solo/Duo) John Melendez, jazz pianist.
1:00 pm
free, no reservation required
This class introduces savings and budget concepts: Review banks and banking products, including debit ...
more >> and credit cards, and how to reduce indebtedness. The class also introduces investment principles. Seating is limited and is on a first come, first seated basis.
1:15 pm
free, no reservation required
Whether you want to learn key words and phrases for travel or build up fluency for school and work, these ...
more >> beginner-classes resources will make learning French practical, easy, and fun.
2:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Once described as the lungs of the city, Central Park brings a breath of fresh air to New York's crowded ...
more >> urban terrain. What started out as the rocky and desolate northern fringes of a rapidly expanding city is today among the world's most famous and beloved public parks. With over 843 acres of meadows, hills, ball fields and bodies of water, it's impossible not to find something to enjoy in Central Park.
Bill Wurtzel is a renowned guitarist with the experience to play jazz that fits any event or venue. He ...
more >> has performed worldwide with many great jazz artists. Wurtzel's groups have played for countless private affairs featuring mainstream jazz and the Great American Songbook. He is a member of local 802 and is a director of the Jazz Foundation of America.
2:00 pm
free, no reservation required
A docent-led tour of items on display, drawn exclusively from the Library’s collections, exploring ...
more >> the breadth and significance of this pivotal era. The tour last approximately 45 minutes and covers highlights of the show.
3:30 pm
free, no reservation required
The commodification of housing and neighborhoods has increasingly produced alienation and anxiety across ...
more >> low-and moderate-income communities in large cities. As a response, grassroots and nonprofit groups have organized and demanded community-control over housing and neighborhood restructuring processes. Some cities have acknowledged these claims, as it is the case of New York City and Barcelona. This panel aims to discuss progressive housing development policies and approaches envisioned and implemented to guarantee permanent affordable housing in these two cities. Particular attention is given to community-led systems such as Community Land Trusts and policy instruments creating non-speculative housing. The panel intends opening up a discussion among proponents of these models, on its opportunities and challenges.
5:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Professor Natalie Jeremijenko directs the Environmental Health Clinic and is an Associate Professor in ...
more >> the Visual Art Department and is affiliated with the Computer Science Dept and Environmental Studies program. She will discuss design experiments for the rebuilding of Houston and how to create porous cities.
The photographer Carlo Rocchi Bilancini has always had an affinity for the mysterious, transformative ...
more >> qualities of water. Yet, where his earlier focus was on individual character, here the photographer is concerned with memory and loss, two things that migrants always carry with them, regardless of their weight. In thirty-four hauntingly beautiful colour images, Bilancini explores what it means to leave something behind.
6:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Nathlie Provosty’s second solo exhibition with the gallery introduces the artist’s newest body of ...
more >> work: five large paintings and several smaller pieces. The title indicates a play on words and vision. A pupil is the dark circular opening in the iris of the eye that allows light in, but it is also a student. An anvil is an iron metalworking tool upon which objects are struck and shaped, but it is also a small bone in the ear that registers vibrations. Both the pupil and anvil are tasked to receive, and respond in force.
6:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Based on her teaching approach at Columbia University for 30 years, the book explores how gifted filmmakers ...
more >> layer their first shots in a way that introduces the movie’s stylistic and thematic richness. Her focus will be ‘ensemble-piece’ movies including Truffaut’s Day for Night and Farhadi’s A Separation.
6:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Celebrate LOVE by creating your own masterpiece inspired by work from Robert Indiana. The series will ...
more >> include an overview of the artist or technique, followed by a hands-on workshop.
Editor's Pick
Who makes your clothes? This used to be an easy question to answer: it was the seamstress next door, ...
more >> or the tailor on the high street - or you made them yourself. Today we rarely know the origins of the clothes hanging in our closets. The local shoemaker, dressmaker and milliner are long gone, replaced by a globalised fashion industry worth $1.5 trillion a year. In Wardrobe Crisis, fashion journalist Clare Press explores the history and ethics behind what we wear. Putting her insider status to good use, Press examines the entire fashion ecosystem, from sweatshops to haute couture, unearthing the roots of today’s buy-and-discard culture. She traces the origins of icons like Chanel, Dior and Hermès; charts the rise and fall of the department store; and follows the thread that led us from Marie Antoinette to Carrie Bradshaw.
