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.
Naomi Safran-Hon
With Lace and Concrete, an Israeli Artist Reframes Abandoned Palestinian Homes
Naomi Safran-Hon has — by her own admission — terrible taste in music, which explains how she became a regular listener of Israel’s trashiest radio station, Galgalatz.
Rendering Politics in Cement and Lace
A bit more than a year ago, Naomi Safran-Hon opened her studio to the public as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s GO community-curated project and was worried that no one would show up. The 29-year old Safran-Hon was one of the 1,708 artists who participated, and in the end, she was chosen as one of the five winning artists to exhibit her work at the Brooklyn Museum. Visiting her studio in Crown Heights, I’m not surprised that a large number of people who showed up voted for her work, which combines cement and lace and possesses a haunting quality that forces you to linger in front of her paintings.
See the Work of GO Brooklyn’s 5 Winning Artists
Last September, GO Brooklyn presented a chance for New York locals to discover a new side of non-traditional art neighborhoods, with 1,708 artists opening their studios to visitors in areas like Fort Greene, Crown Heights, and even Coney Island. After a round of voting and a final list of 10 nominees, the Brooklyn Museum’s curators have chosen five artists to show at the museum.
5 Go Brooklyn Artists Chosen for Brooklyn Museum Show
We already chimed in about GO Brooklyn’s Top 10 nominees but now they field has been shaved to five artists who will be featured in an exhibition, which opens December 1, at the Brooklyn Museum.
GO Crown Heights: Away from the Hype
I’m skeptical of crowd-curating and crowd-sourced art-prize voting. I’ve written about it here on Hyperallergic. Still, as the date approached, I found myself really excited about this past weekend’s GO open studios event, organized by the Brooklyn Museum — not because I wanted to vote for who would win a show at the museum (I’m not voting), but because I wanted a chance to meet artists in the neighborhood where I live, Crown Heights.