Last week, the “first real inauguration of the [Konbit Shelter] community center with workshops and events brought by Ayiti Resurrect and Ayiti Cherie Healing” took place in Bigones, Haiti. Spearheaded by Brooklyn-based artist Swoon, the Konbit Shelter Project was created with the idea that a group of artists, engineers, architects, and builders could pool their individual knowledge, resources, and time to make a lasting difference in post-earthquake Haiti. [Konbit Shelter blog]
January 2011
Posted inNews
Museum Files $2 Million Suit Against Photographer for Posting Photos
Photographer Thomas Hawk visited the World Erotic Art Museum in South Beach took photos, he claims he didn’t see the no photography sign. Now the South Florida institution filed “fradulent” DMCA notice with Flickr and Yahoo, which owns Flickr, has threatened Hawk’s entire account with permanent deletion without future warning.
Posted inOpinion
Who Needs Bricks When You’ve Got Pixels?
Production outfit The Third & The Seventh has made a movie that allows us to experience architecture better than ever before, showing iconic buildings in multiple perspectives simultaneously and suffusing them with soft, unearthly light. Viewers would be excused for thinking that these clips were shot on a real camera, but the really amazing part? It’s all three-dimensional computer rendering, created by hand. Incredible.
Posted inArt
Global Africa Project Dissects the Idea of Africa
The Museum of Art and Design, New York’s The Global Africa Project makes an audacious claim: to present the art, design, architecture, and craft of the contemporary African diaspora. Given that Africa is the world’s second largest continent, with a population of over one billion dispersed among 54 distinct countries—never mind the millions of people of African descent living elsewhere—any attempt to survey its production and influence seems impossible. However, the curators — Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, formerly director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and currently the Charles Bronfman Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design, and Dr. Leslie King-Hammond, founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art — have embraced the unwieldiness of the notion of “Africa,” creating an exhibition that intentionally raises more questions than it answers.
Posted inOpinion
Killer Last Meals
Graphic designer James Reynolds recreated the final meals of nine American prisoners executed between 1963 and 2006, then photographed each on an inmate-orange cafeteria tray.
Posted inArt
A Winter Pilgrimage to Utah’s Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” (1970) is arguably the most famous, least directly experienced work in the Land Art cannon. Most know the work from iconic aerial photographs, some by Smithson’s accompanying text and some by his weird and monotonous film. Built in 1970, the 6,650 tons of black basalt paved in a 1,500 foot long counter-clockwise coil was underwater and invisible for nearly 30 years until the early 2000’s. During the first days of 2011, artist Suzanne Stroebe and I ventured into the frigid landscape of Northern Utah to Rozel Point, the home of Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake. On January 2, Smithson’s birthday (he would have been 73 and coincidentally died in 1973), we visited the site for the afternoon and returned two days later to spend an incredible 23 hours with the jetty and its lunar-like, desolate landscape.
Posted inOpinion
5 Reasons Egypt Won’t Get Their Central Park Stele Back
Apparently Egypt is starting to get jealous of Greece and wants to repatriate Cleopatra’s Needle, the trophy of cultural dominance granite stele that’s been festooning Central Park since 1881. Too bad 129 years is totally long enough for finders keepers! Here are five reasons Egypt won’t get their stele back. So there.
Posted inArt
What Has Hide/Seek Lost? A Review
On November 30, 1994, choreographer Bill T. Jones’s experimental dance piece “Still/Here” opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The work featured live dancers performing in front of video footage of terminally ill people discussing their sicknesses. Nearly a month later, dance critic Arlene Croce blasted the piece in a now-infamous essay in the New Yorker. Announcing that she had never seen “Still/Here” and had no intention of doing so, Croce wrote, “By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism. I think of him as literally undiscussable.” She went on to classify that category of undiscussability as “those dancers I’m forced to feel sorry for because of the way they present themselves: as dissed blacks, abused women, or disenfranchised homosexuals—as performers, in short, who make out of victimhood victim art.” In many ways, the National Portrait Gallery’s current, controversial, and excellent special exhibition Hide/Seek feels like a resounding rebuttal of Croce’s thesis.
Posted inOpinion
Buy Atelier Van Lieshout’s Utrecht Blob House
Call it the anti-condo: Dutch artist and architect Joep van Lieshout’s Atelier van Lieshout is offering up their first house for sale, and this inhabitable work of art is not your average villa. Draped with an intestinal blob-tunnel, Lieshout’s one of a kind Utrecht building is available for a cool one million euros, but it’s not for the faint of heart (or eye).
Posted inArt
Met Staff Share Their Quirks Through “Connections”
The Metropolitan is really hitting hard with its new media efforts lately, coming out with an interesting project in conjunction with its Lod mosaic exhibition, as well as a new presentation called “Connections,” an online series of photo slideshows with audio featuring museum staff giving short presentations of pieces in the museum collection that fascinate them, based on a particular theme or idea. The videos are fun insights into the personalities of staff and the collection, but they could go deeper into the art objects that they present.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading Debuts
Mary Louise Schumacher on Steve Martin’s art world novel — Carolina Miranda on the “new shape of street art” in ARTnews — “Smithsonian” of Arab art in Qatar — Filip Dujardin’s architectural remixes — Star Wars Modern blogs on art and technology
Posted inOpinion
I See Balloon Dogs Everywhere, Shhh Don’t Tell Jeff Koons
In response to Jeff Koons’s zany copyright lawsuit, I thought it would be fun to collect some awesome balloon dog-related merchandise and images from across the web.
