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

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

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!

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.

Ocean!

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

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