Nature Meditations in the Land of Fire and Ice

Posted on January 9, 2015 by MsSusanB

Katrín Sigurðardóttir, Haul IV (2004) travelling landscape-in-a-box on loan from private collector. Courtesy: The artist.

When the weather dips below freezing and people think they’re in the Arctic, there’s no better place to get out of the elements and meditate on the landscapes of long, dark winters than the third floor of Scandinavia House on Park Avenue. Until tomorrow, January 10, you’ll join eleven contemporary artists from the sub-arctic on their journeys in a show mounted by the Katonah Museum of Art, Iceland Artists Respond to Place.

Bjork may get all the media attention, but do yourself a favor and walk through this three-gallery show, which beautifully and simply presents the work of Iceland’s other leading visual artists. See the land of fire and ice through their eyes.

Olafur Eliasson, The Aerial River Series, 2000 on loan from private collector. Courtesy: The artist. Installation photo: Ben Blackwell

Olafur Eliasson, The Aerial River Series, 2000 on loan from private collector. Courtesy: The artist. Photo: Ben Blackwell

Olafur Eliasson takes you on an aerial journey along a 60-mile meltwater river, from the mouth to the source. Ragna Róbertsdóttir splatters miniscule lava rocks against a wall but it’s not what it sounds like. Far from a violent eruption, it’s an undulating, mesmerizing meditation that you’ll spend time contemplating.

For sheer romantic and modernist punch, enjoy Georg Guðni Hauksson’s two works – a large landscape memory and a solid dark blue canvas evoking the long winter nights (like an emotional Ad Reinhardt).

Lava rocks “talk” in Egill Sæbjörnsson’s Pleasure Stones installation (2008) on loan from private collector. Courtesy: The artist.

Egill Saebjornsson takes home the whimsy award with a multimedia installation in which rocks speak (seriously!). Eggert Pétursson zeros in the microscopic natural phenomenon – painting flowers (life sized) in patterns that read like tapestries. You’ll wish you were on some hikes with him. Katrín Sigurðardóttir simply packs up her landscapes into boxes. Tiny, tiny recreations of vast, romantic landscapes.

When we visited the galleries this week, visitors were asking if there was more they could see. Scandinavia House always hosts classy, elegant shows, so although the exhibition space is limited, we have to admit they always leave us wanting to see what’s next from that part of the world.

Seth Myers was recounting his Icelandic adventures this week on Late Night. If you can’t get to the country like Seth or visit the show, at least you can spend chilly days and nights like the natives do, courtesy of this instructional video produced by Scandinavia House:

Groundbreakers App Ties History and Beauty Together

Posted on September 7, 2014 by MsSusanB

The New York Botanical Garden carved out an ambitious agenda in its Groundbreakers show – to tie the stories of six women of landscaping history, present a two-gallery recreation of an historic garden, pay tribute to the contributions of several landscapes within NYBG itself, create a poetry walk, and wrap it up with the history of early 20th-century photography and high-gloss publishing. They did it with GPS and an iPhone app, courtesy of Bloomberg.

Closing this weekend, Groundbreakers: Great American Gardens and the Women Who Designed Them is still worth downloading from iTunes, just to get a glimpse into the lives of six landscape-gardening pioneers, see their work, and understand the popularization of American gardening long before the dawn of HGTV or Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Here’s the link.

Photos of Ms. Johnston (left), lantern slides and projector, and Beals (right) on NYC street in 1902. Courtesy: NYBG

Here’s the story: back in the day (early 1900s), garden design and photography were two of the few career avenues available to women.

Way before Instagram, Photoshop, and two-way phone cameras, documenting the lush gardens involved lugging a gigantic, large-format camera up and down garden paths and around water features, processing black-and-white negatives into prints, turning some into newly-invented lantern slides, and having each slide painstakingly colored by hand. It helped if you had a car and an able-bodied assistant to help navigate the flagstone-lined paths with all the heavy gear.

Six American landscape pioneers who changed the course of American gardening. Courtesy: NYBG

Also, after the Industrial Revolution, aesthetically minded women (predating Lady Bird Johnson) felt it was time for American homescapes to get a little more spruced up.

The rich and famous were beginning to hire landscape designers to fix up the areas behind their East Side townhomes and acreages around their country estates. Why not document this and inspire upper middle class homeowners to follow suit?

The exhibition gives us a look at how artist visionaries, authors, and the publishing industry worked in tandem to record how landscape architects were creating romantic backyard landscapes and popularize beautification. Although seeing actual lantern slides, projectors, and gigantic tripods is amazing, one of the highlights is a recreation of the slide show by Frances Benjamin Johnston that basically blazed the trail of a new vision of what was possible – one image after another of gorgeous, visionary landscapes on the grounds of homes on the East Coast, California, England, and France.

