Louise Despont (Hannah T)

Louise Despont is an artist who works and lives out of New York, where she was born in 1983; and Bali, Indonesia. She possesses a bohemian flair that bleeds into her artwork. Ms. Despont chooses to create very large drawings on seperate sheets pulled from antique accounting ledgers, draftsman paper, and other gridded papers. With the help of her assistant, Nicole Wong, Ms. Despont uses colored pencils, graphite, and a hefty collection of architect/artist stencils to make her ideas a reality.

She creates her intricate artwork with elements pulled from her infinite amount of inspiration images—old photographs, Buddhist medical charts, various textiles, patterns, beehives, architectural schematics, soundwaves, etc.
Many different elements may be chosen and woven into these designs, which are themselves very expressive and geometric, but also fluid and earthy.

More often than not, Ms. Despont finds herself working on her living room floor than at an artist’s table. She fully invests herself into every drawing, and into her work projects as a whole. According to Ms. Despont herself, her work is 90% research and 10% action. Oftentimes, she spends months just collecting images and making portfolios of every photo she finds. Because her pieces are so large, they have to be fitted into even larger frames; and because so much goes into their creation overall, it takes some time to get each drawing into a gallery, and at times she can do only one show a year.

But she never lets that stop her from brainstorming or innovating.
Oftentimes, the antique accounting ledger paper she draws abstract shapes, florals, or designs on contain old checks and balances from their past owners. By letting these numbers and words show through without bothering to change them or white them out, Ms. Despont makes the figures part of her work, which in itself looks antique.

Ms. Despont has also stated that while her work appears very calm and naturalistic, she actually calculates every mark she makes. By using stencils, she creates designs that are so beautifully designed, one would never think they were made with a stencil at all. Ms. Despont’s base of operations is in the comfort of her home, and she often finds herself streched out on her bedroom floor with her huge, sectioned layouts.

And she has said that she really prefers to work this way. “I find that being able to work at home—that I wake up in the morning, I have breakfast, and I start working—it’s a very smooth transition to a quieter, more centered place.”
Also, because Ms. Despont creates all of her drawings using relatively inexpensive materials, she does not have to wait until she has large amounts of money or has recieved donations to create the pictures, which she just likes to “just let happen.”

Louise Despont, colored pencil and graphite on antique ledger book pages, 18x23 inches — Heliconia Mask

All of her drawings started with simple marks that turned into something more.
“Those marks contain the seed of the drawing,” she commented in Louise Despont Draws Deep. This is something that is true of virtually any drawing, or any work of art.
And in Louise Despont’s case, it is the foundation of her media.

23rd and 24th St by Derek Sneed

The Cell Theatre (338 W 23rd St New York, NY)

it’s a flexible space with 20 foot ceilings, balcony, and booth. Plus it seats 60 plus people. It’s pretty quaint. http://www.thecelltheatre.org/

The Peoples Improv Theater (123 E 24th St New York, NY)

The Pit is dedicated to the performance arts of original comedy. http://thepit-nyc.com

Chamber NYC (515 W 23rd St, New York, NY)

Art Gallery with objects

https://chambernyc.com

Susan Inglett Gallery (522 W 24th St, New York, NY)

http://www.inglettgallery.com/

NYC Neighborhoods

Lots of great info can be found on compass.com.

CHINATOWN:

A pocket of downtown Manhattan rich with history and tradition.

As the largest “Chinatown” in the United States, New York’s Chinatown has had roots in Eastern traditions since the mid-1800s. An influx of immigrants from Hong Kong and the Fujian Province during the 1900s helped the neighborhood to solidify its identity. Today, Chinatown remains true to its cultural heritage while inviting newcomers to explore and get to know the neighborhood.

CHELSEA:

A westside hub for art & culture.

Chelsea has consistently served as the setting for iconic pop culture moments with artists like Andy Warhol and Patti Smith living and working in the neighborhood. Now, Chelsea is home to a thriving gay community, world-famous retrofit architecture, and some of the finest art galleries in the city.

FASHION DISTRICT:

The city’s fashion heartbeat with gritty exterior.

Since the early 1800s, the Fashion District (also known as the Garment Center and Garment District) have been the epicenter of the national retail and clothing industries. Despite it’s small size (slightly less than 1 square mile total) this studio-packed neighborhood accounts for over $14 billion dollars of retail sales around the globe, and is the home base for legendary fashion designers from Diane Von Furstenberg to Calvin Klein.

GREENWICH VILLAGE:

The heart and soul of lower Manhattan.

