Ben Wolf at SPRING 2011 ART + ARCHITECTURE SHOW

Ben Wolf (b. 1983, Nashville) is a Brooklyn-based sculptor whose abstract assemblages and installations express the “decadence of abandonment” in architectural materials including rotten boards, rusted stair wells, peeling paint and other found and salvaged objects. Wolf often works on a large scale, taking over and reconfiguring entire lost buildings and towns. He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 2005 and in 2008 received a Brooklyn Arts Council grant for public art works and a residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). In 2010 Wolf participated in a Power House Productions group residency in Detroit, constructing a massive sculptural work from the remnants of forgotten homes. An avid traveler, Wolf has produced and exhibited projects in Australia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland, as well as throughout the U.S. You can see more of Ben’s work on his website.

Art + Architecture 2011 at the Gowanus Ballroom
55 9th Street Building 61, Brooklyn, NY 11215 April 8th – April 17th

Ryan McGinness' Women Series

Ryan McGinness' new "Women" Series debuted during Basel last week. Four new pieces were hung on the walls of a local strip club flanking three stages. It was awesome to see the pieces glowing under the black light as both art world folks and underage kids tried to act too cool for school. Here's a video that was looping at the Madonna Strip Club on South Beach during the opening showing some of McGinness' process drawings. I swiped a poster off the doors of the strip club last night before heading back to NYC!

25 Women Sketch Process (2010) from Ryan McGinness Studios, Inc. on Vimeo.

JR in Shanghai

Beautiful new work from French street artist/photographer JR. After photographing portraits of people from the neighborhoods and cities he works in, he installs his large scale images on surrounding architecture. Check out his transformative work in the Rio favelas here. Thanks Wooster!

CREATURE :: Kim Ann Foxman + Andy Butler

KIM ANN FOXMAN "CREATURE" [mr.intl records] from KIM ANN FOXMAN on Vimeo.

Phenomenal Video for Kim Ann Foxman on a beat by Andy Butler. Gorgeous styling and art direction with cameos from Shane (hood by air) and Tigga Calore. This feels like the new New York. Check out mixes from Shane and some of his partners from the Ghe20 Gothik party here!! Thanks Sai!!
GHE20 GOTHIK PRESENTS TRIBUTE 2 $HAYNE BY PHYSICAL THERAPY by GHE2O GOTHIK MIX SERIES

NY Art Book Fair

Of course all my favorite things in life are bulky and heavy. Books being on the top of my list. This weekend is a great opportunity to add to my ever expanding collection at the fifth annual NY Art Book Fair. Sponsored by Printed Matter, the fair is FREE! hosts over 200 international presses, booksellers, antiquarian dealers, artists and publishers from twenty countries, offering the best in contemporary art book publishing. Check it out at PS1 starting Friday and take a stroll around the corner to grab some buffet Indian eats at Five Star. Not bad for a day's work!

Jayelle Hudson

Sao Paulo-based Jayelle Hudson's photographic b+w kaleidoscopes are beautiful and serene, surreal nature-scapes that blur reality and fiction.

Banksy x Simpsons

Fred Tomaselli @ Brooklyn Museum

I love Fred Tomaselli. His psychedelic collages remind me of the infinite nature of the universe and how all things are interconnected. The Brooklyn Museum is opening a mid-career survey of his work (1990-present) this Friday and I am psyched. Besides two newly created works specific for this show (see Night Music for Raptors above), there are 12 works on paper making their US debut. These new works have transformed the front page of The New York Times into a backdrop for his work.

Brooklyn Museum
October 8 - January 2

Tomaselli’s artwork draws upon a wide range of sources from both popular culture and art history, and from his own hobbies of gardening, kayaking, and bird-watching. Growing up near the desert in southern California, Tomaselli felt the influence of nearby theme parks, with their manufactured reality, and the music and drug counterculture of Los Angles in the 1970s and 1980s. His distinctive melding of these influences coalesces into a folk-driven, utopian vision of the mythic American West and of lush gardens as sites of contemplation, loss, and possible redemption. One of the pioneering artists who moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1980s, Tomaselli continues to live and work in the borough.

