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Lower East Side

Surprising, And Some Unsurprising, Findings About Where NYC’s Artists Live

by Michael Anthony Farley on July 14, 2017

A new study from the Center for an Urban Future looks at where artists live in New York City. What neighborhoods in New York City are losing artists? Gaining them? Those answers aren’t surprising. But the dominance of pricey Uptown Manhattan nabes (in terms of total artist populations) certainly is.

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We Went to the LES: Solo Shows of Chris Burden and Patricia Treib

by Michael Anthony Farley and Patricia Margarita Hernandez on May 12, 2017

Michael: In the belly of the beast that was Frieze Week, I met up with Patricia Margarita Hernandez, Gallery Director/Assistant Curator of P! to check out some openings in the gallery’s neighborhood. We ended up at two solo shows: Chris Burden at Shin Gallery and Patricia Treib at Bureau.

I liked both of them a lot more than she did. Below, we talk nerdy masculinity, whether abstract paintings have content beyond “decor”, weird curating, and bad lighting.

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Monday Links: New Trend Piece Discovers 30 Year Old Art Trend

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on August 29, 2016

Lisa Cooley Gallery, one of the most influential scene-makers of the Lower East Side, is closing its brick-and-mortar location on Norfolk Street. Cooley declined to comment on why the gallery closed, but in her email announcing the gallery’s closure she wrote, “Although this chapter is ending, another one is right around the corner—more sustainable, more rewarding, and more interesting. In my mind, this change will continue and extend the direction of the recent gallery program. Stay tuned. I hope to show that growth can be about ideas, not just about scale, and I look forward to seeing everyone in person soon. Lastly, consider taking a break from art and donating to one of these organizations:Food Bank of New York, Planned Parenthood, Children’s Defense Fund”. She sounds disillusioned, as anyone working in this field should be. [ARTnews]

Vogue has identified the hot new trend in the art world: small-scale, intimate paintings supplanting large-scale installations. Except, A: installation art is just as popular as ever, B: all of the work they highlight is of a vein people have been mining since the 80s, and C: none of it is particularly “small.” Essentially, this is just a list of painters in their 20s and 30s who are cool. [Vogue]

Is this the last we’ll hear about the insane lawsuit against Peter Doig? Three legal experts weigh in on the outcome and its place in the history of authentication law. Surprisingly not as dry of a read as one would guess. [artnet News]

Jayne Merkel and Julia Wertz document and mourn some of the innumerable small—and vital—businesses shuttering across New York City as rents rise. Doesn’t it feel like huge swaths of Manhattan are turning into a suburban mall? Even the East Village is getting a Target. [The New York Times]

But the East Village is also getting a shelter for LGBTQ homeless youth, named after Golden Girl Bea Arthur. Arthur donated $300,000 to the Ali Forney Center, and supported it several times before passing away in 2009. [Refinery29]

Theo Ponchaveli has painted a mural of Lee Harvey Oswald on the side of a barbershop in Oswald’s former Dallas neighborhood, now an arts district. Some neighbors are predictably unhappy about the associating the assassin with the area. [Dallas News]

More than 750 women artists gathered in Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s courtyard this Sunday to mark the closing of their exhibition “Evolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016”. Here’s a video from the gathering. [The Los Angeles Times]

Watch the destruction of Pompeii by Mount Vesuvius in this 8 minute 3D animation. [Open Culture]

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A Door-Shattering Breakthrough At Denny Gallery’s Pop-Up “The City & The City”

by Emily Colucci on July 8, 2016

Nothing underscores the fraught tensions of gentrification quite like the deafening sound of a large glass door shattering behind you. Moments after I entered Denny Gallery’s East Broadway pop-up space this Wednesday, the gallery’s door splintered with a bang and a startling crack. Fragmenting into a wall of tiny shards, the broken door trapped the gallerists and me inside. “You’re not art press, right?” jokingly asked Director Robert Dimin. Well, actually…

As the initial shock wore off, Dimin, between calls to his building contractor and the gallery’s main Broome Street space, tried to piece together what happened. Was it the scalding summer heat that weakened the glass–a product of faulty construction and sweltering temperatures? Or was it something more nefarious such as a warning sign from a neighborhood hostile to symbols of gentrification like a gallery?