For most of the 20th century, Greenwich Village was the center of downtown culture. In the 60s, the Village was the birthplace of the beatnik generation. Allen Ginsberg was known to pop up at Cafe Reggio, while Bob Dylan was a regular performer at Cafe Wha.

HARLEM:

Where history feels like home.

Harlem is known as an important touchpoint of American jazz, literature, and civil rights history. And for good reason: major streets like Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd., Malcolm X Blvd., and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. pay homage to civil rights leaders that actually walked those passageways. Meanwhile, venues such as The Apollo Theater, Hotel Theresa, and Sylvia’s Restaurant stand as iconic landmarks frequented by both history buffs and culture seekers alike.

LITTLE ITALY:

Traditional roots in busy downtown Manhattan.

Little Italy got its name back in the early 1900s when thousands of Italian immigrants moved into the small neighborhood. Since then, many of the area’s Italian-American residents have relocated to other Italian enclaves like East Harlem, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Still, their original legacy remains, and is woven into the fabric of this culturally distinct pocket of lower Manhattan.

THEATER DISTRICT:

Vibrant sites and scenes of the city.

The Theater District has undergone serious transformation over the last century. During the early 20th century, the area was known as home to history-making families such as the the Astors and the Rockefellers, and was officially named for the New York Times original headquarters on the square in 1903. The post-Depression era saw an influx of downtown-bred music, dance, and drama venues (hence, the term “Theater District”), and a mid-century decline followed by a city-led commercial rebrand and tourist boom. Today’s Theater District is a hub for awe-inspiring happenings around every corner.

SOHO:

from an industrial powerhouse to a haven for NYC’s creative communities.

Soho has a long history of inspiring New York’s creative communities. The same lofts that used to house manufacturing factories in the 1950s are now home to photo studios, fashion houses, and art galleries.

WILLIAMSBURG:

Brooklyn’s creative outlet.

Williamsburg has long been the setting of many seminal films and books that represent life in Brooklyn in the 1900s. As a manufacturing neighborhood, the area attracted hard-working New Yorkers. Decades later, Williamsburg began to attract an overflow of artists from downtown Manhattan, and since then it has become a beacon of Brooklyn creativity.

St. Marks Place

The three blocks of East Eighth Street that run from Astor Place to Tompkins Square Park—has become a symbol of the East Village. Head shops serve as a reminder of the street’s hippie heyday, while stalwart Federal mansions remain a link to the area’s more distant—and upscale—past. If something has happened in the East Village in the last two centuries, there’s a good chance St. Marks Place has played a role. Yet the street has never been a perfect microcosm of the East Village; those mansions were an anomaly, and the hippies were, too.

In 1977, Manic Panic, the country’s first punk boutique, opened at No. 33; Theatre 80, which had seen, somewhat incongruously, the premiere of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1967, became a movie revival house in 1971, drawing crowds of cinephiles. The former Russian baths at No. 6 became the New St. Marks Bath, purportedly the world’s largest gay bathhouse when the Department of Health shut it down in the midst of the AIDS crisis in 1985.

Also check out ABC No RIO and these Punk walks

NYC Subway Music

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as “the Whitney”, is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City. The Whitney’s permanent collection comprises more than 19,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and new media by more than 2,900 artists. The Whitney places a particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists for its collection as well as maintaining an extensive permanent collection containing many important pieces from the first half of the last century. The museum’s Annual and Biennial exhibitions have long been a venue for younger and less well-known artists whose work is showcased by the museum.

JAY DEFEO: A RETROSPECTIVE

This retrospective is the definitive exhibition to date of the work of Jay DeFeo (1929–89). At the outset of her career in the 1950s, DeFeo was at the center of a vibrant community of Beat artists, poets, and musicians in San Francisco. Although she is best known for her monumental painting The Rose (1958–66, now in the Whitney’s collection), which she spent eight years making and which later languished hidden behind a wall for two decades, DeFeo created an astoundingly diverse range of works spanning four decades. Her unconventional approach to materials and intensive, physical process make DeFeo a unique figure in postwar American art who defies easy categorization. The full breadth of her work will be presented for the first time in this exhibition of more than 130 objects. This astonishing array of collages, drawings, paintings, photographs, small sculptures, and jewelry will illuminate DeFeo’s courageous experimentation and extraordinary vision.

BLUES FOR SMOKE

Blues for Smoke is an interdisciplinary exhibition that explores a wide range of contemporary art through the lens of the blues and blues aesthetics. Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category but as a field of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by over forty artists from the 1950s to the present, as well as materials culled from music and popular entertainment.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a 1960 solo album by virtuoso jazz pianist Jaki Byard in which improvisation on blues form becomes a basis for avant-garde exploration. The title suggests that the expanded poetics of the blues is pervasive—but also diffuse and difficult to pin down. By presenting an uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and conceptual inclinations, genres and disciplines, Blues for Smoke holds artists and art worlds together that are often kept apart, within and across lines of race, generation, and canon.

