Friday, December 18, 2015

The Last of the 2015 New York Art


Only six weeks later, we come to the end of all the New York art posts. Ta-da! This last one is a bit of a grab-bag -- first off lots of cool stuff I saw in various Chelsea galleries, then a bunch of murals I liked around town, then a bunch of smaller-form street art (stickers, tags, paste-ups, etc) mostly from Chelsea and the East Village. Enjoy!

Above: Svenja Deininger at Marianne Boesky



Zhan Huan at Pace 


Carol O’Malia at Stricoff


Robert Rauschenberg at Pace


Louise Fishman at Cheim & Read


Keith Mayerson at Marlborough 


Na Kim at Doosan


Jesse Burke at ClampArt 


Simon Hantai at Paul Kasmin


Max Ernst at Paul Kasmin


David Hockney at Paul Kasmin


Maria Kalman at Julie Saul


Carroll Dunham at Gladstone


Tal R at Carolina Nitsch















Thursday, December 17, 2015

The Ongoing Poem Series About the Summer of 2006 Brings Us July in December


July 26, 2006
Today I saw a man on the street with

two not-very-ripe bananas
unblemished pale yellow skin
still tinged with translucent green
poking out of what may have been
a special little mesh banana pocket
on the side of his big black backpack





image source is here

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

The Chronicle Books 2015 Employee Art Show


Of the many (and there are many!) rad annual traditions at Chronicle Books, one of my personal very favorites is the Employee Art Show. People around this joint are insanely creative and it's so fun to see what they make. Plus it was a chance for me to (nervously) show off some of my own drawings (or maybe they're paintings? or maybe they're drawings? the jury's still out on that one), as seen above. Yay for art!




Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Lulu Ama


Mabel made an artist's book. Entitled Lulu Ama, it is full of mysteries. Why is it bound (with a binder clip) on the right rather than the left? Why are the images on the verso rather than the recto? Why is it shaped like this? That last question, at least, has an answer--that the paper came from some sort of little die-cut shaped notebook someone gave her--but what the image on the notebook cover was, or why it was that particular shape, is lost in the mists of time. However, leaving all of that aside, as a big fan of art and books and art books, I personally find this to be a perfect object. Am I biased? Yep. But that doesn't mean I'm not also right.













Monday, December 14, 2015

Ocean!


We love the ocean. Like really really love it. We should go there more often.

Friday, December 11, 2015

At MoMA


Because the Picasso show was taking up one whole floor, the Modern and Contemporary collections at the MoMA, which usually take up two floors, were squished into one. The result being that only the very biggest and best-est and most famous-est pictures were on show. If this sounds like an embarrassment of riches, it was. But unlike too much rich ice cream, say, or too much rich red wine, this did not feel one bit like overkill. Rather it felt entirely marvelous to wander these halls of wonders. To ooh and ah and see and have all this magic go in through your eyeballs. The photos are merely a sad shadow of the real-life experience, I fear, but, hey, they may give you at least a rough notion.

Above, Basquiat


Rothko


Rothko


Brancusi


Heilmann


Gaugin


de Kooning


van Gogh


Derain


Popova


Fankenthaler


Pollock


Mondrian


Mondrian


Motherwell


Matisse


Mattisse


Matisse


Matisse


Matisse