Founded by Surfing Madonna creator Mark Patterson, agents of change (i.e. you can help reverse the serious degradation currently impacting the world’s oceans).
Now the organization is challenging artists located near the world’s 10 deadliest waves—Banzai Pipeline, Ghost Trees, Mavericks, Teahupoo, Waimea, Shipstern Bluff, Dungeons, Cyclops, ours and New Smyrna—to create mosaics in their locations.
adoptable cats!
I’d be remiss not to mention here the best summer group show I’ve ever seen: “The Cat Show” at interviewed the curator, Rhonda Lieberman, in early June, and since then there’s been a ton of great press on the show. You can also keep up with more details on the show via Twitter.
Postscript: Check out this piece I wrote with Rhonda about the “Return of the (Feline) Repressed”: Cats + Minimalism.
For a good many of us just itching to get out of the city on a hot weekend, once July 4th has passed we feel ready to get excited about the Wassaic Arts Festival. Each year the a nearby field. The Festival is accessible by taking the Metro North to Wassaic and walking to the small town from where the train drops you. The vibe is relaxed, community and family-friendly all day. As the bands come on it slowly becomes a summer party at dusk.
LOCATION
The Wassaic Project Summer Festival is accessible by train and by car. More info and directions.
Register for camping. Cost is $40 a night and free for kids under 10
The Maxon Mills 37 Furnace Bank Road
Wassaic, NY 12592
XAM “CSD Dwelling Unit 1.6? (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Nice story in the NYT today about an artist who describes himself as an “architect for the contemporary bird”.
XAM is the name he uses to preserve his anonymity (he agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that we use it, too). He has been hanging street art for three years now in the form of birdhouses. Although the term seems inadequate, these structures are, in fact, functioning shelters for birds. But many also have jigsaw angles and purple-camouflage paint schemes, and features like passive ventilation systems, green roofs, gravity-controlled feeders and solar-powered LED porch lights that attract insects.
More here.
I’ve previously posted about Koji Enokura’s work but his current, exemplary show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles deserves a special mention. The exhibition is on view until July 13. From the gallery:
This exhibition features photographic documentation of his early installations, as well as cotton-fabric works from the 1980s and 1990s in which Enokura continued to explore the act of staining. The artist variously contrasts smooth fields of black paint with unpainted fabric, drenches the entire surface, or uses oil-soaked beams of lumber to mark the fabric—either affixing the beams to the work or leaning them against it. Also included in the exhibition are some of the artist’s signature fabrics hung diagonally on the wall and folding out onto the floor, as well as Intervention No.13 (1988), a particularly rare canvas that bears a paint-splattered glass bottle filled with oil and sand.
John Beattie. Photo: Dave Sanders for NY Times
After John Beattie suffered a stroke one winter morning, he was convinced he’d never surf again. For the life-long surfer (he learned when we was 13), the thought of a life without waves was a real loss. In order to process the loss (and celebrate the surfers he saw in the water), he picked up a camera and began filming. Over the course of six years, he amassed hours and hours of raw footage of local NY-area surfers, which he then cut into a trim 45-minutes with the help of Tyler Breuer of SMASH Surf. The resulting product, A Hundred Miles to the End, is a celebration of a life spent surfing and the surfers of Long Island. Read more here.
“A Hundred Miles to the End” has its premiere at the Long Beach Public Library, 111 West Park Avenue, Long Beach, on July 13 at 7 p.m. as part of the inaugural SMASH Fest, a surf film and art festival. Tickets are $19 (including service charge). More information:smashsurf.com or (347) 586-9602.
Read more about strokes, including symptoms, here
Looking for an inspiring and fresh take on the lecture series? Tina Roth Eisenberg, whose popular design blog Year in 2005. Past lecture titles include, Seeking out Criticism, Pleasure.Flow.Meaning, and Don’t Be The Best.
The lectures are free by RSVP and tickets tend to sell out the mornings they become available. Follow your city’s CreativeMorning twitter page or choose to receive email updates for upcoming events. This month’s global theme is Space. View all the taped NewYork/CreativeMorning talks available on Vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/creativemornings/videos
Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
The NYT recently published a compelling profile by James Nestor on surfing in Niijima, a small island 100 miles southeast of Tokyo. Here’s an excerpt:
Niijima, one of nine inhabited islands in Japan’s Izu archipelago, has been a place of many faces. Around the 18th century, during Japan’s Edo period, it served as an island prison for mainland exiles. By the 1960s, the Japanese defense department moved in and shot rockets and missiles from its coasts. For the last few decades, it has been a weekend escape hatch for harried city residents and college students looking for sun-drenched island life a 40-minute flight from Tokyo.
More recently, Niijima has become one of Japan’s top surfing destinations. In the summer months, Habushi-ura, a stunning stretch of Windex-blue water along the island’s east coast, has some of the best surf in all of Japan and is host to a number of international surfing competitions. A handful of young Tokyo surfers have since made Niijima their year-round home and created a burgeoning surf scene.
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