Results tagged “art”

This would have made a great Halloween costume. Fred Lebain has a new series of photographs that blend New Yorkers right into New York. Animal notes that "After shooting the scene, Lebain returned with a large-format print that he then photographed again using tripods and other ubiquitous poster-holding techniques." Perfect for a city where pretty much everyone is invisible.

This seems like one of those instances when it's best to keep your mouth shut. Brooklyn sculptor Diego Medina's "14-foot-tall tagger's dream" has remained graffiti-free in front of the Bronx River Arts Center since the unpainted plywood sculpture was installed in July — a fact so astounding to the Daily News that the tabloid decided to jinx celebrate the artwork by dedicating an entire article to the shocking lack of tagging.

A Manhattan woman who has been keeping her Andy Warhol original in the closet for decades, has finally taken it out of the makeshift storage room so she can cash in. The painting (a self portrait) will go on the auction block at Sotheby's on November 11th. The woman was reportedly a receptionist in Warhol's factory at age 17, and in 1967 he gave her the painting, which is inscribed to her. Why sell such a personalized gift? It's estimated there are about one million reasons.

Amazing. 34-year-old British artist, Stephen Wiltshire, who was diagnosed with autism at an early age, is currently taking residence at Pratt to do what he does best: draw. But not just draw; the artist is creating a detailed panorama of New York's skyline from memory, after only briefly visiting the city and taking it all in from a helicopter. He has done this around the world, 8 times in total, and says this is his finale.

New York artist Rob Pruitt just j'adores the Oscars. The red carpet, the flashing bulbs, the drawn-out speeches! But what's a conceptual artist to do when such award shows revolve around Hollywood A-listers? Create one for the art world, of course. This week's Talk of the Town places focus on Pruitt's vision, which will become a reality this Thursday as his First Annual Art Awards takes over the Guggenheim.

Many of you probably have that image of a youthful Farrah Fawcett in a red bathing suit engraved in your memory, but another iconic photograph was taken of her that decade.

As the NY Times noted, the artists are also bringing empty storefronts to life — something that's been happening in other boroughs as well. They explain these particular spaces were "donated or leased by building owners unable to rent or develop them." Starving artists are making out well during this recession with prime real estate! The benefit for developers? "The artist gets a gallery or studio, and the landlord gets a vibrant attraction that may deter crime and draw the next wave of paying tenants."

Last week the Public Art Fund’s new exhibition at City Hall Park (Peter Coffin’s Untitled Sculpture Silhouettes), was unveiled. Currently you'll be able to find 13 monumental silhouettes of iconic artworks around the park (and miniature versions inside City Hall's lobby), including variations on Rodin’s The Thinker, Picasso’s She Goat, Michelangelo’s David, and one of Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes.

       

This past Thursday the Animazing Gallery unveiled the world’s largest exhibition and sale of original illustrations and etchings from the collection of artist and author Maurice Sendak. The show is comprised of 200 pieces and will run through November 8th and coincides with a Sendak retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Uh oh, it's bad luck to walk under a Ponzi schemer! Chinese artist Chen Wenling has created this sculptured masterpiece entitled "What You See Might Not Be Real" (or as we like to call it: MadBull). Yes, that man pinned to the wall is jailed financier Bernard Madoff. The piece is currently on display at a gallery in Beijing, China, but we have high hopes that one day it will take the place of the Wall Street Bull.

Earlier this morning Will Sherman of Animal alerted us that he spotted a C-L-O-U-D cloud in the sky, but said, "I popped inside for 5 minutes and it basically disappeared." Such is the fleeting nature of sky art. That's right, street art was taken to a higher altitude this morning by Ron English. There's no escaping it now. Enjoy!

       

Artist Barbara Kruger has taken over the lobby at Lever House (390 Park Avenue) with what Animal calls a "dizzying display... reminiscent of the illegal ads covering vacant storefronts around the city, every surface from floor to ceiling is covered with Kruger’s bold black and white vinyl slogans." Andrew Russeth at 16 Miles paid a visit and has some great photos of the installation. While it looks amazing, it could be a little depressing for those working in the building to push their way, every day, through revolving metal doors that shout "We Forget. Another Life. Another Love."

