Shakespeare in the Parking Lot typically presents bare-boned adaptations of the classics set in contemporary times. For example, last summer, “Julius Caesar” was staged as a battle for control of an urban school system, with women playing Brutus and Cassius.

The Drilling Company's production of Julius Ceasar during the 2010 season of Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot

“Hamlet” departs from The Drilling Company’s normally political edge. In an unusual interpretation, the production is intended to illuminate the modern dysfunctional family unit. However, cuts have been made and scenes reordered to streamline the storytelling and to reduce the running time to two and a half hours.

The Drilling Company's production of Hamlet

Unlike Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, where it’s easy to forget you’re in the city, here it’s impossible. And that’s part of the fun. Cars come and go during the show. The other night, one particularly rude driver pulled out right in the middle of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

Alessandro Colla as Hamlet in Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot

The Drilling Company presents “Hamlet,” the closing show of the 20th season of Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot, July 28 to August 13 in the Municipal Parking Lot at the corner of Ludlow and Broome Streets, Manhattan. The location is one block south of the F train station at Delancey Street. All performances are free. Shows are Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 PM. For more information visit www.shakespeareintheparkinglot.com.

Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation

In New York, the Lab is located at First Park, Houston at 2nd Avenue, a New York City Parks property, and is open free of charge Wednesdays to Sundays, August 3 to October 16. Visitors may participate in over 100 programs related to the theme ‘Confronting Comfort,’ including workshops, experiments, discussions, screenings, and off-site tours. The Lab also features a cafe operated by the Brooklyn restaurant Roberta’s.

Roberta's at the BMW Guggenheim Lab

A central component of the Lab is Urbanology, a group game played on-site and online. Participants role-play scenarios for city transformation, advocating for education, housing, health care, sustainability, infrastructure, and mobility as they build a city that matches their needs. The Urbanology game experience was developed by Local Projects, and the physical design was created by ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles].

Urbanology at the BMW Guggenheim Lab

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is organized by David van der Leer, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Urban Studies, and Maria Nicanor, Assistant Curator, Architecture, Guggenheim Museum.

In spring 2012, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will be presented in Berlin, in collaboration with ANCB Metropolitan Laboratory, in Pfefferberg. In winter 2012-13 it will be presented in Mumbai, in collaboration with the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum. The first cycle will culminate with an exhibition of the Lab’s results and findings at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2013.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is open Wednesday – Sunday at Houston Street and 2nd Avenue through October 16, 2011. All events at the Lab are FREE

For more information log onto the BMW Guggenheim Lab website http://bmwguggenheimlab.org/

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Savage Beauty, the exhibition on the life’s work of fashion designer Alexander McQueen at the Metropolitan Museum is the quintessence of a blockbuster show. Last week the Museum announced that during the fiscal year ending on June 30, 5.68 million people had visited the museum, which is the largest total in 40 years and a 400,000-person increase over last year’s attendance. The exhibition has welcomed more than 620,000 visitors since it opened on May 4. Due to its popularity the Museum has extended the exhibition by an extra week through Sunday, August 7. And for the final weekend, the exhibition will stay open until midnight, a first for the Museum.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

“We have created these late hours to satisfy the unprecedented interest in this landmark retrospective,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Visitors from across the globe have come to see this remarkable exhibition, and we want to keep it open for as many people as possible. Indeed, these midnight hours will mark a fitting conclusion to this powerful exploration of McQueen’s work.”

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

To echo Judith Thurman in her review of this show in the New Yorker “Even if you never bother with fashion shows, go to this one.” Alexander McQueen’s brilliance, creativity, and mastery of his medium elevate fashion to fine art. Dresses are made out of pheasant feathers, razor-clam shells, fresh flowers, leather bodices, and balsa wood, with his inspiration ranging from the renaissance to a futuristic society reverted back to nature.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

My background being in Fine Art, I couldn’t resist drawing comparisons in McQueen’s work to Nick Cave’s soundsuits and Leigh Bowery’s elaborate costumes. In addition to the magnificent survey of Alexander McQueen’s two decades of fashion, Savage Beauty has the most elaborate staging I have ever experienced in an exhibition. A great deal of thought and labor went into constructing environments to set the mood for the display of McQueen’s work. Don’t miss this opportunity to step into the world of  the tortured genius that was Alexander McQueen.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Sunday August 7th, 2011. The exhibition will remain open until midnight the final weekend. After 9 p.m. on Saturday, and after 5:30 p.m. on Sunday (the regular closing times for the entire Museum), visitors can enter the Met through its 81st Street and Fifth Avenue street-level entrance for a last chance to view the McQueen exhibition

