Bender becomes a street artist in New New York
Odd Street Sculpture in Williamsburg
Ever since we published Luna Park’s lovely photo essay on New York’s sculptural street art, I’ve been looking more closely at work that projects out into public space.
Yesterday, I spotted one of the oddest works of street art I’ve yet encounter (and there has been quite a bit). It reminded me of the work of NE Thing Co., while remaining very contemporary and even more abstract than the work of that 1960s Canadian art group. The object was connected to the wall by a small strip of wood near the top, and it projected out an inch or two.
I spotted it around 11am and then by 9:30pm the same night it was gone. I don’t remember it being there the day before. Good things never last.
Two questions … What the hell was this thing? And who was it by?
Chatting with #class Co-curator Jennifer Dalton About Ethics
I spoke to artist Jennifer Dalton about the #class exhibition at the Ed Winkleman Gallery in New York and specifically about the issue of ethics. As the co-curator of the show, William Powhida was the other half of that curatorial team, I really wanted to know her take on an exhibition that seemed to swallow up part of the New York art world for a few weeks.
The full post on the Art21 blog here.
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Photo caption: Spotted on the chalkboards of #class.
Some People Aren’t Happy With New York’s MTA
Good find by Luna Park
Lesley Vance, “Untitled (21)” (2009)
I was very impressed with the paintings by Lesley Vance at this year’s Whitney Biennial. Vance is able to pack so much into her small jewel-like canvases. Some artists resort to larger formats, which can help mask their artistic shortcoming by using scale to produce a wow effect (though that doesn’t always work, think Julian Schnabel), but Vance is too sophisticated a painter to need that visual trick.
While the compositions can suggest figurative elements that appear amid the swirls of color, any semblance of representation quickly dissipates to reveal a canvas that is wholly abstract. Even though the works appear thoroughly contemporary, they did remind me a great deal of 17th C. Dutch painting (think love child of Frans Hals and Willem Claeszoon Heda) because of their size, dark shadowy backgrounds, and rich colors.
The row of paintings by Vance was one of the Biennial highlights.