Marwencol

The wonder and healing power of imagination!
"Marwencol" is a documentary about the fantasy world of Mark Hogancamp.

After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark builds a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populates the town he dubs "Marwencol" with dolls representing his friends and family and creates life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helps Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds of the attack. When Mark and his photographs are discovered, a prestigious New York gallery sets up an art show. Suddenly Mark's homemade therapy is deemed "art", forcing him to choose between the safety of his fantasy life in Marwencol and the real world that he's avoided since the attack.

"Marwencol" is playing at the IFC center and Hogancamp's photography is on view at the Esopus Gallery. Thanks Stacy!

The Creators Project x Beijing

Check out J.Lam's great B+W photo gallery of the Beijing Creator's Project. This traveling multi-media art extravaganza was brought to the masses by Intel+Vice. A really phenomenal production featuring an innovative group of young creatives! Check the full dedicated Creator's Project site here.

Gil Scott-Heron x Chris Cunningham

POPRALLY PRESENTS
New York Is Killing Me
featuring Chris Cunningham
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
8:30–11:00 P.M.
MoMA

Join us for the world premiere of Chris Cunningham's audiovisual remix of Gil Scott-Heron's "New York Is Killing Me," which will be projected across three screens. This unique event will be preceded by a conversation about the making of the video with Cunningham and Barbara London, Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art. Doors and bar open at 8:30; conversation starts promptly at 9:30. Buy tickets here.

Cult filmmaker, musician, photographer, and producer Chris Cunningham is known for his highly acclaimed music videos for artists including Aphex Twin, Björk, Portishead, and many others. Since 2003 his focus has moved to music: he worked as a producer on The Horrors' Mercury Prize–nominated Primary Colours; won a Cannes Golden Lion for his reworking of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" in his 2008 Gucci Flora commercial; and created audiovisual remixes for Gil Scott-Heron and Grace Jones. Recently, he has headlined festivals around the world with his new live show, and is presently working on his first audiovisual album.

Check out this heartbreaking portrait of Scott-Heron from last month's New Yorker.

Devin Troy Strother @ Richard Heller

Checkout Devin's solo show at the Richard Heller Gallery and see some of the amazing work he put together during his artist residency this summer.

Devin Troy Strother
Please Don’t Act a Fool in the Club: A Memory of the Sugar Shack & Stuntin’ Like My Daddy
September 11, 2010 - October 9, 2010
2525 MICHIGAN AVE, B-5A
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA
Opening Reception: 6:00 - 9:00 pm

Garden of Eden

Collage Artist Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo is dope! Check out some of her new work, just in time for Fashion Week!

Chillzine Season 2

Attention attention! Chillzine Season 2, Issue 7 is out!! This Seoul-based arts 'zine is lovingly curated by three creative superstars who met one another in art school. "Chill," in Korean, can be loosely translated to mean, "to color" or "to paint" and Maia, Jaewon, and Heoji have used the medium of the 'zine to paint their own world into reality. After a short hiatus, the zine is relaunching this month with collaborations from photographer Jay Lewis! Pick up the newest issue at Printed Matter in NYC, Donlon Books in London and throughout Seoul.

Papa Issue :: Bold and Spicy

As a Houstonian, Ive always been lucky enough to have access to one of the best contemporary Latin American collections in the United States (see Mari Carmen Ramirez, curator for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston) and even saw Inverted Utopias in '04, the landmark exhibition of up-and-coming Latin American artists like Jesus Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Thanks to the beauty of the interwebs, we can roam through the mini-galleries of Papa Issue, a collection of works by Latino artists from around the diaspora working across different mediums. Architecture, music, illustration, conceptual art, and interiors seek to inspire people to create. Thanks TSA!

