Performa's Marclay Award Ceremony, Alanna Heiss's Farewell to the Clocktower Gallery, & More

The last week of November was an enormously eventful one in the New York art world. On Sunday, Performa 13 bestowed its Malcolm Award—named in honor of the late punk impresario Malcolm McLaren—to the artist Ryan McNamara for his “Meem: A Story Ballet About the Internet,” a performance that audaciously sought to transfer the multi-tab, multitasking mode of cultural consumption that the Web encourages to the august medium of dance by approximating the mashed-up experience of watching clips of a series of historical ballet performances on YouTube. The artist Christian Marclay presented the award.

On a more bittersweet note, the Clocktower Gallery, the pioneering space that New York art legend Alanna Heiss founded atop an old courthouse off lower Broadway in 1972, held a closing party to celebrate its decades of alternative art programming (an attention-getting recent show was James Franco's "The Dangerous Book Four Boys in 2010). Forced out of the building after the landlord sold it to residential developers for over $100 million—the top-floor Clocktower space is being converted into a $34 million penthouse; one interested party who has toured the space is Leonardo DiCaprio—the Clocktower will now continue its programming across pop-up sites in Times Square, the outer boroughs, and around the world.

Scroll through the slide show above to see pictures from these events, plus Julia Ault's opening at Artists Space, Isaac Julian's opening at MoMA, Marianne Vitale's "The Book of Spurs" Performa performance, and a show organized by an artist who wishes to remain anonymous.