       

The Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit at the Whitney opened yesterday, and it may not be what you expect. The artist created some lesser known abstract works throughout her career, which have remained overlooked in favor of her landscapes and flowers. This exhibit, fittingly called "Abstraction" acknowledges those works. The exhibit includes 130 paintings, drawings, watercolors and sculptures, as well as photos of the artist by Alfred Stieglitz, whom she met in New York City and introduced her to many early American modernists.

     

It's Park(ing) Day, the most wonderful day of the year for people who like sitting in the street. Did you get everything you wanted under the Park(ing) tree? Here are the first photos from the day's festivities, which involve the imaginative transformation of over 50 drab, lifeless parking spots throughout NYC into spontaneous "park" installations.

Ah, remember the good 'ol sock hop days of Governors Island? Jukeboxes blaring the latest tunes as teens gathered round milkshakes and cheeseburgers; the city skyline just off in the distance providing the perfect backdrop to the 50s soundtrack. No? You mean you don't remember the snow factory that manufactured snow year round? What an uneducated lot!

Well this isn't a pretty picture, but who doesn't love an art caper come full circle? Last month two drawings by Russian artist Nicholas Roerich were stolen from the Nicholas Roerich Museum (where else?). While one piece was returned in the mail (with a return address), the NY Post now reports that a Brooklyn couple was busted at a LES Starbucks trying to sell the other one to an undercover cop. "Denis Ryjenko, 35, and his girlfriend, Natella Croussouloudis, 42, were arrested Sept. 3 as they tried to unload a small masterpiece. One of them even told the 'buyer' the painting was hot and warned him not to hang it on his gallery wall." The couple had been showing it to people in their Midwood apartment, and were prepared to sell the piece (which is worth well over $100,000) for $40,000. Their landlord told the paper they owed $7,500 in back rent and recently had their power and gas shut off.

The 59th Street-Columbus Circle station just got more colorful thanks to a Sol LeWitt installation, in honor of what would have been the artist's 82nd birthday. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced its completion today, and said, "The artist created the proposal in 2004, and he selected the site, which is an expansive wall facing a double wide stairway and landing at 60th Street that leads from the mezzanine to the A, B, C, D and 1 trains. Titled 'Whirls and twirls (MTA),' the artwork is 53 feet wide by 11 feet high and consists of 250 porcelain tiles, in six colors, each cut to meet the artist’s specifications."

The DOT has brought some newly commissioned artwork to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, unveiled earlier this week and up for 11 months. 1010Wins notes that it features "barrels as seats with birdhouses above"—which sounds like a pretty risky design for the humans! However, the DOT sent us these photos and it doesn't really look like the old wine barrels are made for lounging about. If you wanna give it a shot, however, you can find the Atom Cianfarani installation at Columbia and Halleck streets. We're sure the squirrels and pigeons will are having a field day over there. The NY Post has a photo of another DOT piece that was unveiled in the Bronx, "an abstract sculpture made of plywood and resembling a stack of children's building blocks and star-shaped toys," and they note that three more sculptures will go up this year (on the UWS, Queens Plaza and Lefferts Gardens).

Not too long ago there was some pole dancing for arts sake on the L train. Well, yesterday photographer Zach Hyman (he's like the one-model-at-a-time version of Spencer Tunick) brought his nude subject to a museum. Surprisingly, it seems the MTA is cooler with the naked human form than the Met is!

Not us—see it below in all its NSFW, uh, glory. The "it" we're talking about here, be warned, is artist Jonathan Horowitz's 2008 piece "CBS Evening News/www.Britneycrotch.org," which frames two big digital prints on top of each other: The top image is Katie Couric at her news desk, and the bottom is Britney Spears’s infamous crotch shot, photoshopped to match Couric's upper half. It's the artistic antithesis of a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup, and you can see it at P.S. 1 in Queens with your own eyes (though the museum politely asks that visitors not flush their gouged-out their eyes down the toilet).

Who could have predicted an art caper ending with a stolen piece being returned to the scene of the crime? One of two Russian masterpieces lifted from the walls of an Upper West Side museum has now been mailed back in one piece. The NY Post reports that the Nicholas Roerich Museum staff "were shocked Friday when the mailman delivered the $70,000 painting" (pictured) in a manila envelope where it was pressed between two pieces of cardboard. One employee told the paper, "I thought it was some junk mail. I opened the envelope. Everybody started jumping up and down." The sender even left a name and return address on the envelope (which was mailed from Brooklyn), though there's no word on if it's legit.

              

Here are some more photographs of the wonderfully chaotic public art event, Those About to Die Salute You, at the Queens Museum of Art. Conceived by artist Duke Riley, we noted yesterday that the event was a Roman-themed naval battle that also involved tomato throwing, baguette battles, watermelon cannon balls, warriors in togas and other museums—the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Oh, and the madness did make the Queens Museum's director a little nervous.

       

There's a new outdoor exhibition sitting pretty atop the Gawker HQ rooftop called MOM & POPism that you can go check out today. (In fact, it's only open today through 4 p.m., but if you miss out on this public viewing you can make an appointment throughout the month.) We headed to 210 Elizabeth Street yesterday to see the installation for ourselves; it's like a colorful old New York up there! The show was curated by Billi Kid and reinterprets James and Karla Murray's latest book, Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York ("a breathtaking visual guide to New York City’s cultural heritage, with special emphasis on the historic streets and ethnic shops that have defined its many neighborhoods").

       

Vasily Kandinsky is getting a full-scale retrospective treatment at the Guggenheim next month (the exhibit will run from September 18th through January 13th). The comprehensive survey will include "nearly 100 of Kandinsky’s most important canvases from 1907 to 1942... drawn primarily from the three largest repositories of the artist’s work—the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich—as well as from significant private and public collections." There will also be over 60 works on paper, and combined this will be the largest retrospective of the artist’s career in the United States since the 80s.

Downtown Alliance's Re:Construction initiative has been going on for a couple of years now, and they continue to use construction sites as canvases. Today and tomorrow, two new art projects—Rainbow Conversation and Botanizing on the Asphalt—are being installed in separate Lower Manhattan construction sites (Louise Nevelson Plaza and Hudson River Park along West Street, respectively).

The Nicholas Roerich Museum on West 107th Street near Riverside Drive has been robbed of two of its artworks (whilst the fat cats at the Guggenheim have people trying to give them art!). The Russian masterpieces were swiped off the walls at separate times, without anyone witnessing the act. The NY Post reports that a police officer first noticed a missing work when he was visiting on June 24th, seeing a label on the wall with no painting above it. Turns out it was a $20,000 sketch by Russian artist Roerich, circa the 1930s. Four days later an employee noticed another work went missing in the same hallway, this time a 70,000 painting. The paper reports that the NYPD has "few clues in the thefts, and surveillance video of the hallway has yielded little information." With an average of 25 visitors a day, could this be an inside job?

Remember when, in 2005, Banksy snuck in to museums and illegally hung his own work (video!)? Well, another artist has just done the same, catching up four years later—but at least he hit a different museum: the Guggenheim (Banksy got the Met, MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and American Museum of Natural History).

The empty storefronts along Willoughby Street in Brooklyn have become canvases for local artists during the strip's ghost town era. The Daily News notes that the Willoughby Windows art show set up in prime retail space masks the eyesore of an abandoned retail corridor "created when 30 merchants along Willoughby, Duffield and Bridge Sts. were booted by a developer to make room for a glitzy new, $208 million commercial and residential complex." Guess how that plan went? The recession sure is ugly, and artists were sent in to dress up the stalled area.

As the battle for the Gowanus Canal continues, and Superfund supporters bring their campaign from doorsteps to YouTube, the NY Times looks at the canal as one man's artistic muse (and it's not the first time).

Reality television will soon confront its latest victim: art. Bravo is now casting for "The Untitled Art Project," which brings Sarah Jessica Parker and her production company, Pretty Matches, together with the Emmy-nominated Magical Elves ("Top Chef," "Project Runway") and Eli Holzman, to produce an hour long creative competition series among contemporary artists. It's just like how all the great artists were discovered. There will be thirteen total aspiring artists competing for a gallery show, money, and more. Each episode will have the artists creating "unique pieces highlighting art's role in everyday life" in everything from sculpture to photography. Get your portfolio together and your beret perfectly situation atop your head, the NYC casting call is July 18th and 19th at White Columns.