A revealing exhibition about Columbia’s Casa Italiana—the neo-Renaissance palazzo on Amsterdam Avenue, ...
more >> now home to the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies—and the dawn of Italian studies at Columbia, starting with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s witty librettist. Silk, silver, and parchment relics, oil paintings and forgotten letters: the displays will illustrate the complex and often controversial moments in the Casa’s history, highlighting figures such as the talented but equivocal Giuseppe Prezzolini and Columbia’s president Nicholas M. Butler, as well as students and community members—both Italian and Italian-American.
Spiral Music presents acoustic music every Wednesday evening at the base of the museum’s spiral staircase. ...
more >> Artists who specialize in music from the Himalayas and South Asia are invited to forge a connection between their music and the art in the galleries. Lauded as the “Jimi Hendrix of Hammered Dulcimer” by NPR and a “force of nature” by NY Music Daily, Max ZT is an innovator on his instrument. With roots in classical Irish folk music, Max ZT has transplanted his compositional techniques to both Senegal, where he studied the Mandinko technique with the Cissoko Griot family, and to Mumbai, India, where he studied under the great santoor master Pandit Shivkumar Sharma.
6:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Andy Spade has served as an ad man, an art patron, a fashion mogul, a gallerist, a publisher, a photographer, ...
more >> a creative director, and a world-class collector.
6:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
The Caine Prize for African Writing is a literature prize awarded to an African writer of a short story ...
more >> published in English. The prize was launched in 2000 to encourage and highlight the richness and diversity of African writing by bringing it to a wider audience internationally. The focus on the short story reflects the contemporary development of the African story-telling tradition. The university will host the 2017 Caine Prize winner, the Sudanese writer Bushra al-Fadil. His prize-winning story, “The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away,” was translated by graduate student Max Shmookler and published in The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction.
6:15 pm
free, no reservation required
Editor's Pick
The digital revolution and interactivity changed many aspects of our life, but how much did it affect ...
more >> storytelling and film? The Kissinger Twins present Cinematic Labyrinths, their interactive non-linear storytelling showcase. They will talk about film and interactive media, their inspirations and present their award-winning projects: from Attitude (2002) to SXSW finalist Forget Me Not and Sufferosa, one of the biggest web-based interactive films. During the presentation, members of the audience are invited to interact with selected projects. The Kissinger Twins will close the presentation with a live cinema performance of Sufferosa and a poetic Cinematic VR film Lucidreams.
6:30 pm
free, no reservation required
6:30 pm
free, no reservation required
This is the public opening of Danspace Project's Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, ...
more >> and Downtown Dance. Danspace celebrates the release of its 12th Platform catalogue with words, movement, and song featuring the Platform 2018 curator, choreographer Reggie Wilson, and other participants to be announced.
Is it a coincidence that the first city in Europe to publicly illuminate its streets was also a capital ...
more >> of the Enlightenment? Is there, in fact, a relationship between actual illumination and enlightenment as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon? This talk will explore those questions through an examination of public lighting in Paris in the siècle des lumières, seeking to show that the concerted effort to shed light on dark streets provides a vivid illustration of the Enlightenment in practice. Lecturer Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor at Dartmouth College and the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment (Oxford), Happiness: A History (Atlantic), and Divine Fury: A History of Genius (Basic).
6:30 pm
free, no reservation required
Western medical and scientific studies, oscillating between a psychological or a physiological locus ...
more >> for dreaming, has consistently reinforced a cultural assumption of dreaming as a solitary experience. To reveal dreams is to identify pathologies or instabilities. Yet, among ancient and non-western cultures, dream sharing not only offered a means to highlight a medical condition and its cure, it also served to connect, and to prophesize. For the ancient Greeks, the designated space for this collective activity was the Ascklepion, a ritualized complex of sanctuaries and temples overseen by the god Ascklepious and organized explicitly for fostering dream incubation, therapeutic sleep, prophetic dreaming, and medicinal healing. Is there a broader role for dream sharing in contemporary culture? This evening’s event pairs two historians to speculate on this and other questions on contemporary forms of dreaming. Olympia Panagiotidou will be teleported via skype, for this dialogue.
