Four New York City museums are joining Google’s online Art Project, adding hundreds of works of art to the growing online collection. MORE
Brooklyn wins, yet again.
Six out of every 10 people who buy Edwin Class’s I❤NY subway maps buy the one that says “Brooklyn” inside the big red heart. About three of every 10, he figured, buy the general, non-borough-specific map. And the rest is divvied up between Queens and the Bronx. Once in a very long, long while, someone asks him for a Staten Island edition.
—Union Square station
Are we alone in the universe?
Studio 360 wants YOU to answer the question in an illustration. The deadline for the contest is 11:59pm ET February 3, 2013
In 1913, New Yorkers got their first glimpse of Cubism and abstraction, there was a near-riot in Viena at a concert of atonal music by Schoenbergn and in Paris, The Rite of Spring burst on stage with inflammatory results.
Sara Fishko takes us on a tour of this unsettling, shocking era of sweeping change — and the not-so-subtle ways in which it mirrors our own uncertain age.
5 Things I Learned from the “Discovering Columbus” exhibit at Columbus Circle.
- Christopher Columbus is a hero — or at least that’s how most adult visitors like to think of him.
- Kids are more likely than their parents to see Columbus as a colonizer, enslaver or the guy whose germs helped decimate Native populations. So I heard from a security guard who’s eavesdropped on some fierce intra-family debates.
- A lot of people don’t have much faith in academic scholarship, especially if it casts Columbus in a negative light. “It’s history. We rewrite history all the time,” said Scott Mackey, from Rochester. “So whoever’s teaching it, it’s their twist.”
- In 1891, the year before the statue was erected, 11 Italian-Americans were lynched in New Orleans. This I heard from John Mancini, head of the Italic Institute of America, who’s been a vocal critic of the exhibit because it doesn’t present these kinds of facts.
- The exhibit is a hit. It’s sold out just about every day, and every visitor seems to have a smile on their face. Columbus is Fun!
The exhibit is up through November 18. More info at the Public Art Fund.
(Photo by Tom Powell Imaging)
![jillathrilla:
New York City has experienced a biking boom in recent years, but the flip side of that trend is oddly sinister: hundreds of abandoned bicycle corpses are rotting away all over the five boroughs, and it’s a lot harder to get rid of them than you might think.
In late April, Transportation Nation, a public radio reporting project of WNYC, asked readers and listeners to submit photographs of abandoned bikes throughout the city. They received more than 500 submissions and mapped them online. Now, the bikes’ afterlives have become an art exhibit at The Greene Space in Manhattan. From August 1 through September 4, WNYC’s Abandoned Bike Project photos will be on display as “a collection of the detritus of urban mobility in a busy city.”
“Once we got in hundreds and hundreds of photos of these abandoned bikes we started to notice there was a rhythmic beauty in how they were all so similar but they were all so unique in the peculiar but familiar form of decay,” says Alex Goldmark of Transportation Nation (who’s also a contributing editor at GOOD). “And we have a performance space here that supports art events. The director suggested we make an art exhibit because some of [the photographs] do rise to the level of art.”
A crowdsourced project to get abandoned bikes off the street results in an urban art project. My latest for GOOD. Read more…](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8i6mcvEFg1qdvy24o1_500.jpg)
New York City has experienced a biking boom in recent years, but the flip side of that trend is oddly sinister: hundreds of abandoned bicycle corpses are rotting away all over the five boroughs, and it’s a lot harder to get rid of them than you might think.
In late April, Transportation Nation, a public radio reporting project of WNYC, asked readers and listeners to submit photographs of abandoned bikes throughout the city. They received more than 500 submissions and mapped them online. Now, the bikes’ afterlives have become an art exhibit at The Greene Space in Manhattan. From August 1 through September 4, WNYC’s Abandoned Bike Project photos will be on display as “a collection of the detritus of urban mobility in a busy city.”
