People can be forgiven for not realizing that one of the masterpieces of Brutalism, an architectural style with a name that isn’t exactly soft and fuzzy, is just north of New York City in Orange County, New York. But then again you may not need to remember that fact since the Paul Rudolph-designed Orange Country Government Center (aka the “masterpiece”) may be facing demolishing very soon in order to be replaced by an unoriginal colonial-wannabee structure that looks like the architectural equivalent of clipart.
March 13, 2012
Posted inNews
Some Answers in Cyclist Mathieu Lefevre’s Death
Last October, we reported about the death of Williamsburg artist Mathieu Lefevre, who was killed by a truck. Now, recently discovered court documents explain why the NYPD’s Accident Investigation Squad decided not to charge the truck driver who ran over cyclist Lefevre. It’s worth mentioning that the explanation isn’t exactly satisfactory for everyone, except the NYPD.
Posted inArt
A View from the Easel, Part 7
This edition travels to Paris, Glasgow, Chicago, Kansas City and Long Beach, California.
Posted inArt
New Project to Help Citizens Document Themselves on Satellites
LOS ANGELES — They fly over us everyday, photographing and documenting us with startling regularity. We’ve seen our homes and some of us have spotted our cars, but only rarely are we able to get enough detail that we can see ourselves. Bemysatellite.net, a new initiative from Los Angeles artist and designer Bora Shin, aims to tap into these satellites and create a living document of the people it photographs so regularly, starting with LA’s 10 million residents.
Posted inArt
Pulling Down the Curtain
Franklin Evans is a Brooklyn-based artist. You might have heard of him as a result of his involvement in PS1’s 2010 installment of Greater New York. I knew little about the artist until I walked into his current exhibition Eyes on the Edge at Sue Scott Gallery. He is a painter and installation artist of the self aware/self conscious brand. Upon entering the gallery the visitor is forced to walk across a Plexiglas-faced bookshelf installed on the floor. Resting on the upturned shelves is a carefully installed library — presumably the artist’s own.
Posted inOpinion
Twitter Portraits of Rupert Murdoch
Artist Michelle Vaughan continues to render tweets into letterpress. Her 100 Tweets project was the first to give the quips of the twitteratti some permanence in print but now the queen of the twitter press has created a small series devoted to the dark lord of right-wing news media himself, Rupert Murdoch.
Posted inArt
The Legacy of Edward Gorey Preserved at Columbia University
In 2010, Columbia University received a donation of an extensive collection of Edward Gorey items from Andrew Alpern, an architectural historian and attorney who spent four decades acquiring the illustrator’s work. The 700 objects in the collection include almost every edition of every book Gorey published, as well as drawings, etchings and pieces of his design and illustration work. Gorey Preserved, now exhibited at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, is a glimpse into the collection, and into Gorey’s mischievously dark world, where death could be as playful a character as a cat on a unicycle.
