THIS IS STORY; Lower Manhattan’s Everchanging Retail Space
New York City has long offered its inhabitants the opportunity to transform common spaces into something new. I’ve seen a shared apartment turned into a salon, read how a water-tower hosts a secret nightclub, and just last week a group of artists in Greenpoint showed their site-specific work within an old medical office for a [...]
Apology
Jesse Pearson, a longtime editor at Vice magazine, has a new project, called Apology. As he puts it, “Apology is a new magazine that contains literature, interviews, essays, reportage, humor, photography, and art. In other words: pretty much everything. It’s a general interest magazine for people whose general interests aren’t general. It’s a sophisticated alternative [...]
Albert York, Woman and Skeleton, 1964
“Albert York: A Loan Exhibition” at Davis & Langdale Company is certainly one of the best shows I’ve seen this year. Presentations of canvases by this painter’s painter are rare and tend to be coveted by admirers—including collectors Lauren Bacall and Jackie Onassis. For a standout read on York, see Calvin Tomkins’s 1995 essay from the New [...]
We Think Alone
We Think Alone is a new project from Miranda July, author, artist, and director of the films The Future and You and Me and Everyone We Know. There aren’t a whole lot of details about what it is, other than a series of 20 e-mails “from the Sent mail folders” of various contributors, which you [...]
Michael Fordham on California’s Coast
Yesterday the Guardian posted a video interview with Michael Fordham, author of The Book of Surfing: A Killer Guide, as he traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles while searching for “the heart of America’s surf culture.” It is a ten minute glimpse into some of the famous shops, beaches and individuals that make up [...]
The New York Review of Books Turns 50
This year the New York Review of Books, one of the world’s most esteemed English-language journals of literature and politics, turns fifty. To mark the occasion, there have been celebrations in New York and a series of remembrances and essays published online. Sample the latter by clicking here, where you’ll find pieces by (and audio [...]
“Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets”
Ginia Bellafante profiles an exemplary New York exhibition—on view until June 14—in the NYT: “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets,” an exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Midtown . . . places Ms. Freilicher’s work in the context of her exalted status among the poets of the New York School — Mr. Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, [...]
ARCHI/MAPS
One of my favorite websites to browse is ARCHI/MAPS, which pulls photographs of buildings, floorplans, other architectural renderings, and maps from various historical archives and posts them to the web. You can find all manner of buildings, from medieval to modern, at the site, which also ranges across continents. Get lost there for hours! Above [...]
Reto Pulfer: Zustandseffekte
Check out this mysterious, oceanic-ish installation at Swiss Institute in SoHo; it’s on view until June 23 and not to be missed. From SI: The enigmatic body of work by Swiss artist Reto Pulfer (b. 1981, lives in Berlin) might be said to occur at the intersection of architectural space and performance. In his first solo-exhibition in [...]
The First Book on Surfing
In 1914 photographer and surfer A.R. Gurrey self-published what is now believed to be the first book devoted solely to surfing, The Surf Riders of Hawaii. Combining his own photos and prose alongside poetry from Lord Byron, Gurrey explored the sensorial adventure of the sport. Most of the photos were shot from the water while riding [...]
Urban Air
Los Angeles artist Stephen Glassman has plans for the steel frames that hoist billboards above his concrete city. He wants to transform them into suspended bamboo gardens, transforming the scenery of thousands of commuters every day. His project, Urban Air, is well underway. He has been constructing public gardens like this since the riots of [...]
Painter Painter
The Walker Art Center, one of the preeminent contemporary art museums in the United States, has a show on view now (until October 27) about new developments in contemporary painting. The exhibition, “Painter Painter,” presents the work of fifteen artists from the US and Europe. Here’s a brief description: The exhibition posits abstract painting today [...]
THE WHITNEY: NEW IDENTITY
The Whitney, which is opening their new space near the Highline in 2015, has just unveiled their new graphic identity and it’s a fun one! Created by the design studio Experimental Jet Set, the graphic relies on what the museum describes as a “responsive W” that “literally responds to the art” and to the materials [...]
Art in Protest
In Portugal, artists and protestors have been using a wide variety of political and artistic signage and design to draw attention to the escalating taxes and austerity measures in their country. Inspired by the May ’68 Paris protests, their call to action is, “It’s the people who call the shots.” The intriguing thing about this [...]
Zilia Sánchez at Artists Space
Artists Space‘s elegant retrospective of the too-little-known Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez is mesmerizing. From AS: Her paintings have regularly taken on a modular character, comprised of two or more abutting parts. This seriality has become a cornerstone of Sánchez’s work: she continues to rework and add to paintings begun as early as the 1970s, considering each [...]
New Directions Poetry Pamphlets
The esteemed literary publisher New Directions has revived its series of poetry pamphlets, and the first four contributions look stellar: Eliot Weinberger, Lydia Davis, Susan Howe, and others are involved. A bit more on the series: New Directions is happy to announce the publication of a new series of Poetry Pamphlets, a reincarnated version of the [...]
Finding Vivian Maier
In recent years the photography world has fallen head-over-heels in love with a previously unknown street photographer named Vivian Maier. She lived her life as a nanny in Chicago, raising a family three children and taking photographs all the while. Thousands of negatives ended up in a storage-unit auction late in the last decade, and [...]
Re-imagining the Donnell Library
Ever since the Donnell Library branch closed in 2008, the neighborhood surrounding West 53rd street has missed its beloved reading room. Today the New York Public Library will officially unveil the The Donnell Library Center’s replacement, a center redesigned to fit at the base of a high-rise hotel. Architect Enrique Norten and his firm TEN Arquitectos imagined [...]
MoMa PS1 RAIN ROOM: Opening This Saturday
The rain room is coming! Apparently this interactive installation- a constantly raining room which reacts to viewers within the space by magically shielding them from wet drops – was a hit in London. I can’t wait to see it in New York. Opens May 12th and runs through July 28th. Read more below and here [...]
Making Cents
Musician and writer Damon Krukowski, of the bands Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, breaks down the meager royalties currently being paid out to bands by streaming services and explains what the music business’ headlong quest for capital means for artists today. Consider Pandora and Spotify, the streaming music services that are becoming ever more [...]
Matt Paweski, Tulip Lamp
Matt Paweski, Tulip Lamp, 2013, steel, acrylic, enamel, copper rivets, electrical components, 27 x 7 x 2″. On view at Atelier de Troupe , 3418 Glendale Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90039.
Sebastião Salgado’s “Genesis”
This past Sunday, The New York Times’ Sunday Review section featured a portfolio of images from photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, who has long documented human suffering and its causes around the world. But for his latest project, he has turned his lens on Earth itself, in order to document the beauty it retains despite its own destruction [...]
DAUGHTER: THE MOVIE TEASER
I’m super excited for the premiere of the experimental surf film, Daughter: The Movie. Shot on 8mm & 16mm film, and featuring footage of Kassia Meador, Mikey DeTemple, Derek Hynd and others it’s guaranteed not to be your average surf film. Check out the teaser here:
Arthur Ou at Brennan and Griffin
Harmony Blog contributor Arthur Ou has a solo exhibition opening this Sunday, April 28, from 6-9 PM at Brennan and Griffin at 55 Delancey Street. Though Ou primarily works in photography, this show departs from his recent photographic seascapes and gestural alchemical interventions by transposing the sensibilities of both into an engagement with painting. The [...]