Don’t come expecting a spectacle, the piece is slow and meditative. The ghastly appearance of choreographer-dancers Eiko and Koma are reinforced by the minimalist soundtrack provided by two-time Grammy Award–winning Native American flutist-composer Robert Mirabal. Standing in the middle Manhattan, Water in an exercise in patience, slowing down the rhythm of life. Arrive early to get a seat around the perimeter of the pool for this hour-long performance.

Water will be performed nightly through Sunday July 31st at 9:30pm at the Paul Milstein Pool at Lincoln Center’s public plaza (behind Avery Fisher Hall).

Performances of Water coincide with the July 19 opening of Residue: An Installation by Eiko & Koma, a major exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts that features artifacts collected during the Retrospective Project.

River at Night by Eiko & Koma

This Summer Hauser & Wirth presented the first New York City solo exhibition of Peru-born, Berlin-based artist David Zink Yi, titled ’Pneuma’. The piece de resistance of the exhibition is a room-filling, 16-foot long, 660-pound, breathtaking, ceramic sculpture of a squid sprawled across the floor and surrounded by a pool of its own ink. The work is so large that to create it the artist did a four-month residency at ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, which houses the world’s largest kiln. The work is life-like, chilling, and beautiful all at the same time. And definitely worth a trip to the Upper East Side to see.

David Zink Yi’s ‘Pneuma’ is on view at Hauser & Wirth at 32 East 69th Street through July 29, 2011.

Willem de Kooning, Amityville, 1971 on view at Pace Gallery

There’s only a few days left to catch Willem de Kooning: The Figure: Movement and Gesture, on view at Pace Galleries 57th street location through July 29, 2011. This is the first exhibition at Pace devoted to the artist since the gallery announced exclusive representation of the estate last fall. Willem de Kooning: The Figure: Movement and Gesture features nearly forty paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the late 60s through the late 70s, including a number of private loans and rarely seen paintings.

If you miss this show fear not! This exhibition precedes a major retrospective devoted to the artist at The Museum of Modern Art which will examine the development of the artist’s career over nearly seven decades through more than 200 works from public and private collections. De Kooning: A Retrospective will be on view from September 18, 2011 through January 9, 2012.

Installation view of Willem de Kooning: The Figure: Movement and Gesture at Pace Gallery

Installation view of Willem de Kooning: The Figure: Movement and Gesture at Pace Gallery

Willem de Kooning, 1972, photograph by Hans Namuth

Willem de Kooning: The Figure: Movement and Gesture is on view at Pace Gallery at 32 East 57th Street through July 29, 2011.

Screenshot of the Google doodle on July 22nd celebrating Alexander Calder's birthday.

I don’t know how I missed this but on July 22nd Google had a very special Google doodle on their homepage celebrating the 113th birthday of artist Alexander Calder. Google doodles are what it’s called each time Google changes the logo on their homepage to celebrate a special occasion, usually a holiday, important date in history, or in this case a birthday.

You may remember The Culture Report’s post on the recent Google doodle designed by Takashi Murakami to celebrate the Summer Solstice. What made the Calder Google doodle so unique is that, like Calder’s mobiles, it was kinetic and rotated and swayed in response to clicks and drags.

Scroll down to check out a video of the Calder Google doodle in motion. You can also log on to www.google.com/logos/ to view an archive of over 300 Google doodles or log on to The Calder Foundation’s website to learn more about Alexander Calder’s life and work.

JR covers the Favela Morro Da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2008

In Rio, he turned hillsides into dramatic visual landscape by applying images to the facades of favela homes. In Kenya, for his project “Women Are Heroes,” he turned Kibera into a stunning gallery of local faces. And in Israel and Palestine, he mounted photos of a rabbi, imam and priest on walls across the region including the wall separating Israel from the West Bank.

JR in Kibera, Kenya as part of the Women Are Heroes series, 2008

JR received world-wide recognition as the recipient of the 2011 TED Prize. On his recent trip to New York he pasted up images from a new series,”Lakota, North Dakota” which features the Standing Rock and Pineridge Native Reservations whose impoverished and forgotten communities have suffered unspeakable hardships.

