Things to do in Soho

Queer artists at Leslie-Lohman

Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman began showing queer artists’ work in their downtown loft in 1969. At the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, you’ll find that commitment carried forward through exhibitions and public programs, with photography and moving-image installations among the forms presented. The museum’s holdings exceed 30,000 artworks, giving its changing exhibitions a substantial collection behind them.

Preservation is part of the story here. During the AIDS crisis, Leslie and Lohman rescued artwork that families intended to destroy. That history gives a concrete reason for the museum’s collecting work: keeping queer artists’ work available to be seen, studied and shown.

A past exhibition, David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York, showed photo-performances he made with friends in 1978–79. Those images connected changing New York locations with his move from writing into visual art. For more detail on the exhibitions you encounter, the museum’s free Bloomberg Connects digital guide provides additional interpretation.

Drawing beyond the sketchbook

Tattoo artists, chefs, novelists and prisoners have all had works on paper brought into conversation with visual artists at The Drawing Center. You’re visiting a museum devoted to drawing as a complete art form, with exhibitions that also consider how people use it to think across disciplines. That breadth gives the program subjects well beyond studies for paintings.

The institution has been in SoHo since 1977, first in a Greene Street warehouse and, since 1987, in its Wooster Street home. Alongside Leslie-Lohman, it gives this part of the walk two distinct exhibition programs: one centered on queer artists, the other on the possibilities of a medium.

The bookstore adds another way into that work through the museum’s own publications. I’d include it if you want something to read beyond the gallery displays; publishing sits alongside exhibitions and education in the institution’s approach to drawing.

The Drawing Center is closed for installation. Its next program begins October 7.

Inside Donald Judd’s home and studio

Donald Judd lived and worked at 101 Spring Street, and you enter his former home with a guide. Judd Foundation preserves the rooms with art, furniture and decorative objects arranged as he installed them. This is where the walk takes you inside SoHo’s cast-iron architecture: Nicholas Whyte designed the five-story building in 1870, and Judd bought it in 1968.

The first floor became his studio; the family cooked on the fourth and slept on the fifth. A low walnut platform bed, made by Peter Ballantine to Judd’s specifications, is among Judd’s earliest furniture designs. Those domestic uses remain part of the visit, alongside the art and the building itself.

On the fifth floor, Dan Flavin’s untitled fluorescent-light barrier from 1970 uses a blue, red and blue configuration. Judd developed his approach to permanent installation here, treating a work’s placement as consequential to its understanding. The preserved arrangement puts individual objects, the proportions of the rooms and their windows together within the guided visit.

A loft filled with earth

Walter De Maria filled a loft with earth for The New York Earth Room in 1977. You view the sculpture from its edge, at a glass barrier in the entrance, with soil extending across the white room’s floor. The earth lies 22 inches deep, occupying the space itself rather than sitting in a display case.

After Judd’s carefully arranged domestic objects, this upstairs installation offers another kind of permanent artwork. Dia Art Foundation commissioned and maintains it. Earlier Earth Rooms in Munich and Darmstadt no longer exist, leaving the New York work as the only surviving version, on long-term public view since 1977.

Choose your pastry at Dominique Ansel

Dominique Ansel launched the Cronut at his original SoHo bakery in May 2013, but you have several distinct choices at Dominique Ansel Bakery. I’d start with the DKA if texture is what you’re after. Short for Dominique’s Kouign Amann, it has a flaky, tender interior and a crunchy caramelized exterior, with a croissant-like structure.

The Cronut uses its own laminated-dough recipe. It’s proofed, fried, rolled in sugar, filled with cream and glazed, with the flavor changing each month. That makes the choice between it and the DKA fairly concrete: cream filling and glaze on one side, caramelized pastry on the other. Both sit within a menu of signatures and a changing pastry case.

The cookie shot gives you a third format altogether. A chocolate-chip cookie forms the drinking vessel and is filled to order with vanilla milk. You sip the milk, then eat the cookie.

New work at SoHo Playhouse

Performers arriving from international Fringe festivals are one reason to look at SoHo Playhouse’s calendar. You can choose among theater, comedy and solo performance at this Off-Broadway venue, whose Fringe Encore Series gives selected festival productions extended New York runs. The series began in 2007 and remains a distinct strand of the theater’s programming.

The Lighthouse Series serves a different purpose: it’s a competition and development platform for emerging artists and works in progress. Those two strands give you a useful choice when browsing the program, between productions coming through the festival circuit and work still being developed.

That interest in new writing has a local history. The Playwrights Unit Workshop, founded in 1963 by Edward Albee, Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder, developed plays through full public productions and helped launch work by Adrienne Kennedy. Today’s compact performance room occupies a building dating to 1826. Finish this walk by choosing a performance from the changing calendar.