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Goodbye To All That: “InFinite Futures” and “The Past Will Be Present” at ABC No Rio

by Emily Colucci on June 23, 2016

In the contemporary Lower East Side–a neighborhood of unlimited brunch spots, luxury condos and pristine white-walled galleries, artist-run punk haven ABC No Rio stands defiant as a welcome anachronism. Whether interpreted as a graffiti-covered blight or a monument to the heavily romanticized culture spawned downtown in the late 20th century, ABC No Rio has acted as a hub for a community of artists for over three decades. The space remains inexorably tied to the last gasps of the neighborhood’s gritty essence, which is why the plans for its sleek renovation seem almost shocking.

With the demolition and reconstruction finally on the horizon after years of delays due to bureaucratic red tape (AFC even published a series of interviews on ABC No Rio in 2012 in anticipation of its forthcoming closure), the nagging question remains: will the experience of ABC No Rio be the same without the fear of falling through their stairs or tumbling into some industrial waste in the backyard?

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This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Give Thanks That Anything Is Happening at All This Week

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on November 23, 2015

Let’s be honest: With Thanksgiving and Art Basel just around the corner, there’s dick all to do around here. Nobody is opening their show this week and if they are it’s something really weird. Naturally we found that for you: Art School Acid Dropout invites stand up comedians tell stories while art school drop-outs illustrate the stories. The rest are talks, screenings and closings: Adeola Enigbokan lectures on her Renters Archive project tonight, where she chronicles the personal histories of rents after the second World War. Saturday MoMA screens “Goodnight Mommy” a terrifying film about two children who believe their mother is an imposter after she returns home with a botched plastic surgery job. And if that doesn’t suit your fancy there’s always the NOoSPHERE closing. The nonprofit art space that focuses on international collaborations and exposure for artists from Norway will move from the LES to Greenpoint. This is their current space’s last hurrah.

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GIF of the Day: Ben Dowell’s 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo (One Mind)

by Michael Anthony Farley on September 18, 2015

These eerily seductive/hypnotic GIFs are a preview of Ben Dowell’s video piece “2008 Lamborghini Gallardo (One Mind).” There’s something oddly satisfying about the sleekness of the car’s design and finish contrasting with the humanity of the hand-held camera. As a viewer, I feel voyeuristically complicit in the desire to gaze upon (or possess) the design object, and I don’t even drive!

The full-length video will be screening at Pure Potentiality, which opens this Sunday at 110 Ludlow Street from 7-9. True to the trend we’ve spotted of Lower East Side exhibitions contextualizing art with theatrical staging, the work will be presented in a fictional New Age guru’s live/work apartment. Artists will appropriately be showing work that’s meditative or references self-help. Pure Potentiality is curated by Andrea McGinty, who impressed us with her ambiguously cheery mash-ups of positive mantras and humidifiers last month.

In addition to Ben Dowell, the show features work by Katherine Aungier, Al Bedell, Elizabeth Ferry, Konsta Ojala, Jennifer McDermott, Nicole Reber, Misael Soto, Aaron Steffes, and Esther Ruiz whose sculptures I also reviewed last month and feature neon and very-new-age-friendly crystals.

This show looks like it’s going to be good—and after a week of openings and publication launch parties, whose chakras won’t need a little cleansing?