A series of performances, events, screenings, and readings will accompany the exhibition.

AMERICAN LEGENDS: FROM CALDER TO O’KEEFFE

American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe showcases the Whitney’s deep holdings of artwork from the first half of the twentieth century by the eighteen leading artists: Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield, Paul Cadmus, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, Elie Nadelman, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Joseph Stella. Organized as one- and two-artist presentations, this exhibition provides a survey of each artist’s work across a range of mediums.

DARK AND DEADPAN: POP IN TV AND THE MOVIES

From Andy Warhol’s commercial for Schrafft’s restaurants to Sherman Price’s film The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee, starring Weegee as a crazy photographer, footage of the moon landing, and George Kuchar’s mock Hollywood melodrama HOLD ME WHILE I’MNAKED, this exhibition brings together rarely seen films, advertisements, and political campaign messages that reflect the extravagant yet deadpan excess of Pop. Together they reveal the central role played by television and cinema in articulating the excitement, anxiety, and desire underlying both Pop art and popular culture in the 1960s.

SINISTER POP

Sinister Pop presents an inventive take on the Museum’s rich and diverse holdings of Pop art from the movement’s inception in the early 1960s through its aftershocks a decade later. Although Pop art often calls to mind a celebration of postwar consumer culture, this exhibition focuses on Pop’s darker side, as it distorts and critiques the American dream. Themes of exaggerated consumption, film noir and the depiction of women in art, the dystopic American landscape, and the intersection of popular culture and politics, are explored through works by acknowledged masters such as Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol, as well as by many artists not traditionally associated with Pop whose art may be understood within its wider field of reference. These include William Eggleston, Peter Saul, Christina Ramberg, and Vija Celmins, among others.

Spring Break Art Show

The Spring break art show features projects of over 20 curators. The show this year is going to do a fresh take on the art model of showcasing art works and showcase a range of New York City’s curatorial voices, all surrounding a solo exhibition theme – New Mysticism. Last year was themed as well with an Apocalypse theme and a lot of the pieces were done beautifully.

Making use of over 20 classrooms, hallways, and unique areas one of the cities oldest schoolhouses new art works will be on display, arranged by curators representing the more recent creative contributions of the Lower East Side, Bushwick, and Gowanus. The fair’s 2013 curatorial theme as described by the co-founders of The They Co. and SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Gori and Ambre Kelly, is called New Mysticism is supposed to dig deeper with 21st century technological advancements such as the internet, digital stimulations and other technologies intertwined with 20th century art. Given how technological this show will be it will dig deeper and more personal than you would imagine.

The show is really good about getting viewers to interact with performance shows and exhibitions. I even got to ride a moped last year around New York as a performance piece. It’s a much more fun experience for the viewer and it’s obvious the artists and curators had fun with this exhibition as a whole.

The show begins March 5^th – March 11^th, 2013.

Here are some photos from 2012.

Volta

The Volta art show is fairly new, being the incarnation of an art show which was founded in 2005 in Basel, Switzerland. The Volta was conceived by Amanda Coulson, an art critic and art show director. The Volta’s main focus is to bring contemporary art to an intimate boutique type setting. Regardless of the artist the Volta tries to have art that deals with current art and contemporary relevance.

Viewers have compared the experience at the Volta to be like visiting the artist’s studio. Speaking from personal experience the more intimate setting with fewer works exhibited by the artists does make it a more personal experience. The unique thing about this show is that it isn’t usually multiple works done by the artists like bigger museums or art shows but it’s usually one exhibit each which gives the viewer a more personal experience with the work. In 2012 when we went to this museum we got to interact more with the artists and with the work without being told to “back up!”. Its nice to be able to get closer to the art without being intimidated.

Here are a few works that stood out to me while being there.

Wilmer Wilson’s “I voted”

Timotheus Tomicek’s moving photographs

The Volta art show is open March 7th- March 10th in their new location:

82MERCER – New York, NY 10013

-Kurt G.

NYC Subway

The New York City Subway is a rapid transit system owned by the City of New York and leased to the New York City Transit Authority, a subsidiary agency of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It is one of the oldest and most extensive public transportation systems in the world, with 468 stations in operation (421, if stations connected by transfers are counted as single stations). Overall, the system contains 209 mi (337 km) of routes, translating into 656 miles (1,056 km) of revenue track; and a total of 842 miles (1,355 km) including non-revenue trackage. In 2011, the subway delivered over 1.64 billion rides, averaging approximately 5.3 million rides on weekdays, about 3.0 million rides on Saturdays, and about 2.4 million rides on Sundays. (from Wikipedia)

The subways are called trains and run north, south, east and west.
Subway Map (PDF)
MTA

Expect this.