NYBG recreated the evocative Moon Gate from the Rockefeller garden, inspired by their experience of the Forbidden City and designed by Beatrix Farrand

In the Conservatory, the team at NYBG recreated Mrs. Rockefeller’s garden, originally designed by Beatrix Farrand, to highlight how the garden was conceived, used, and enhanced by the Asian art Mr. and Mrs. John D. collected. Since Farrand took on this project in 1926, NYBG has the sounds of America’s Jazz Age wafting through the galleries. Take a look on our Flickr page.

Another great feature of this show and the app – NYBG’s GPS feature shows you where you are in the expansive garden and encourages you to visit features where these groundbreakers had a hand – such as Marian Coffin’s ornamental conifer collection and Ferrand’s Rose Garden.

Get a closer view of the spectacular Groundbreakers in NYBG’s news-style video:

If you have a bit more time, listen to this curator lecture on the Beautiful Garden movement in America in 1900 and see the photos used by Johnston home to show suburbanites exactly how it should be done. You’ll witness garden images that hadn’t been seen since 1930. Take a look and get inspired:

Click here for other videos: a lecture about Beatrix Farrand created Mrs. Rockefeller’s garden and how the NYBG team recreated it in the stunning Victorian conservatory.

Dissident Artist Leaves Brooklyn for Second Time

Posted on August 9, 2014 by MsSusanB

The artist in Williamsburg, 1983. From his New York Photograph Series (1983-1993). Courtesy: the artist

Then: Ai Weiwei in Williamsburg, 1983. From his New York Photograph Series (1983-1993). Courtesy: the artist

If you haven’t yet trekked to Brooklyn to see one of the world’s most famous international provocateurs, go this weekend to see Ai Weiwei: According to What? and get to know the work of the artist who was incarcerated a few years ago by the Chinese government for pulling the veil off its bureaucratic repression and dishonesty. Closing August 10, it’s the last stop on the show’s North American tour – a fitting finale since Ai Weiwei first lived in Williamsburg when he moved to New York back in 1983.

You know him either from his collaboration on the famous “bird nest” stadium at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, smashing Han Dynasty vases as an art project, or from having bulldozers sent by the Chinese government to eradicate his studio in 2011 and being put into house arrest for 81 days – an event that made front-page news and sparked an international outcry – museums and political leaders took out protest ads, made videos, placed flowers on his public works, and called for his release all over the world.

Close-up of R itual, one of the six dioramas of S.A.C.R.E.D. (2011-2013), inspired by his 2008 incarceration. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio. © Ai Weiwei

Now: Close-up of R itual, one of six dioramas of S.A.C.R.E.D. (2011-2013), showing his 2008 incarceration. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio. © Ai Weiwei

Even before you hit the admissions booth, you’ll see his response to all of this – a series of six large, mysterious boxes that make up his work, S.A.C.R.E.D. You climb up to peer into them, right inside Brooklyn’s entrance. Inside, you’ll see everyday depictions of what it was like for him in detainment – eating, sleeping under the watch of the uniformed guards, and interrogations.

Upstairs, you’ll see an expansive show filled with thought-provoking works along with some black-and-white photos of his East-Village life in the 1980s, where he hug with Tan Dun, Xu Bing, and other artists-on-the-move and artists-on-the-run from a conformist Mainland.

At a distance, his sculptures seem like simple, cool contemporary installations. Read the label copy and you realize the subversive is at work. It looks like some found-art piece, but the room is actually filled with the full contents of a young woman’s home. Ai Weiwei found her and all her stuff on the side of a road after the authorities evicted her.

Straight (2008-2012) is made from 70 tons of rebar reclaimed from the Sichuan earthquake and hammered straight back into rods. © Ai Weiwei

Straight (2008-2012) is made from 70 tons of rebar rods, reclaimed from the Sichuan earthquake and hammered straight. © Ai Weiwei

A single room is devoted to Straight, a monumental installation made up of rebar, metal rods used to strengthen concrete calls. Except that this is the actual rebar from the 2008 earthquake that claimed 5,400 young lives in Sichuan Province when the schools collapsed due to shoddy construction practices. He bought the scrap rebar from those buildings, spent four years hammering to straighten them out, and assembled the rods into a 70-ton sculpture. Nearby, he’s listed the names of every school child – something that the Chinese government never did.

