We are on a mission to expand your summer horizons, prying you away from the beach or the A/C in your bedroom and into a few of our hidden, obscure, and even secret New York City summer favorites in ARTLOG’s Summer Art Guide.

Tonight the Whitney Contemporaries throw the American art museum’s annual Art Party, whose auction benefits the institution’s educational programs.

Featured prominently in both the Whitney Biennial and the New Museum Triennial, Wu Tsang is currently one of the most visible artists in New York City. Although Tsang can be easily pigeonholed as a mixed-race/trans artist of color, these identities provide a hotbed of common misconceptions for his performance work to challenge and problematize.

Laura Letinsky’s still life photographs are the antidote to Will Cotton’s sugary Katy Perry confections. In the light of morning, the actors are offstage, the fruit and sweets half-eaten and forgotten (but not yet rotten). This is what it feels like when the party’s over.

CHERYL, the artist collective made up of Destiny Pierce, Stina Puotinen, Nick Shiarizzi, and Sarah Van Buren, sits somewhere on an axis that joins Mike Kelly and David Byrne, a mix of earnest absurdism and a regard for abjection that seems squarely a product of early-80s investigations into participatory dynamics and DIY spectacles. Lately, the crux of CHERYL’s production are obsessively orchestrated video works loosely composed around a theme that involve lots of fake blood, cat masks, choreographed dances, glitter, and gloopy food. As one part of the overall work, the videos are completed by chaotic dance parties held in a nightclub, gallery or museum. The entire affair comes off rather like the up-cycle of a bipolar swing, a manic rush to the top of the roller coaster hill fully aware of the drop to come.