Posted inArt

Dread Scott Is Bringing the Wars Home

I encountered Dread Scott’s curious flag project, “Flags Are Very Popular These Days” (2011), on Facebook and was fascinated by its simplicity. Last month, the artist placed the flags of four nations (Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan) on overpasses in upstate New York. These symbols of pride for four Muslim-majority countries— two of which America is currently (and officially) at war with — must have felt jarring to passersby who may not have been able to recognize their meaning or discerned their origins.

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A Touch of Bushwick In Chelsea

If Friday night is the night for gallery openings in Bushwick, then last Thursday in Chelsea was a type of artistic foreplay. You could tell that something was in the air by the density of Bushwick regulars in front of Chelsea’s Standpipe Gallery on West 25th Street. And indeed, a group show Fresh Paint From Bushwick, which features seven emerging Bushwick talents (Gina Beavers, Holly Coulis, Halsey Hathaway, Rachel LaBine, Kerry Law, Adam Simon and Josette Urso), was just opening that night.

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Do You Know What It Means To Dream About New Orleans?

By the ordinary way of reckoning such things, there are considerably fewer artists participating in this year’s Prospect.2 biennial in New Orleans than in the event’s first iteration three years ago. But if artist and provocateur William Pope.L’s piece for the exhibition turns out according to schedule, there will be a lot more artistic visions on view around New Orleans this fall than the smaller number of artists might lead you to expect.

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How Comfortable Are You in the City, Really?

Can anyone ever be truly comfortable in New York? I’ve lived here my whole life and still feel the daily stresses of subway rides, traffic, overcrowding and of course insanely high prices (tickets to MoMA cost $25 now?). These Manhattan blues are part of the reason I was both intrigued and skeptical of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a pop-up event space in the East Village that will present a series of lectures, film screenings and interactive programs all based around the idea of confronting comfort in our cities and urban development. With corporate sponsoring shoved right into its very title, I wondered if the Lab would stick to a privileged, glossy view of urbanization or actually offer legitimate “solutions for city life,” as the program’s website states. Even the word “comfort” suggested to me that these solutions would be targeted only towards a particular social class who has the resources to take advantage of them.

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Restless and Peaceful with Li Wei

Li Wei’s “Being Absent,” which showed at Linda Gallery this past June. BEIJING — I arrived at Dongfeng Art District one afternoon, a 20-minute drive east of the more famous 798 and Caochangdi arts districts in northeast Beijing. It’s a short but somewhat winding drive away from the shinier parts of Chaoyang District, Beijing’s most economically-developed area. “Dongfeng” […]

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Lesser-Known Visions of Hispanic Culture in Manhattan

Masterpieces, hidden treasure, absolutely free. These are just some of the accolades of New York’s Hispanic Society, a museum that unfortunately only gets 25,000 visitors a year. With a roster of artists that includes rock star names like El Greco, Velasquez and Goya it’s hard to swallow that the Society gets so few visitors a year. Why is the collection so underrepresented? What in the name of Goya is going on here?