Performance art: dropping a Han dynasty vase (206 BC-220 AD), along with other historic ceramic pieces altered by a dip into modern industrial paint (2007-2010). Photo: C. Carver. Courtesy: the artist

How and why does he do it? Find out by listening to Ai Weiwei’s answers to visitors’ questions. You’ll have quite an insight to his thought process, since there are 45 pages of video Q&A. Well worth the time to meet this brave, inspirational artist-activist.

He’s simply one of the top contemporary artists working today and you owe it to yourself to experience work that literally takes on the world. Kudos to the Brooklyn Museum for also publishing the amazing teacher’s guide, which asks students to ponder and think about news, authority, and speaking out.

Watch as the Brooklyn crew assembles Stacked, Ai Weiwei’s 2014 sculpture made from 700 bicycles, a comment on the transportation traditionally used by Chinese commuters until the dawn of the smog-inducing automobile. It’s all happening under the watchful Egyptian eye on Brooklyn’s main floor:

Vintage Attire on NYC Mean Streets

Posted on June 10, 2014 by MsSusanB

Editta Sherman in period dress on a graffiti-covered subway car to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

Cunningham’s photo of Editta Sherman in period dress on a 70s graffiti-covered subway car going to a shoot at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

Uber-fashion documentarian Bill Cunningham had a great idea in 1968, just as NYC was sliding toward financial crisis, crime, and (goes without saying) neglect of architectural sites, like Grand Central. Why not celebrate two centuries of NYC fashion and splendor on the street?

What were people wearing when some of the City’s most iconic homes, churches, and public buildings were built? Was it possible for a black-and-white photograph to reveal some new insight about the City from combining fashion, architecture, and a little fashion flair and attitude?

Editta poses for Bill in embroidered frock coat and breeches in front of St. Paul’s Chapel, the oldest church building (1766) in Manhattan

Results of Bill’s eight-year project are on display through July 15 in the Bill Cunningham: Facades photo exhibition on the second floor of the New-York Historical Society.

Without the aid of Wikipedia, he researched the years that some of his favorite historic places were built, and began scouring thrift stores for get-ups from the matching decade. He enlisted his muse, Editta Sherman, a fellow photographer and neighbor at the Carnegie Hall studios. For the next eight years, Editta and Bill went on weekend odysseys throughout the City, modeling and documenting over 500 historic outfits in front of interesting but sometimes forgotten facades.

In 1976, Bill gave 88 of his silver-gelatin prints to NYHS – the core of the current show, which is hung to emphasize the chronology of fashion and architectural style. The show was jammed with fashion lovers last weekend, soaking in the details from Bill and Eddita’s journey back in time.

Editta dresses for Bill in Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s own Callot Soeurs at the 1904 Harry Payne Whitney House

It starts with Editta dressed in an 18^th c. embroidered coat and breeches in front of the 1766 tower of St. Paul’s Chapel at Broadway and Fulton – the oldest church building in Manhattan that was considered “suburban” when President Washington lived here. Remarkably, they discovered this satorial gem in a Ninth Avenue second-hand store.

The visual treats just keep coming – a diaphanous Empire muslin on a model in front of City Hall (1803), Civil War-era frocks at Sniffen Court in Murray Hill, bustles and parasols at the 1884 Villard Houses (Helmsley Palace), and many spectacular gowns from the Gilded Age. Consider Eddita channeling “Diamond Lil” in front of 1891 Delmonico’s, the first modern American restaurant that innovated a la carte dining, private dining rooms, Lobster Newberg, and Baked Alaska.

In two photos, the team managed to borrow some historically relevant gowns – Gertrude Whitney’s Callot Soeurs frock for the shoot at the 1906 Payne Whitney home by Stanford White (Fifth & 79^th) and Mrs. J.P. Morgan’s Worth gown at the gazelle gates of the Apthorp.

Bill Cunningham’s take on modern fashions at the 1968 GM Building

The curators note that although women’s fashion in the early 20^th century was fairly liberating, the public architecture of New York remained tightly classical. The show’s final shots soar with the optimism of the modern – the “New Look” in front of the Paris Theater (1948), full-skirted flair on Park Avenue by the Lever House (1952), Givenchy at the Guggenheim (1959), and mod looks at the GM Building (1968).

You will savor every minute of your journey with these creative geniuses. Check out a few photos on the NYHS web site, find a copy of the 1978 book Facades, or get to the show.

If you didn’t see the film about Bill, rent it from iTunes or Netflix or buy the DVD. You can glimpse Eddita (a.k.a. The Dutchess) in the movie trailer below:

Subversive Chinese Brush-Up at the Met

Posted on March 26, 2014 by MsSusanB

Yang Jiechang’s Crying Landscape (2003) shares the Gallery for Art of Ancient China with a sandstone stele from the Northern Wei dynasty (489-495) and the 1319 Buddha of Medicine.

Normally, the galleries for Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are pretty tranquil. But through April 6, you’ll find them buzzing with contemporary art lovers reveling in the hunt to find the most famous, subversive, subtle works by Chinese painters, sculptors, and digital artists residing amidst centuries-old treasures in the widely popular exhibition, Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China.

The Met gave the Chinese art curators free reign to pluck sly works from the in-house contemporary collections created by Chinese artists over the last 20 years, grab monumental works from private collectors, and mount a tribute to how post-Cultural Revolution innovators parse the traditions associated with centuries-old art making in their ancestral country.

How do the hottest artists on the planet turn calligraphy and inked woodblocks into biting social commentary? Take a stroll through the second floor Asian art wing.

Inspired by Cultural Revolution posters, the letters in Wu Shanzhuan’s Character Image of Black Character Font (1989) have no meaning. Courtesy: Private collector, the artist.

Just past the balcony-bar area, the monumental 1319 Buddha of Medicine mural from Shanxi Province, China, casts a benign presence over the Gallery for Art of Ancient China. But just stage right, two larger-than-life works on paper preview how Chinese artists twist the “then” into the “now”.

Yang Jiechang’s Crying Landscape panels are painted in the beautiful, colorful “old school” flat Asian style but depict decidedly unbeautiful industrial and political subjects. Similarly, Qiu Zhirie’s Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge ink triptych features masterful, large-scale ink-brush technique but uses art-world icons to relay a disturbing story. It’s an installation triumph that will haunt you every time you pass through that room again.

Large-scale calligraphy by many of the artists makes ink-pot-and-brush tradition echo with gestures as large as Rothko’s. In the galleries with meticulously crafted “landscape” drawings and images, you’ll ask how this modern crew managed to produce scrolls with such heft and detail. Take a walk-through of the show through our Flickr site.

In 1995, Ai Weiwei corporatized a Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 9 A.D.) earthenware jar. Courtesy: M + Sigg, the artist

Along the way to back of the wing, the curators play hide-and-seek, putting Ai Weiwei’s “enhanced” Han Dynasty jar right in the aisle with the “unmodernized” earthenware vessels, and mounting Hong Hoo’s subtly colored, hilarious historical “atlas” silkscreens in a case that practically dares unfocused visitors to pass them by as they drift toward the Astor Court.

Hopefully by the time they get to the rock garden they will notice Zhang Jianjun’s crazy pink silicone rubber “scholar rock” right next to the real ones. Zhan Wang’s stainless steel scholar rock and Shou Fan’s side chairs are beautifully arranged in the Ming Dynasty room just off the Court, along with more of Ai Weiwei’s furniture hijinx.

After you’re done getting a feel for how the galleries have been transformed, go back into the Met’s exhibition web site to study the brushwork and details and get to know some of the artists.

Zhang Jianjun’s 2008 silicone rubber Scholar Rock (The Mirage Garden) sits in a 17th-century pagoda in the Met’s Astor Court

Zhang Jianjun’s 2008 silicone rubber Scholar Rock (The Mirage Garden) sits under a 17th-century pagoda in the Met’s Astor Court. Courtesy: Sigg Collection, the atist

Although the web site appears to be more plain-vanilla than jazzy, you’ll be surprised to see that the digital back-end of the Met archives lets you zoom into each of the paintings to see the handsome handwork of each of these wunderkinds from each thematic section of the show. You can even peruse the gigantic scrolls up close, section by section.

The video room, where art lovers can relax and watch a rotating collection of work, is a nice touch. The modern digital sign to the side tells you exactly where you are in the rotation.

Here’s a link to one of the featured videos: Get to know the constantly transforming cityscape of Beijing through Chen Shaoxiong’s 2005 Ink City, and see what happens when a contemporary artist paints daily life in Beijing with traditional tools and ports his day-to-night experience to video.

Armory Show Stars on the West Coast of Manhattan

Posted on March 14, 2014 by MsSusanB

The Artforum Lounge on the Contemporary Pier

For four action-packed days, the art crowd made its way to the West Coast of Manhattan Island past gritty lots, warehouses, the ball fields of Clinton, and high-rises-under-construction to enter a white, light-filled glittery expanse of painting, sculpture, and champagne bars at the 2014 edition of The Armory Show.

This year, 205 exhibitors showed off the best in modern masters and contemporary upstarts. Walk through it with us on our Flickr feed.

If you’ve never been there, just know that the art fills two full piers (yes, where the cruise ships come in). You may think the Whitney Biennial is big, but The Armory promenade is vast.

On the Modern Pier: Chicago’s Alan Koppel Gallery gave tribute to original Armory Show in 1913 with several Duchamps, but most of the work is post-1940 by Modern superstars. Right at the start of the pier, Galleria d’Arte Maggiori positioned a nice rough-and-ready Mattia Moreni in kind-of a face-off with a pretty primitive Basquiat nearby.

Dramatic paper collage and charcoal work by Elaine de Kooning with two Picasso ceramics at Vivian Horan

Dramatic paper collage and charcoal work by Elaine de Kooning with two little Picasso ceramics at Vivian Horan

Frankfurt’s Die Galerie gave NYC glamour-icon Louise Nevelson a mini-tribute, and several galleries featured Marca-Relli’s painting/collages.

Best on the Modern Pier: Vivian Horan’s booth, dominated by a large Elaine de Kooning charcoal drawing with collage, but populated by two small Picasso ceramics that most fair goers didn’t even see, although they were practically out in the aisle. You don’t see Picasso ceramics too much, and they really added a nice touch.

Second runner-up was the Armand Bartos booth with a sharp Kenneth Noland, Andy’s chicken soup can under glass, and a no-holds-barred Stella. In fact, there were multiple 1980s 3D Frank Stellas leaping out from walls, demanding attention. Besides posing with the soup can, lots of visitors were snapping photos of themselves in front of Mr. Stella’s work.

1949 Hans Hoffman oil at London’s Crane Kalman

Welcomed surprises: Even though he taught most of the post-war painters in New York, you don’t often see Hans Hoffman paintings, so it was nice to encounter one of his color explosions at Crane Kalman. And we’ve never seen the two super-early skinny Lichtenstein sculptures at Barcelona’s Galeria Marc Domenech booth. Guess they were made in those lean before-the-dots years on his path to Pop.

Susan Harris curated a great micro-show of 20^th century female artists, mostly works on paper (e.g. Georgia O’Keefe, Kiki Smith, Lee Bonticou), all contributed by gallery exhibitors.

Richard Long’s 1994 Merrivale Circle at the Lisson Gallery

Although you could hike outdoors to get to the second pier along the West Side Highway, most were guided through a wormhole and down a flight of stairs to descend directly into the booths from 17 contemporary galleries across China – a great landing into a warren of booths featuring installations (watch out for the Roomba!), and user-friendly exercise equipment that the PRC makes available in public parks for citizen fitness.

From there, you enter the Contemporary Pier area. Highlights: the whirling handbag piece (with real handbags) by Egill Saebjornsson at Reykjavik’s i8 Gallery, Richard Long’s stone circle at London’s Lisson Gallery booth, the completely constructed entry to Boesky Gallery, and Claudia Weiser’s cool wooden sculptures at Sies + Hoke (Dusseldorf).

Nick Cave Soundsuits at Jack Shainman

A great place to end the journey was at the Jack Shainman booth, with its dramatic contemporary art exploring expressions from Africa, African-Americans, and global artists — the Nick Cave soundsuits and Richard Mosse’s spectacularly dissonant hot-pink infrared photograph of a waterfall in the continually disintegrating, war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.

Take a look at the highlights here.

Fair goer relaxes on modernist egg chair under the watchful eye of Dali

The Art of ElBulli’s Culinary Genius

Posted on February 24, 2014 by MsSusanB

Notebooks and menu drawings from ElBulli’s kitchen displayed in front of a mural of Ferran Adrià and staff in Roses, Spain in the most famous kitchen in the world. Courtesy: elBullifoundation, The Drawing Center

If you weren’t able to visit the famed ElBulli restaurant on the coast of Spain before it closed two years ago, don’t worry. Pop down to Soho to meet the man, his team, and his legacy through The Drawing Center’s provocative show, Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity, running through February 28.

Even if you can’t taste the world-renowned creations, you’ll feel as though you’ve entered his kitchen during the six months per year that his team worked on R&D through up-close looks at experiments, plating, techniques, codes, inventions, and graphic treatises. Take a look at the installation on our Flickr feed.

Close-up of large working board of photo and diagrams document the plating and components of each dish. Courtesy: elBullifoundation

Last weekend, the Wooster Street space was jammed with visitors eager to see glimpse the genius behind the magic of the famed elBulli – notebooks filled with diagrams of exacting platings of food, a room inside the gallery evoking elBulli’s Barcelona archive, huge storyboards pinned with drawings and photographs of artist-inspired dishes, and glass-topped tables containing inventions that created some of the most amazing food–art in the world.