Yoshitomo Nara (MOMA)

Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese painter, sculptor and draughtsman. He was born December 5, 1959. Yoshitomo recieved his B.F.A and M.F.A from the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music in 1987. He also studied Art at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (German State Academy of Arts), Düsseldorf, Germany in 1993. Growing up, Yoshitomo was a shy kid and very sensitive. He had sibling, but they were much older so they weren’t really around. Both his parents had jobs and he was alone through a lot of his childhood. He says that his childhood loneliness fuels the creativity for much of his work. “When you are a kid, you are too young to know you are lonely, sad, and upset,” he told ARTnews ‘ Kay Itoi. “Now I know I was.” In high school he experienced art for the first time and was astounded that he could finally express himself.

After gaining his M.F. A. he headed to Germany. He lived here for several years in a city called Koln. Yoshitomo began to look inside of himself for art. He explored his self conscience and from this he created one of the first of his sad little girl portraits. “When I make the drawings, I don’t think of it,” he told Asahi Shimbun. “My brush just moves unconsciously.”

Some critics hate his work. It is very childlike. The subject of most of his work is a chubby cheek little girl with slanted eyes. He also draws little dogs frequently too.

His works have an air of simplicity. The subject is full of angst with a piercing gaze. In the 1990’s Yoshitomo aquired a huge fan base. He became an international artist. He has had shows in Japan, Korea, Germany, and the US. He has become so popular that his work can be seen on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where a character of the show is wearing a shirt with his design on it.

Yoshitomo was arrested in NYC for drawing a smiley face on the wall near the First Ave L train stop. He was detained overnight. He was charged with making graffiti and mischief conduct. The charges were dropped later that year. Yoshitomo says he liked the experience because he met people he wouldn’t have other wise. The brick he drew on was washed clean. Apparently, the transit workers had no idea that the brick Yoshitomo drew on could have generated $10,000 if they had sold it.

Pieces by Yoshitomo can generate upwards of a million dollars. While pricey works are sold, he also has key chains and other items that are sold for only a few bucks. He has mass appeal. I instantly loved his work when I saw it at the MOMA. I also feel like he is an artist that I can relate to on an emotional level. Yoshitomo still feels lonely sometimes and has to constantly remind himself of all the good things that has been said about his work. He tries to work freely and without feeling pressured, to just create art for the joy of it. Yoshitomo keeps these words posted: “Never forget your beginner’s spirit.” He applies this idea to his work every day.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: Arms and Armor

In my previous article, I mentioned how I got lost in the MET museum. While trying to find my way around, I came across the Arms and Armor exhibit. My love and interest for medieval times was instantly sparked, and has compelled me to blog about the experience. When I found the exhibit I automatically fell in love with it. The place was filled with European swords, shields, armor for both horses and humans,and guns. I felt like a child in a candy store. The only bad part was that I couldn’t buy any of it.

Armor of George Clifford, Third Earl of Cumberland

Made under the direction of Jacob Halder
(English, master armorer at royal workshops at Greenwich, documented 1558-1605)

“George Clifford was appointed Queen’s Champion in 1590 and was made a Knight of the Garter two years later. He is best remembered for his capture of the Spanish fort in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1598. A favorite of Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), he chose for the decoration of this armor the Tudor rose. The armor was made for tournament use and when needed for battle.”
( The Met Museum of Art )

The whole story behind this armor just makes me fall in love with it all over again. Its structured beauty and its enchanting tale makes the armor a true work of art. All the details etched in its metal would really make a person feel just like royalty if ever worn again.

Burgonet
Attributed to Desiderius Helmschmid (German, Augsburg, 1513-1579)

“This helmet is very similar in design and workmanship to a parade armor made in 1549 to 1550 by Helmschmid and Sigman for the future Philip II of Spain (1527–1598). It is a rare example of embossed armor made by German craftsmen.” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

This helmet stood out from all the others to me because of its beautiful design. This armor piece is my second favorite from the exhibit because of its wonderful metal craftsmanship and intricate detail. What really stood out to me is the angel on the front of it, and how anatomically correct it’s body was.

All these beautiful piece of armor really make ones imagination just sore. Out of every place I had been in New York City the Met was my all time favorite. I was sad to leave and can’t wait to go back if I ever get another chance.

The following images were taken by me and the museum: