Film
As an ever-increasing amount of street art documentaries appear online, along with pleas for Kickstarter donations to prospective films, I, a longtime street art enthusiast, find it near impossible and entirely overwhelming to try to watch all of these films. With the recent release of yet another s
Art
Before AIDS activists plastered posters reading "Silence = Death" on New York City walls and ACT UP shouted, "Fight Back, Fight AIDS," the disease had already claimed the lives of thousands of New Yorkers. The first five years of the AIDS epidemic were characterized by a lack of information about th
Books
Holding a sign that reads "I am your worst fear, I am your best fantasy," a photograph of a proud and defiant woman at a gay liberation march in the 1970s opens Phaidon's newly published Art & Queer Culture, illustrating the dual visions of queer identity by the field of art history.
Art
Despite my longtime interest in New York art from the 1970s, I somehow never imagined delving into an artistic process called, quite literally, "rectal realism." However, last week, I found myself in a small room at the Gershwin Hotel at "Fresh Faces from the 1970s" a film screening and discussion,
Art
With the permanent invasion of art fairs into the art world economy like a plague, most galleries, no matter how cutting-edge or avant-garde, seem to believe (whether from actual or perceived necessity) that they must participate in all of the increasingly frequent art fair seasons. This endless str
Art
From hard-edged, angular, and zig-zagging lines inspired by graffiti tagging styles to thick, swooping curved lines reminiscent of calligraphy, Opera Gallery's Saber & Rostarr exhibition sets up a fascinating and fruitful comparison between two artists who combine street culture and aesthetics with
Art
Meandering the dim halls of Hunter College's admittedly hideous MFA Studio Building in Hell's Kitchen for their recent MFA Open Studios, peering into every open door I could find, I expected to be fascinated by the selection of emerging artists contained within the small, often shared studios — but
Art
Before pride parades, Stonewall, the It Gets Better Project, and "Born This Way," a circle of friends, lovers and artists unabashedly embodied and represented their own homosexuality. This group coalesced around Paul Thek, expressing their identity during a deeply conservative era, as seen in the im
Art
Wandering through five jam-packed floors of art student studios at the New York Academy of Art MFA Open Studios last Friday, I realized that despite the Academy's emphasis on traditional figural art, many artists transcended this stricture through the use of multiple medias to depict nature-inflecte
Art
"You're all too young and too clean-cut to remember, but I was a star in the golden age of Times Square sleaze," snears burlesque superstar Tigger-James Ferguson, playing a washed-up Times Square prostitute in my favorite of his performances. That piece kept popping up in my mind while visiting Scot
Art
Wading through the crowded opening of the Independent Art Fair, held in the former Dia:Chelsea building with its ridiculously narrow stairway, I found myself doing more reading than gazing at art. While this was partly due to the inclusion of Printed Matter, the seminal alternative book and zine sto
Art
When I entered the doors of Scope New York, taking place in the Skylight at Moynihan Station, part of the former James A. Farley Post Office, I almost walked right into a can of spray paint. Jutting with a horse head and a skateboard from the walls in French street artist Shaka’s large-scale, three-