Examples: the apparatus that turns cheese into “spaghetti”, the glass bowls used to serve diners “edible air”, or the cocktail device that literally sprays a dry martini right into a diner’s mouth.

240 plasticine models used to standardize recreation of the sizes and shapes of various portions of food used as components in his highly inventive, artistic dishes. Courtesy: elBullifoundation, The Drawing Center

240 plasticine models used by staff to recreate precise shapes and portions of artistic dish components.

And how do you keep the beautiful dishes consistent? By making little plastic sculptures so that the kitchen crew knows how to duplicate forms for delicate platings precisely on everyone’s plate. When you’re delivering identical 40-course dinners to guests who have flown halfway around the world to join you for dinner, precision counts.

Improvisation may have happened during the six months of the year that elBulli shut down to devote itself to R&D, but not so much during dining-season crunch time. Just look at the large wall drawing that Adrià sketched for this show — Map of the Creative Process: Decoding the Genome of Creativity. Organization is key.

Last weekend, there were no empty seats in the downstairs video viewing gallery, as visitors sat mesmerized by 1846, the 90-minute film co-produced by The Drawing Center, showing every dish Adriá ever served at elBulli (1987 – 2011).

Plasticine model of the 1994 Le Menestra dish composed only of textures, including cauliflower mousse, basil jelly, almond sorbet, avocado, and numerous other components.

Photos of gorgeous, glistening food on plates, rocks, and wood lilted by to an opera soundtrack punctuated by the sounds of water lapping on the shore near the restaurant. Plates of vegetables, seafood slices, sprigs, and flowers wafted by. What are those spoons filled with? What appeared to be “hatching” out of that egg? What was the egg? What was perching on a stalk like an insect? The effect made you feel as if you were seeing life on Earth evolve…biomorphic shapes surrounded by foam.

You could tell that these art-and-food lovers had absorbed the exhibit upstairs when there was a collective gasp of recognition when the real-life version of La Menestra (accurately and lovingly represented in plascticene upstairs) floated onto the screen.

Since he shut the most desired and famous restaurant in the world, Adrià has been hard at work making sure that his thoughts, processes, philosophy, and research were well documented and translated to digital form. Although it’s still in beta, he’s incorporating it all into an online encyclopedia of gastronomic knowledge.

Kudos to Brett Littman and his team at The Drawing Center for mounting a show that pays tribute to food-as-art and shows us how creativity, inspiration, and documentation (in the hands of an genius, or team of geniuses) can turn experiments in a kitchen on a small Spanish seaside cove into a global digital export of wisdom and innovation for the next generation of chefs.

Take a look at Bullifoundation’s promo video to see what’s in store:

Happily, this show is going on the road in the United States before it leaves for The Netherlands in 2016: See it at the ACE Museum in LA (May 4-July 31), Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland (September 26-January 18, 2015), or Minneapolis Institute of Art (September 17, 2015-January 3, 2016).

Here’s a link to Documenting Documenta, a 2011 film about Adrià’s life, inspiration, work, and participation in Documenta 12, an international cultural festival in Kassel, Germany that happens every five years.

Must-See Skytop Panorama of NYC Past & Present at The Whitney

Posted on February 3, 2014 by MsSusanB

The installation view of T. J. Wilcox: In the Air, 2013. Photo: Bill Orcutt

If you want to enjoy a beautiful view of Manhattan from the roof, don’t worry about the snow, rain, or cold weather. Go over to the Whitney Museum before February 9 and take in the film installation T.J. Wilcox, In the Air, that features a beautiful panorama (from the roof of Wilcox’s Union Square studio) that dreamily introduces six stories about the past and present of life, art, energy, fame, events, and cosmic forces that ebb and flow continuously below.

The big, in-the-round screen circles around you (duck and just walk into it), so you can really take in the view, all the way from the Battery to beyond the Empire State Building.

Still from T.J. Wilcox’s panoramic 2013 silent film installation, In the Air. Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

The film cycles from dawn to dusk, but along the way, Mr. Wilcox takes you on little journeys as you enjoy his movie panorama. The experience is one where you begin to see New York through his eyes, past and present together.

After a few minutes, one of his panorama screens fades you see a short, reflective, poetic, subtitled NYC story-movie. It’s a quiet experience — bringing you back to the Thirties when the Empire State Building was contemplated to be used as a zeppelin-docking station, to the present when 14th Street is one of the best vantage points to contemplate the out-of-this-world spectacle of Manhattanhenge, and the days of glitter, glamour, and grit of Warhol, Gloria Vanderbilt, and fashion-industry icon, Antonio Lopez.