JR's Lakota, North Dakota series on Bowery and Houston Street

JR's Lakota, North Dakota series on Wooster and Grand Street

JR's Lakota, North Dakota series on Wooster and Grand Street

You can find more on JR on his website and you can participate in his latest project, The Inside Out Project, “a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work.”

Erik Parker's Brink in Pretty on the Inside at Paul Kasmin Gallery

From the playful to the grotesque, the works in the new group show at Paul Kasmin Gallery opening tonight have one this in common, they’re all pretty on the inside. Pretty on the Inside, organized by Erik Parker and KAWS includes works in a range of media by seven American artists, Todd James, KAWS, Tony Matelli, Erik Parker, Joyce Pensato, Peter Saul, and Karl Wirsum. Most of the work in the show uses cartoon imagery as a point of departure. Todd James often uses playful cartoon imagery as a way of tackling topics like war, sex, and excess. Kaws’ work brings cartoon imagery into the Superflat-Pop Art realm whereas Joyce Pensato interprets cartoon  imagery with the hand of an Abstract Expressionist.

Peter Saul's Still Life in the Bedroom from Pretty on the Inside at Paul Kasmin Gallery

Joyce Pensato's Mr. MotoMickey in Pretty on the Inside at Paul Kasmin Gallery

Kaws' Ahhhhh... in Pretty on the Inside

Poster for Pretty on the Inside at Paul Kasmin Gallery designed by co-curators Erik Parker and Kaws

Pretty on the Inside is at Paul Kasmin Gallery 293 Tenth Avenue (at 27th Street) from June 23rd – August 19th, 2011

Urs Fischer's Untitled (Lamp/Bear) at Seagram Building Plaza

Urs Fischer is represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and was recently the subject of a major survey of his work at the New Museum. Fischer was one of the highlights of the 2006 Whitney Biennial and is probably remembered most for an exhibition in 2007 titled ‘You’ in which he literally broke new ground at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise creating a 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep, that nearly extended to the walls of the gallery.

Christie’s compared Untitled (Lamp/Bear) to Jeff Koons’ large-scale sculptures of puppies and balloon dogs, but I think this work is much closer in the tradition of Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and monuments of ordinary objects. Urs Fischer’s Sculpture Untitled (Lamp/Bear) (2005-6) will be on display at the Seagram Plaza at 375 Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Street until September 30, 2011.

Urs Fischer's Untitled (Lamp/Bear) at Seagram Building Plaza

If you head one block North to 54th Street and Park Avenue you’ll find new work by photographer David LaChapelle in the lobby of the Lever House. The exhibition, From Darkness To Light, is primarily made up of photo collages. The main piece in the show, LaChapelle’’s Raft of Illusion: Raging Toward Truth, is the artist’s take on Gericault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19). LaChapelle created his epic allegory using large-scale photographs that he has taken of friends and models, and staged a tableau by cutting and tearing individual elements, adding depth with layered sections, and reassembling them into a composition that clearly reveals the artist’s hand at work. Photographs are used as sculptural elements in Chain of Life, 2011, and applied to the windows in Adam Swimming Under a Microscope: Plague of an Ancient City and Eve Swimming Under a Microscope: Plague of an Ancient City, 2011.

Raft of Illusion: Raging Toward Truth, 2011 by David LaChapelle at the Lever House, installation view

Raft of Illusion: Raging Toward Truth, 2011 by David LaChapelle at the Lever House, detail

David LaChapelle’’s career as an artist began with his hero, Andy Warhol, who offered him his first professional photography job at Interview Magazine in the early 1980s.  Working at Interview Magazine, LaChapelle began photographing some of the most famous celebrities of the times. He has photographed personalities as diverse as Tupac Shakur, Madonna, Eminem, Pamela Anderson, Lil’ Kim, Hillary Clinton, Muhammad Ali, and Britney Spears, to name just a few. He is most recognized for elaborate sets and styling that position his famous subjects into dream-like situations.

Adam Swimming Under a Microscope: Plague of an Ancient City, 2011 by David LaChapelle at the Lever House, installation view

David LaChapelle From Darkness To Light is on display at the Lever House at 390 Park Avenue at 54th Street through September 2, 2011.

Both the Seagram Building and the Lever House are owned by mega art collector Aby Rosen.