Last week I got an email advertising a collaboration between Shepard Fairey’s apparel company OBEY and the Keith Haring Foundation, resulting in T-shirts, tank tops and baseball hats — including one with an unsettling combination of Haring’s three-eyed face and Fairey’s OBEY graphic — sold at mall hipster-mecca Urban Outfitters. This was enough to make begin questioning the Keith Haring Foundation’s treatment of the artist’s legacy — and then I heard about the Tenga x Keith Haring sex toys.
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 inNews
Smile! Yoko Ono’s App Will Send It Around The World
Leave it to Yoko Ono to create one of the cheeriest, global participatory art projects with an iPhone.
Posted inOpinion
Privacy, Sexuality and Museum Politics at the Jewish Museum
Last month the Jewish Museum removed San Francisco artist Marc Adelman’s controversial photo installation “Stelen (Columns)” (2007–11) from its exhibition Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex. Adelman’s piece, which is part of the Jewish Museum’s collection, consists of 150 profile pictures found on the German gay dating site GayRomeo.com taken at Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
Posted inOpinion
Olek Sells Cellphones To Pay Her Legal Bills
Knitting her way through a cellphone commercial, crochet-crazy artist Olek is Samsung’s latest spokesperson, starring in a commercial for their Galaxy Note smart phone.
Posted inNews
Ai Weiwei Blocked From Court, His Legal Consultant Goes Temporarily Missing
Today, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was harassed by police in an attempt to block him from attending his scheduled court appearance at the Beijing tax bureau.
Posted inArt
America Runs On Graff: An Interview with Moody
Even though both genres risk their freedom by putting their art up on the streets, the worlds of graffiti writing and street art are often separated and even completely antagonistic. Rarely does a graffiti writer turn into a street artist or vice versa. Enter Moody, aka Mutz.
Posted inArt
At Greenpoint Open Studios, Wacky, Weird and Beautiful Art
From the Pencil Factory to the Fowler Arts Collective to tons of individual artist studios, the Northside Art Festival’s Open Spaces proved that Greenpoint remains a calmer, more meditative home for artists in comparison with the bustling hipster streets of Williamsburg. While wandering around, I didn’t get the sense that I was taking in the most edgy, avant-garde art being made in New York, but I was still able to locate studios where amusing, wacky and beautiful art is created.
Posted inBooks
A Comic Book Written on the Streets
Paging through New York-born, Brazil-based street artist Tito na Rua’s Street Comics Vol. 1, a story of the search for lost love through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, I couldn’t help but become fascinated by the possibilities of a narrative being told in the streets, even though I’m not the biggest fan of comics or comic-based street art.
Posted inOpinion
Do Jay-Z and Jeff Koons Really Need $1 Million for Water Tank Art?
For twelve weeks in the spring of 2013, the organizers of the Water Tank Project, a public art project set to raise awareness on water scarcity, plan to decorate 300 water tanks around New York City with big name artists. But you have to wonder, is it worth it?
Posted inArt
At the Northside Arts Festival, the Art Is on the Streets
When going to the Northside Art Festival this weekend, remember that the art is not just in the galleries and open studios but some of the best art is on the streets of North Brooklyn.
Posted inArt
Too Many Paths Leading Every Which Way at Caribbean: Crossroads of the World
Spending all day being party-bused between the three museums — El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Queens Museum of Art — who are hosting the self-proclaimed landmark exhibition “Caribbean: Crossroads of the World,” I was repeatedly told by the museum directors, curators and artists just how significant and groundbreaking the exhibition is. However, I left the final museum feeling confused by the jumbled mix of artistic styles and periods shoved together.