Watching Wilcox’s Gloria Vanderbilt vignette from outside the installation. Photo: Bill Orcutt.

He reminds you that Gertrude Whitney, the museum’s founder, long ago succeeded in a custody battle to care for little Gloria. The film takes you to her apartment and reflects on the fact that Gloria was “in the public eye from birth” and celebrates her vibrant artistic, business, and family accomplishments (re: plenty of shots of Anderson Cooper). Another mini-film focuses upon a nano-second in Warhol’s life, when his Factory crew unfurled Mylar balloons to welcome the arrival of the pope-mobile to New York City in 1965.

Weegee’s Variant of Untitled (Striking Beauty) is hung in an adjacent gallery. Courtesy: Whitney Museum

In his musing on the film about fashion-illustrator extraordinaire, Antonio, Wilcox reveals his surprise that Antonio’s studio was located right next to his own building, takes pleasure in asking us to gaze out over the community where so much magnificent art was made, careers enlivened, and life lived.

In a tiny back-room gallery, the Whitney has installed a few other reflections on skies over the City – Weegee’s lightening strike behind the Empire State Building and Yoko’s Sky TV, are two – but the big “wow” here is Mr. Wilcox’s ability to take us on a 35-minute journey in and among the streets and skyline that from his quiet, contemplative perch.

It’s quite a collage of memory, reflection, mythologies, politics, history, and beauty. Click here to see the Whitney’s slide show of the storyboards in Wilcox’s studio, and listen to him talk about it this beautiful work in this YouTube video:

Wool Smart Art Covers Guggenheim

Posted on January 20, 2014 by MsSusanB

Wool’s untitled 2000 work, silkscreen on linen on the top-floor gallery. © Christopher Wool

Wool’s gigantic 2000 silkscreen installed on the top-floor gallery, a cool, hands-off approach to large-scale work. © Christopher Wool

The Saturday night art crowd packing the free Guggenheim night for the last weekend of the Christopher Wool retrospective was drinking in the cool, edgy dissonance of this savvy, art-world action artist. Check it out in person before January 22, or download the new free Guggenheim app and take the tour on your iPhone.

Gazing down from the third or fourth floor, the smooth rungs of Mr. Lloyd-Wright’s spirals punctuate tiers of Mr. Wool’s own spirals, splatters, wipe-outs, word art, and grids of gritty photos. The massive crowd of locals, tourists, and moms with tweens provided a lively audience for work originally germinated in the rough-and-ready Lower East Side during the days when NYC was not-so-nice.

Just up the ramp in the two-story mini-gallery, the curators hung pieces that sum up Wool’s lifetime achievements – large-scale enamels on aluminum using gigantic, ironic gestures and banal advertising-art flowers; channeling the down-and-out feel to 80s New York with cool word-and-letter art evoking graffiti; and appropriating phrases from revolutionary texts that seem to be about one thing but are actually heady philosophical and literary references that only super-smart people would “get.” The work is stunning.

Wool’s 2010 untitled enamel on linen uses erasures, spray, and wipeouts. © Christopher Wool

Then a slightly more chronological journey begins through the rest of the museum. Wool began appropriating rollers used by painters to paint tenement walls and halls to apply decorative patterns methodically across his own giant canvases – taking a bit of the decision making out of the act of painting. At the time, it was an in-you-face comment directed toward more lyrical, or expressive gestural painters. Of course, he would screw up the pattern just a little to add a little extra dig at the current scene. Oh, yes, he mostly kept the color palette to black and white. Smack!

By 1987, he injected letters, words, and texts onto the white canvases and began collaborating with other artists in the “no wave” Downtown scene, which was rife with 8mm filmmakers, performance artists, and musicians reacting against the more commercial artists emanating from CBGB or other clubs. He collaborated making books, always an ephemeral, revolutionary choice.

Hydrant photo that resembles the above work, from East Broadway Breakdown, one of 160 inkjet prints, 1994–95/2002. © Christopher Wool

Hydrant photo with spilled water whose shape resembles the silkscreen above. Photo from East Broadway Breakdown, one of 160 inkjet prints, 1994–95/2002. © Christopher Wool

In the 1990s, the street was used as a start point for both his own photo books, which were shots of lonely urban areas that he photocopied over and over to obtain the I-don’t-care-about-glossy-quality look of the published work. When accessing the iPhone audio track in front of the 1990s photo piece, East Broadway Breakdown, Mr. Wool and the curators pretty much knock your socks off by blasting the superb Nation Time by Joe McPhee right through the earbuds. Thanks to them, you can hear the masterwork music that inspired Wool at the time, jolting you back the mean streets of Chinatown and East Broadway that sparked so much creative juice.

