Architect for Birds
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 […]
Koji Enokura at Blum & Poe
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 […]
A HUNDRED TO THE END: SURF AFTER STROKE
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 […]
CreativeMornings Lecture Series
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 […]
BLIND SPOT: RICHARD BENSON
Richard Benson sits down with Harmony Blogger to make the best prints he’s “ever seen.” Blind Spot Conversations 02: Richard Benson and Arthur Ou from David La Spina on Vimeo.
Hilma af Klint, Altarbild, 1915
In af Klint’s pictorial universe, the semiotic level is never radically separated from the world of visual forms; her cosmic figures send out mysterious linguistic messages that, as a mystic, she seemed to channel from another dimension, often referring to herself in the second or third person. One of the spirits told her: “You are […]
JAMES TURRELL: ATEN REIGN (2013)
It seemed like everywhere I went this weekend people were talking about this exhibit (Turrell’s first one in New York since 1980). The piece will be up until September 25th and was such a major undertaking, that it would be worth a look just to see how he transformed the famed rotunda.
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 some of the famous shops, beaches and individuals that make up the west coast surfing community, as well as a revealing portrait of Fordham himself and how easily he falls into step with his wave-bound peers. California road trip: surfing the perfect wave
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 free online pokie machine games the New York School […]
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 Online Casino all manner of buildings, from medieval to modern, at the site, which also ranges across continents. Get lost there for […]
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, that we can often lose sight of. To create the garden billboards, Glassman and his crew alter […]
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 process here on their website; it’s a fascinating read). […]
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 S?nchez 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 Sánchezâ??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 […]
