New York

The Touch | NY exhibit is something we’re looking forward to checking out here in town, showcasing products and installations by 14 artists and designers specializing in the use of recycled materials. Products on show include jewelry, furniture, apparel (a skirt made out of plastic spoons!), lighting, and more.  The artisans featured include Estúdio Manus , Domingos Tótora, Tatiana Sperhacke, Blindesign, and Thomas Beale.

Touch NY
Opening reception: 18 May 2008, 7-9pm
May 18-20, 2008
Honey Space
148 11th Avenue
New York, NY 10011

[via CoolHunting]

This past January, we reported on the man-made waterfalls that will be gracing New York City’s East River towards the end of June. Created by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, the project has since steadfastly gained steam – with scaffolding already having been built. Both the Circle Line Downtown and New York Water Taxi have announced they’ll be offering tours (some of them free) of the four falls . Gothamist reports that NYC is expecting tourism revenues to increase by $55 million due to the project.

 NYC Waterfalls

[via Gothamist]

Hmmm… cupcakes and techies? A combination worth trying out. The bloggers behind Cupcakes Take The Cake will be bringing their sweet talk to the real world at Cupcake Social 2.0, to be held at The Delancey Rooftop Bar in New York. Open to everyone, the event will feature free cupcakes provided by Sugar Sweet Sunshine (which, in our opinion, is the best cupcake bakery in town) as well as an interesting mix of bloggers, developers, and other sweets lovers in the tech industry.
When: Thursday, May 8 7-9PM
The Delancey Rooftop Bar
168 Delancey Street
New York, NY 10002

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This new art exhibition at Ad Hoc Art Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, takes a look at the ‘temptation of possibility’ - resulting in a pastiche of images and experiences from people standing on the brink of change, hope, or peril. The month-long exposition will feature the works of Josh MacPhee, Billy Mode, Chris Stain and The Polaroid Kidd, as well as various found material and industrial detritus. Inside visitors can also experience a lifesize railroad shanty town (or at least the recreation of one), with photographs from the prolific Polaroid Kidd filling the walls, offering a candid glimpse at boxcar culture. The exposition will run from May 2 - June 1.

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Some of you readers are probably aware of Russell Davies’ Interesting conference - a bunch of folks turning up to talk and listen to other folks about what they find interesting. A day off to recharge the batteries and get the brain thinking a little more passionately. It seems to be a rather attractive proposition - this year’s Interesting London sold out in 3 hours! The event is also being held in Sydney and Amsterdam.

A long time collaborator of Russell Davies is planning to hold an Interesting New York. David Nottol is looking for volunteers and speakers to help. Details here.

[We’ll update this page as we get more details]

UPDATE: Dave says:

Thanks for the huge outpouring of support.  We have more than enough
volunteers for the planning committee.  I'll send all of you an email about
a time and place to meet up next week to choose a conference date, venue and
who we know that can help us with specific things like website design and
hosting, stage lighting and sound, etc.  Thanks again everybody.

To celebrate the release of Sabine Seymour’s new book, Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science, and Technology, New York’s Eyebeam Museum will be hosting an event featuring wearable technologies, a runway show by the participants of Eyebeam’s Spring 2008 Girls Eye View program, followed by a discussion with Seymour.

The event is free and begins at 6pm on May 22, 2008.

Read the rest of this entry »

New York City has declared May “Bike Month“, and is hosting a contest to find the most bicycling-friendly employers in the city. Also in the works are initiatives to increase the number of cycling commuters. These include adding 200 miles of bike lanes by 2009 and installing 37 special bike storage shelters and 5,000 bike parking racks by 2011.

[via NYT]

The most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami includes more than ninety works in various media that span the artist’s entire career, installed in more than 18,500 square feet of gallery space.

Born in Tokyo in 1962, Murakami is one of the most influential and acclaimed artists to have emerged from Asia in the late twentieth century, creating a wide-ranging body of work that consciously bridges fine art, design, animation, fashion, and popular culture. He received a Ph.D. from the prestigious Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he was trained in the school of traditional Japanese painting known as Nihonga, a nineteenth-century mixture of Western and Eastern styles. However, the prevailing popularity of anime (animation) and manga (comic books) directed his interest toward the art of animation because, as he has said, “it was more representative of modern day Japanese life.” American popular culture in the form of animation, comics, and fashion are among the influences on his work, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, as well as a wide range of collectibles, multiples, and commercial products.

The exhibition MURAKAMI explores the self-reflexive nature of Murakami’s oeuvre by focusing on earlier work produced between 1992 and 2000 in which the artist attempts to explore his own reality through an investigation of branding and identity, as well as through self-portraiture created since 2000. Two works examining these subjects were a part of a group show, My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation, presented at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001.

Among the works included in this large-scale survey tracing the trajectory of Murakami’s artistic development are many of his acclaimed sculpture figures including the 23-foot-high Tongari-kun (2003–4); Miss Ko2 (1997), a long-legged waitress who has become one of the artist’s signature characters; and Hiropon (1997), a Japanese girl jumping a rope created by milk spurting from her gargantuan breasts. Among the paintings on view will be Tan Tan Bo (2001), as well as Tan Tan Bo Puking—a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002).

This show will explore a very small and specific type of artmaking exemplified by contemporary people like David Shrigley, Raymond Pettibon, Nedko Solakov, and Tucker Nichols. This kind of art, which we refuse to name, is somewhat crude, usually irreverent, and always funny. It exists some - where between one-panel cartoons and text-based art. What we’re talking about, basically, is a show of about 100 works that subscribe (unknowingly) to the following criteria: a) they’re drawings, usually very basic or crude; b) these drawings are accompanied by hand-drawn text on the artwork, and this text refers to the drawing, much like a caption; c) this caption-text is funny. So in many ways you might say these are cartoons, because we’ve just listed the qualifications of a cartoon.
But the works in this show are usually found in galleries, not newspapers or magazines, and so we have something interesting to think about: Is humor allowed in art, and in what forms? Are captions allowed in art, and why? And most importantly, why doesn’t David Shrigley spell better?

- Dave Eggers

With works by: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Cohen, David Berman, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Georges Braque, Jeffrey Brown, R. Crumb, Henry Darger, Marcel Duchamp, CM Evans, Shephard Fairey, David Godbold, Alasdair Gray, Philip Guston, Paul Hornschemeier, Jay Howell, Chris Johanson, Maira Kalman, Kenneth Koch, David Mamet, Quenton Miller, Tucker Nichols, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Raymond Pettibon, Dan Perjovschi, Amy Jean Porter, Steve Powers, Royal Art Lodge, Peter Saul, George Schneeman, Olga Scholten, David Shrigley, Shel Silverstein, Nedko Solakov, Ralph Steadman, William Steig, Saul Steinberg, and Kurt Vonnegut