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Friday Links: Chelsea Still the City’s Art Center

by Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley on September 11, 2015

“’Dismaland’ is spectacular, but its ideas are not everything you want a candidate for history’s largest work of conceptual art to be.” Dan Brooks argues that sarcasm is the new kitsch—the default tone of the internet and now an unfortunate end unto itself in the production of culture. “As with memes, Banksy asks us to substitute the sensation of recognizing a reference for the frisson of wit.” [The New York Times]

More galleries opened in the Lower East Side than any other neighborhood in 2015. Still, Chelsea is by far the capital of the city’s art scene, contrary to reports of a mass exodus in the face of rising rents. Surprisingly, Bushwick seems to not be living up to its hype as the new art destination: only three new galleries have arrived there this year, less than DUMBO and the Upper East Side. [Crain’s]

Where do famous artists teach? This piece could be handy for art-school-shopping, despite its unfortunate “listicle” format. SVA’s MFA candidates get one-on-one time with Fred Wilson and Marilyn Minter, while Ai Weiwei might be offering courses at Univeristät der Künste Berlin next month. [artnet News]

Does the drama surrounding Anish Kapoor’s “Dirty Corner” never cease? Versailles municipal councilor Fabien Bouglé has filed a complaint against Kapoor in response to the artist’s decision to not remove anti-semetic graffiti from the sculpture. Kapoor’s statement: “I think it’s a wonderful reversal; I’ll see him in court… It shows how insane the whole thing is.” Yes, it is insane. So why won’t he just let them power-wash it? [Artforum]

How many more Pablo Picasso shows can MoMA launch? Normally, isn’t a show that would begin to interest us, (we agree with Hyperallergic’s Benjamin Sutton, who describes Picasso as “the Steven Spielberg of European modernism — flashy, prolific, proficient at a vast range of genres, and overrepresented in the mainstream cultural canon.”) but it seems to be getting good reviews. Sutton says there are a number of surprising and inventive works. Roberta Smith at the Times loves the show so much she called the exhibition art. And then there’s the ridiculously titled Jerry Saltz review, “How Picasso the Sculptor Ruptured Art History”. We haven’t been able to bring ourselves to read that one—he makes the show sound like an injury that occurred during sex—but he clearly likes it. [The Internet]

This is really cool. The Hamabul Art Collective is opening the unofficial “Iranian Embassy in Jerusalem”. The group is made up of Israeli, Persian, and Arab artists who hope to spark dialog by highlighting Iranian art, film, and music in spite of their respective governments’ refusals to engage in diplomatic or economic relations. [The Art Newspaper]

Jane Rosenberg, the artist behind the infamously-bad courtroom sketch of Tom Brady, is now seeking legal action against unauthorized reproductions of the portrait. In the past few weeks, it’s showed up on T-shirts, mugs, and phone cases. If she ends up in a courtroom herself, she should cash in with a self-portrait. [The Boston Globe]

An incredible review by Michael H. Miller on Mike Kelley’s show at Hauser & Wirth. On the glass maquettes of Kandor, the capital city of Krypton, Superman’s home planet, Miller says the work makes him feel incredibly sad. “ Curators and dealers seem to be pushing for Kandor as a major part of Kelley’s legacy—or maybe the work is just easier to get on loan—but either way I find so much of it to be mediocre. “Kandor” seems to me to be the product of a man endlessly tinkering with an idea but never really getting it to arrive anywhere beyond Kelley’s general metaphor of alienation…” [ARTnews]

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We Went to the LES and the LES Went All Out

by Michael Anthony Farley Whitney Kimball on September 10, 2015

This week, the art world came back from its summer vacation with a bang. Nearly every gallery in the Lower East Side opened their fall season last night with theatrical staging. From ball pits to frame a Baldessari to fooding a gallery basement, big productions were the look.

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KANSAS, a Tribeca Stalwart, Moves to the Lower East Side

by Corinna Kirsch on July 8, 2015

Manhattan galleries continue to migrate east. Case in point: KANSAS, which has spent several years in Tribeca on Franklin Street, will start making the move this summer to 210 Rivington Street. The Lower East Side is known for its emerging galleries, home-grown boutiques, dumplings—and some artists still live and work there. Tribeca, on the other hand, is where celebrities and their pooches vie for sidewalk space among million-dollar apartments.

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