Sissy Bounce @ PS1

Long Island City's PS1 Warm-Up series has been a summer institution. Young architects get the whole run of the front courtyard to design into an adult playland for NYC party people and DJs and obscure art bands get to play a museum (not necessarily a museum crowd.) This coming Saturday, the Queen of New Orleans bounce, Big Freedia and her sidekick DJ Rusty Lazer bring a little bit of the Third Coast to the East Coast. They recently tore it down at a party with Ninjasonik in BK but I got put onto the subgenre, "sissy bounce" from a recent NYTimes article. The sound is familiar from growing up hearing underground beats in Houston but this bubbling culture is gender-bending, female-centric, fast, and LIVE! I might brave the crowds this weekend to check it out! Read more from the Times article below.

If “gay rapper” is an oxymoron where you come from, how to get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar? What in most cities might seem plausible only as some sort of Sacha Baron Cohen-style provocation is just another weeknight in the cultural Galapagos that is New Orleans. Sometime after midnight on the sweltering Thursday before Memorial Day, the giant plasma-screen TVs at the Sports Vue bar (which “proudly airs all major Pay Per View events from the world of Boxing and Ultimate Fighting”) were all switched off, and the bar’s backroom turned into a low-lit, low-ceilinged dance club, where more than 300 people awaited a return engagement by Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business and who is, to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” a superstar.

At 1 a.m., though, Freedia (pronounced “FREE-da”) was still a mile or so away, fulfilling a paid celebrity-hosting gig at Club Fabulous. The fabulousness of Club Fabulous, on this night at least, seemed a function mainly of its Mardi Gras-themed décor, conceived and executed by Freedia herself. Otherwise the crowd was sparse, largely straight and listless. Freedia looked weary as she leaned back against the bar with her dyed, diagonally cut bangs over one eye, holding a cordless microphone. (Freedia, who is about 6 foot 2 and very powerful-looking and dresses in a fashionable but recognizably masculine style, is genetically a man; but neither she nor anyone who knows her uses masculine pronouns to refer to her.) When “Rock Around the Clock,” one of her signature songs, came on the sound system, a few women walked over to Freedia and stood with their backs to her, but the atmosphere wasn’t quite electric enough for them to really start dancing, and the men just continued playing pool. After a while, Freedia’s D.J. and de facto manager, who goes by the name Rusty Lazer — a whippetlike 39-year-old white man with a salt-and-pepper beard — let Freedia know that it was time to move on to the next show.

NYC Premiere: Downtown Calling

FINALLY!! This Wednesday my good friend Ben Velez's film, Downtown Calling, is making its NYC hometown debut. Chronicling the underground art, music and culture scene of New York during the late 70's and narrated by Deborah Harry, this film is an important document of the people and creative energy that birthed an undeniable NYC youth culture. The icons of Punk, Hip Hop, DJ and Downtown culture continue to influence the way we see and think about the world around us today! Buy tickets here and support the film at the NY International Latino Film Festival!

Rest in Power RAMMΣLLZΣΣ

Its with great sadness that we say goodbye to one of the most influential philosophers, visual artists and MCs of his generation, Rammellzee. He was a prolific artist who's visual style influenced graffiti writers around the world and his flow influenced everyone from the Beastie Boys to Cypress Hill. His collaged sculptures and large scale paintings always reminded me of how infinite the universe is and the power of combining the mundane into something profound and beautiful.

Black Coffee - South African Design

Jacques van der Watt and Daniça Lep, the duo behind South African fashion label Black Coffee, are creating some of the most interesting and forward-thinking silhouettes. Using a mix of jersey and wool-blends for their Winter 2010 collection, the label put together an amazing installation/pop-up store at Arts on Main, a Johannesburg cultural compound located in the heart of the city. Avant-goth librarian describes the unique draping and playful use of print and layering. Check out some pics of the installation below, plus a video for their elegant concept dress which can be worn countless ways.

24-Hour Party People @ The Whitney

My excuse for not doing as much museuming as i'd like is usually some line about the crowds on the weekends and my inability to check out those grand institutions on the week days. No more blah-blah-blahing from me! For the closing days of the Whitney Biennial (which I still havent seen) they'll be open around the clock, 24 hours a day. Starting Wednesday at 12am, artist Michael Asher's proposal for the Whitney goes live and the museum will be open continuously until Friday, May 28th. Who wouldnt want to run around a museum at 2am?! Check out more details here.