Editor's Pick
The Marshall Project’s “We Are Witnesses” explores the American criminal-justice system through ...
more >> interviews with those whose lives have been touched by it. Watch four videos from the project and then hear from the subjects in person. Featuring: - Eduardo Padro, New York State Supreme Court judge (retired) - Sergeant Edwin Raymond, NYPD - Ayana Thomas, formerly incarcerated in the federal prison system - Jennifer Gonnerman (moderator), staff writer at The New Yorker There are 2.2 million people in our jails and prisons; 1 in 115 adults is confined behind bars; our inmate population is four times larger than it was in 1980. “We Are Witnesses,” is an ambitious short film series that offers a very different sort of calculation: the human cost of locking up so many citizens for so many years. The project comprises 19 videos, each between two and six minutes long. Together, the ex-prisoners, police officers, prison guards, judges, and crime victims on screen present a 360-degree portrait of the state of crime and punishment in the United States.
Editor's Pick
As a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. tax code goes into effect, experts with different points of view discuss ...
more >> its implications and ways of redesigning our current system to benefit all. Panelists include Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and distinguished professor; Lily Batchelder, NYU law professor and former deputy director of President Obama’s National Economic Council; Leonard Burman, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and professor at Syracuse University; Lawrence Kotlikoff, professor at Boston University and co-author of Get What’s Yours, on social security benefits; and Kathleen Hays, global economics and policy editor at Bloomberg (moderator).
Mount Gurugu overlooks the Spanish enclave of Melilla on northern Africa's Mediterranean coast. The European ...
more >> Union and Africa are separated here by a high-security border facility consisting of three fences. Refugees, mostly from the sub-Saharan region, live in the tree-covered foothills, from where they try to cross the land border between Morocco and Spain. One of them is Abou Bakar Sidibé from Mali.
How does incarceration impact art making for incarcerated artists and non-incarcerated artists concerned ...
more >> with the criminal justice system? This panel brings together a range of artists and figures who facilitate art projects with incarcerated individuals. Panelists: Lisette Oblitas-Cruz, Aliya Hana Hussain, Jesse Krimes, Joseph Rodríguez. Moderated by Nicole R. Fleetwood, contributing guest editor of “Prison Nation” magazine.
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
A sharp psychological thriller that’s just right for fans of Thirteen Reasons Why and Pretty Little ...
more >> Liars—this story will seduce, mislead, and finally, betray you.
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
In advance of this year's Oscars, a comedy roast of "great" screenwriters, directors, and producers of ...
more >> the overrated and male persuasion. Hosted by Eric Thurm, who is one of the two. Performers tba.
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
The lead singer of the multiplatinum-selling band Scissor Sisters explores his evolution as a young artist: ...
more >> coming of age in the Pacific Northwest and Arizona, his entry into New York City’s electrifying, ever-changing music scene, and the Scissor Sisters’ rise as they reached international fame in the early 2000s. Restrictions apply. Call store for details.
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
Ugly Duckling Presse presents a reading and book launch of Latin American authors and their translators. ...
more >> They will feature: - Chilean poet Soledad Marambio - Hilary Kaplan reading from her translations of Brazilian poet Marília Garcia - Elizabeth Zuba reading from her forthcoming translation of the Argentine writer Arnaldo Calveyra - Jeannine Pitas reading from her recently published translations of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
This is a live audio recording of the podcast The Fragmented Whole, as you view and discuss the documentary ...
more >> Kanju. Adapted from 2014 non-fiction novel, The Bright Continent, Nigerian-American author and journalist Dayo Olopade conceptualizes the Yoruba term ‘kanju,’ which loosely translates to doing more with less and thriving under adverse circumstances, to employ a more asset-based as opposed to deficit-based framework for viewing Africa.
7:00 pm
free, no reservation required
A discussion with four alumni women about the nuances of being a woman in art, design and tech and the ...
more >> current state of gender equality in their fields. Panelists include AnnaLiisa Ariosa-Benston (MFA 2016 Fine Arts), Nadia DeLane (MFA 2015 Visual Narrative), Datrianna Meeks (MFA 2016 Interaction Design) and Jessica Perilla (BFA 2004 Graphic Design).
Editor's Pick
Speak about a cause you believe in. Join a revolution of intelligent passionate people doing real things ...
more >> to make this world a better place. Be part of a process to express your ideas and insights about the current social issues of the day.