“Once we got in hundreds and hundreds of photos of these abandoned bikes we started to notice there was a rhythmic beauty in how they were all so similar but they were all so unique in the peculiar but familiar form of decay,” says Alex Goldmark of Transportation Nation (who’s also a contributing editor at GOOD). “And we have a performance space here that supports art events. The director suggested we make an art exhibit because some of [the photographs] do rise to the level of art.”
A crowdsourced project to get abandoned bikes off the street results in an urban art project. My latest for GOOD. Read more…
nybg:
We got this excellent submission from the Parks Department, so we’re publishing it in honor of the return of the Garden’s Greenmarket on June 13. ~AR
The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation is pleased to host A Window on Nature: Art of Asuka Hishiki, an exhibition of over 35 watercolors illustrating a poetic and detailed observation of plants and insects. Her portraits of vegetables from New York City’s celebrated Greenmarkets and her imaginative plant-like insects from her Association of Type B metamorphosis Entomologists (ATBE) series are on view April 26 through June 6, 2012.
Influenced by a childhood reference book of insects, plants and animals, as well as her fascination with the work of 18th century naturalist and scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian, Hishiki’s paintings are painstakingly detailed and exacting—individual hairs are visible on her renderings of life-sized ants. Offering a visually nourishing treat, Hishiki faithfully captures crisp, ripe colors of locally grown vegetables, as well as the sensuous formations of heirloom tomatoes, which resemble Edward Weston’s peppers. In her fanciful ABTE series, plants grow butterflies instead of flowers and brilliantly patterned caterpillars sprout mushrooms on their backs. Though a stickler for details, she also forms personal relationships with her subjects, naming each of her tomatoes based on their shape (Mr. Big Nose and Yakuza Brothers) and creating intricate histories for her whimsical insects.
Photography and video have since become the norm in nature documentation—recording species faster and more accurately than painters. However, Hishiki wonders if they record her subjects as she sees them. Cameras have one fixed, instantaneous vision, yet she notes that people need time to see an object. Painters have multiple viewpoints and time to study and reflect on their subjects, selectively capturing details. Hishiki displays her paintings on stark white paper that suggest the form of collection boxes with the hope that others will see as much beauty and invest the time in her specimens as she does.
The Arsenal Gallery is dedicated to examining themes of nature, urban space, wildlife, New York City parks, and park history. It is located on the third floor of the NYC Parks & Recreation headquarters, in Central Park, on Fifth Avenue at 64th Street. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except for holidays. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.nyc.gov/parks/art or call 212-360-8163.
NJ Gallery Celebrates WPA-Era Art and its Modern Appeal
Joblessness. Frustration. Doubt. These are issues that many Americans are still facing as the nation strives to recover from the worst recession seen since the Great Depression.
The scaffolding wrapping around Google’s New York City headquarters at 111 Eighth Avenue is showcasing a 450-foot long, 4-foot tall mural that refers to famous landmarks and key figures in Chelsea’s past. Read more.
(view the document here)
So in keeping with my thoughts from yesterday about finances, I’ve decided to follow through on a tweet from last night and make my finances public.
Thank you to everyone who sent me private messages relating your stories. They were helpful and inspiring.
Artist Man Bartlett has created the public Google Doc “$” that shows his income and expenses.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Italian, ca. 1527-1593)
Water
1566
Oil on limewood
67 × 52 cm
© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna
___
The Milanese and the Hapsburgs couldn’t get enough of him during his 16th century lifetime but, after his death, Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s works languished unnoticed in some moldering closet of art history for over 300 years. Until, that is, the Surrealists came along, drew inspiration from his anthropomorphic paintings and touted the artist’s name once again.
There is something fishy going on here… I just can’t quite put my finger on it.—A.P.
Beautiful pen-and-ink drawings of wind by artist Peter Jellitsch based on algorithms that predict how air will move through highrise buildings (via)
In case you can’t tell from this image, those little lines are arrows.
