Sitting in an intimate audience at the LGBT Community Center on a recent Tuesday night, I observed an unexpectedly inspirational conversation: three queer artists with different practices revealed their use of art as a means to construct a community, counter invisibility, and declare acceptance of their bodies in a Visual AIDS–organized panel titled Positive Assertions.
Emily Colucci
Emily Colucci is a recently graduated NYU interdisciplinary Master's student with a focus on art history and gender/sexuality studies. Her interests lie in graffiti, street art and New York-based art from the 1970's and 1980's.
Posted inArt
Narcissister’s Art Hates You (But Loves Narcissister)
One of my favorite quotes on art comes from filmmaker and sometimes visual artist John Waters, who declares in one of his photographic pieces, “Contemporary art hates you,” which may be the perfect description of Brooklyn-based performance artist Narcissister’s first solo exhibition Narcissister Is You at Envoy Enterprises.
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The Vandals Are No Longer Too Hot To Handle at MoMA
Last week, I witnessed an art event I thought would possibly never occur: the Museum of Modern Art made a serious step forward in recognizing the cultural importance of graffiti writing and hip hop at their fascinating panel discussion, “Writers and Writers: Narrative on the Page and in the Street.”
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Has Deborah Kass Saved Warhol Appropriation?
PITTSBURGH – In her mid-career retrospective Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After at the Andy Warhol Museum, Deborah Kass accomplishes the seemingly impossible by breathing new life and critical ideas into the appropriation of Andy Warhol’s work.
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Watch Out! Punk Is History at the New Museum
Sitting in the New Museum theater last Thursday night with an audience full of old-school punk and avant-garde musicians and artists such as Alan W. Moore, Coleen Fitzgibbon and Becky Howland, who were all a part of Collaborative Projects, the artist collective that founded ABC No Rio and organized the Times Square Show, I witnessed a generation of New York art and culture defining their own historical importance.
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Experiencing Emily Noelle Lambert’s Personal Creative World
Sitting on one of Emily Noelle Lambert’s free-form, functional sculptures and surrounded by other found wood sculptures, huge canvases, and smaller paintings tucked around her Heart Heat exhibition at Lu Magnus, I had the distinct feeling that I entered into the artist’s personal world, a place where color, form, and balance skillfully link the two and three dimensional art objects all around.
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Why Are We Revisiting the Times Square Show?
Thirty-two years after being labeled the “first radical art show of the ’80s,” the Times Square Show, a raucous and revolutionary DIY art exhibition held in an abandoned massage parlor on 41st Street and Seventh Avenue in the old dirty and devastated Times Square, has been revived by the Hunter College Art Galleries in the exhibition Times Square Show Revisited.
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Living in Your Art: Apryl Miller on Transforming Her Home Into a DIY Installation
Known for her poetic collages and crafty furniture, artist Apryl Miller has also been working for years on a one-of-a-kind art installation: her own home. She spoke with Hyperallergic about living with and in her artwork, the spirit of do-it-yourself, and the importance of creating a unique space.
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The Dirty Scene of Downtown New York
From artist David Wojnarowicz’s glasses to advertisements for the Pyramid Club in the zine the East Village Eye, signs from Bronx nonprofit Fashion Moda to flyers advertising performances by punk and No Wave legends Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch and Patti Smith, the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University is no ordinary library. Fales holds the Downtown Collection, an archive of art, books, photographs, videos, objects, journals and other materials from the New York City downtown scene’s iconic figures and art spaces.
Posted inBooks
Stickers: Stuck-Up Piece of Crap
Looking at Stickers: Stuck-Up Piece of Crap: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art, a history of stickers from various subcultures, from graffiti and street art to skating and punk music, two years after its publication, the book remains significant as the first major publication on Do-It-Yourself sticker culture; yet the book has also become outdated, as the sticker scene, at least in New York, has evolved past glossy, printed stickers.
Posted inNews
What Are We Losing with the Disappearance of LIC’s 5 Pointz “Graffiti Museum”?
In September 2013, Long Island City’s graffiti museum 5 Pointz will likely be demolished, destroying about two decades worth of aerosol art.
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Artists Remember Pop Art and Soho Pioneer Ivan Karp
A significant figure in the development of Pop Art and the Soho gallery scene, Ivan Karp is dead. He died at his home in Charlotteville, New York, on Thursday, June 27 at the age of 86.