Installation view of Wool’s provocative all-word 1989 Black Book Drawings. Photo: David Heald.

The top rungs of the show are gorgeous, even though that was probably not the original intent – cool, monumental works that are layered, blotted out, white-washed, and splattered over. If a line is blotted out, do you still see the line? If you do your painting on rice paper, is the end result different than when you do it on a canvas?

When you get to the final gallery way, way up top, Wool has digitized fragments of many of these earlier gestural images and silkscreened them onto the giant pieces of stretched linen. Very, very cool and covered in micro-dots from the silkscreen mesh. Check out the works on the Guggenheim website.

Stunning installation of Christopher Wool’s work in Mr. Wright’s building. Photo: David Heald.

If you don’t know Wool’s work, using the iPhone guide provides a valuable context, showing you the works while you listen to the audio and watch other artists talk about Wool. Access some samples here.

But most of the people we saw on Saturday were standing in awe before the gigantic gestural canvases without the aid of an interpretive guide. Thousands of people were examining the curator notes, and moving forward and back within Mr. Wright’s bays to take it in from all angles…the kind of slow, deliberate, thoughtful face-to-face encounters that Mr. Wool likely treasures from cool admirers.

Artistic and Ethnic Identities Explored in La Bienal at El Museo

Posted on December 2, 2013 by MsSusanB

Ethno Portrait Cultural Test Shot by Sean Paul Gallegos alongside Reserved Ancestry made from Air Jordans, Arrow collars, and fur.

Indian Removal Act Skeuomorph by Sean Paul Gallegos wearing Reserved Ancestry (on right) sculpted from Air Jordans, Arrow collars, and fur.

Get to know some of NYC’s best new artists by strolling through El Museo del Barrio’s La Bienal 2013 on the Upper East Side before January 4.

Full of fun, reality, street life, high-art provocation, and what it’s like to be an artist in 2013, the show has it all – installations, videos, performance-art artifacts, photographs, sculptures and even a tintype. Take a look at some of our favorites on the Flickr feed, and go to the excellent website for El Museo La Bienal 2013: Here is Where We Jump, the seventh edition of this working contemporary artist showcase, which explores both formal-art and ethnic identity issues.

Small detail of Ignazio Gonzalez-Lang’s Guess Who – a grid of 100 inkjet prints of police sketches that appeared in NYC newspapers papers. In this 2012 work, he arranged very similar portraits side by side.

Look closely at the pieces by Sean Paul Gallegos, an artist who considers himself a product of colonial ancestry (his father is Tiwa and Spanish from New Mexico and his mother is Cree and French from Canada). Gallegos juxtaposes his “anthropological” self-portrait with his Native American-inspired headdress made entirely out of cut-up Air Jordan sneakers, Arrow shirt collars, and fur.

A grid of 100 inkjet prints of police sketches by Ignazio Gonzalez-Lang, an NYC Puerto Rican artist, also puts identity to the test. For Guess Who, he’s collected police sketches that have appeared in New York City newspapers, slapped them into a grid, and arranged them in pairs that look all-too-similar. Super thought-provoking.

The Cortez Killer Cutz Radio installation by Eric Ramos Guerrero, a Philippines-born artist, also gets into your head but out of your comfort zone. It’s a full-size, two-room simulation of a Southern California hip hop/R&B radio station streaming late-night song dedications by girlfriends to their incarcerated boyfriends.

Close-up of the doll-artist contemplating her studio output in Julia San Martin’s Dollhouse

Julia San Martín’s Dollhouse, on the other hand, is a very tiny, detailed installation of a look into the mind and work of the artist. On a miniscule set of her studio, a doll-size painter works on her paintings and drawings, which the Chilean-born artist often rearranges and reshuffles to mimic the working life and consternation of deciding what to paint and what to show.

RISD-trained Gabriela Salazar also looks inward to her studio experience, but in a more formal way. As an artist that often creates large-scale constructed works in the community, she’s taken the remainders of some of her projects – wood shims, foam, cardboard, felt, rope, and wire – and turned them into tiny-scale minimal masterworks, all displayed in a type of “gallery show within a show.”

Ramón Miranda Beltrán’s historic documents cast in concrete, featuring President McKinley’s treaties that gave Guam and the Philippines to the US after the Spanish-American War

And be sure to look for Gabriela Scopazzi’s hilarious Amarilla video where she seranades a captivated group of llamas with an aria. (Sorry, it’s for in-person viewing only and not on the web.)

Work through the show’s website to see more of each artist’s work and learn more about what makes them tick.

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