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Art, Work, and the Workaday

The lobby gallery at the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed midtown office tower at 1285 Avenue of the Americas, with its partitioned walls flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows on the north and south sides of the building, is unusually well-suited for both casual and concentrated encounters with art.

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The Pursuit of Art, 2012

Tomorrow, Patti Smith will turn 66. The day before yesterday, on the 27th, her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye reached the same age. “We’re three days apart,” Smith announced last week in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art at her “walk-in” concert celebrating the birthday of the French writer Jean Genet.

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City of Women

There is something ineffably comforting about To Be a Lady, the exhibition curated by Jason Andrew and subtitled Forty-Five Women in the Arts. The second time I visited the show, on a misty, autumnal afternoon, the light-filled bays at 1285 Avenue of the Americas seemed to lead back to a once intimate, now forgotten place.

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How to Be a Lady Painter

I think it’s funny that Patricia Albers’s recent and authoritative biography on Joan Mitchell was given the subtitle “Lady Painter.” It’s my only guess that Mitchell’s lifestyle and her painting were so out of character for the time that the term becomes ironic. The artist was known for her camaraderie with Cedar Tavern macho dudes like de Kooning and Pollock, her hangout sessions with beatnik poets, her ability to party, and her tendency to drink and sleep around with bravado. At the time these activities and attitudes were thought to be reserved for men. Mitchell gradually carved out a space for her paintings to be given the same treatment.

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A Handstand in Bushwick

Handstand. That is just another of the items on the long list of the things Paul D’Agostino excels at doing. As a Bushwick resident since 2007, D’Agostino has actively worked to shape the art scene in the neighborhood through his countless activities. Bushwick-based nonprofit Norte Maar is currently presenting a solo show of Paul D’Agostino’s work, titled Appearance Adrift in the Garden.

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Monster Madness on Beat Night

Picture it: a skeleton with a keen eye for color paints a Zombie-pin-up-girl with severe angular outlines against a cartoonish background. What is it? It’s Ryan Ford’s “Humanary Stew” (2011) at Factory Fresh, and it proclaims the talent of the undead. This comic scene is the perfect introduction to some intriguing new work on view in Bushwick this month.

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Your Weekly Art Rx

Here at Hyperallergic we are allergic to a lot — dust, nuts, cats, insipid art criticism, bad art shows, people who suck. Enter our weekly remedy: a list of exhibitions and events that will serve as your weekly dose of art medicine. Here is this week’s prescription …

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Summer Guests in Bushwick

The mercury in your thermometer can easily climb to 100+ degrees during these dog days of summer in north Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. The concrete streets are helplessly desolate and even the Bushwick pigeons seem to have given up. Bushwick has been quieter lately, and the local art scene might have been hiding in the close proximity of blasting air conditioners most of the time, but even with all these factor you can definitively say that it certainly is not dead. In fact, several prominent Bushwick galleries and art spaces opted out of the summer break and have been serving up refreshing art options.

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Don’t Forget Fashion 时装 Moda МОДА

Almost completely left out of the Jeffrey Deitch-organized Art in The Streets at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art and minimally referenced in its exhibition catalogue and other recently published surveys of graffiti and street art, the historical importance of Fashion 时装 Moda МОДА has been lost to a generation of artists and graffiti-lovers. It’s time for that to change.