What’s Happening: The spectacular LadyLand festival returns on Friday, June 23—right on time for NYC Pride and, this time, out loud and in public.

The Download: Queer culture is an essential part of New York City infrastructure. And over the past decade or so, few New Yorkers have built more than Ladyfag. Her parties Battle Hymn and Holy Mountain carry on the city’s spirit of fabulous, big-room clubbing. Her annual LadyLand festival is a Pride-month lynchpin, countering Manhattan’s corporate pride monolith with a notably femme-forward, trans-focused roster of queer luminaries. It debuted in 2018 with a lineup boasting Kim Petras and the late and much-missed Sophie; since then, everyone from Mykki Blanco to Christina Aguilera has played.

This year—one in which the very presence of trans people is being criminalized—LadyLand ditched its previous site, Bushwick’s yawning megaclub Brooklyn Mirage, and is making a home for itself beneath the Kosciuszko Bridge in Queens. It’s a spot beloved by Ladyfag herself, who lives nearby in Greenpoint and has spent the past three months working with local conservancy North Brooklyn Parks Alliance to figure out how to transform it into a party for and by queer people.

“The space kind of lives and breathes,” Ladyfag says of what, since 2019, has become known as Under the K Bridge Park. “It’s the headliner, in a weird way, of the festival.” Perhaps best known as the site of 2020’s notorious “plague raves,” the seven-acre abandoned lot was reconceived by Toronto’s Public Work into an El-Space below the elevated subways, bridges, and highways. A “solar slice,” or open expanse between the bridge spans, lets in the light.

“The climate right now for queer people, and especially trans people, all over America is really dark and dystopian,” Ladyfag says. “The fact that there’s a state park hosting us reminds me that I live in New York, and that’s a special thing. The city has been really supportive.” She and her team will build out three spaces for LadyLand: around the mostly queer-owned and -operated food vendors and marketplaces, a structure she calls “the truck,” will host local DJs. A Creekside stage offers optimistic views of the gradually improving ecologies of Newtown Creek, while a main stage for performers Big Freedia, Peaches, and headliner Honey Dijon.

“Our story is really old,” Ladyfag says of Honey Dijon. “We started together, we could both barely pay our rent. We did parties where people didn’t even want to come and sit in back and laugh, we didn’t care. Then it slowly grew, and we grew together. You build a family. Honey was overlooked for so many years, and now suddenly everyone’s like Oh Honey Honey Honey! So for her, LadyLand is a homecoming.” And if there’s one thing queer people know, it’s that there’s no place like home.

In Their Own Words: “I can’t even imagine what it’s gonna feel like when there’s, you know, nearly 6,000 people underneath the bridge and dancing,” Ladyfag says. “That energy is what Pride is going to be all about for me this year. It’s going to be pure magic. Very, very New York underground magic.”

Surface Says: Queer people shouldn’t have to defend our existence, but LadyLand shows how the world is better with us in it.

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The Op Art masterpieces Bridget Riley made in the 1960s—and even their polychronic updates in the ‘80s—remain so eerily accomplished they might seem sui generis, like ancient machines from the future designed to massage your eyes. They’re not, of course; her paintings glisten with personality, even at their coldest. And while her vertiginous fields of tonal interplay might not exactly be figurative, their histories figure into the history of Riley herself, and thus into the history of 20th-century art.

A new show at the Morgan Library & Museum fills all this in. “Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio” (June 23–Oct. 8) gathers some 75 studies the artist made from the 1940s through the 2000s. The chance to follow Riley’s hand as it goes off the grid of her graphic paper and into eternity reminds us that her minimalism was psychedelic, while her early investigations of the strategies of Seurat illuminates how his landscapes of dots became her galaxies of uncanny form—all with a touch of her hand.

Our new weekly scoop on industry players moving onwards and upwards.

Brett Littman, who has served as the director of the Noguchi Museum since 2018, has left his role. Deputy director Jennifer Lorch will step in as interim director until the board of trustees names a successor.

The Architectural League of New York has appointed Jacob R. Moore as its next executive director. He succeeds Rosale Genevro, who departed the League after 37 years.

Larry Gagosian is solidifying his mega-gallery’s European presence by appointing Andreas Rumbler as the director of its three Swiss galleries. In 2010, Gagosian opened his first gallery there in Geneva, with spaces in Basel and Gstaad following in 2019 and 2022.

Jessie Nelson thinks of craftsmanship in musical terms—no surprise considering he’s currently touring with a metal band. This approach allows the Brooklyn-based furniture designer and fabricator to respectfully nod to movements like Brutalism, Retrofuturism, and the Bauhaus in his work while ultimately freeing himself of aesthetic restraints that may box others in, yielding idiosyncratic pieces that aren’t fussy or overwrought.

Aesop regulars are no strangers to picking out a Paris Review when stocking up on body balm and hand wash. But from June 20–26, the brand’s Williamsburg, Silverlake, and Queen Street/Toronto stores will clear their shelves of the beloved botanic formulations and replace them with some of the foremost queer literature. This year’s Queer Library initiative emphasizes the work of trans BIPOC authors, and visitors can select a complimentary title of their choice.

Despite ongoing repair efforts, the Millennium Tower in San Francisco is leaning more than ever before—a staggering 29 inches at its northwest corner. Monitoring data shows the additional tilt occurred during excavation work to reinforce the tower with six piles installed at its base. This development, of course, challenges earlier indications of success, casting doubt over the tower’s long-term viability. Veteran geotechnical engineer Bob Pyke is skeptical of the $100 million repair plan: “As far as remedial work goes, this is just a mess,” he told NBC. Could there be a better symbol for the Bay Area’s doom loop?

Worthless Studios provides space, materials, technical assistance, and resources for aspiring artists of all backgrounds to realize their creative visions. The studio dreams up and executes public art programs with staff, community partners, and resident artists.

Surface Says: Worthless Studios aims to democratize access to resources and studio space within the competitive art market by offering their Brooklyn facility to early-career sculptors who otherwise wouldn’t have access. Their mission is exactly what the industry needs after these past couple years of economic turmoil.

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