Dan Garodnick

Jessica Lappin

Apple is drawing the Council’s 51 members in prom attire in a series called NYC High for the blog ANIMAL New York. So far, ANIMAL New York posted Council members in districts one through eight.

Each drawing is accompanied by a small score card that lists the neighborhoods they represent and several facts about their time on the Council.

“Politics is kind of like high school, with factions and gossip and people always trying to hold on to or increase their popularity,” Apple told ANIMAL.

Apple contributed to a similar project in which artists drew Chicago’s 50 aldermen.

Here are Apple’s drawings of the two East Side Council members, Dan Garodnick and Jessica Lappin.

Tweet This Post

The statues are part of a major retrospective of Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara at the Asia Society. The sculptures will stand in front of the Asia Society on Park Avenue and East 70th Street and at the Park Avenue Armory on East 67th Street.

“Nara is one of Japan’s most celebrated artists and is known for his childlike images that have an edge,” Casey Freemont, director Art Production Fund, said at a July 8 meeting in front of the Upper East Side’s Community Board 8.

The public art project is being organized by the Art Production Fund, a non-profit that partners with museums and other fine arts organizations to find places to display public art.

The large sculptures, created specifically for the retrospective, will stand along the Park Avenue Mall from September through November. They will be fabricated from the artist’s design in Brooklyn.

“It’s been a long term dream of ours to do something along Park Avenue,” said Yvonne Force Villareal, co-founder of Art Production Fund.

The retrospective Nobody’s Fool collects more than one hundred works including drawings, paintings, sculptures and other large scale installations created by the Neo Pop artist. It will run from September 9 through January 2 at the Asia Society. An open studio where the public is invited to watch Nara at work will take place from August 23 to 27 at the Park Avenue Armory.

Community Board 8 voted in favor of the sculpture project after some members aired their concerns, including that the statues would block the view for drivers coming down Park Avenue.

Tweet This Post

The Frick Collection moved one step closer to fulfilling its dream of building an enclosed sculpture and decorative
arts gallery.

At its June 16 meeting, Community Board 8 overwhelmingly approved a plan for the museum to create a covered portico to house such a gallery. This was followed June 23 with a unanimous vote of approval by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The new portico will be built in the museum’s Fifth Avenue Garden, a part of the Frick property that is currently not open to the public. The addition will contain classic sculptures and
rare porcelains.

“Right now, the area isn’t being used as anything other than an occasional spot for smokers whenever we have parties,” said Anne L. Poulet, director of the Frick Collection.

A model of the proposed Portico for Decorative Arts and Sculpture, south façade, by Davis Brody Bond Aedas Architects and Planners.

The portico will be highly transparent and set back from the original limestone columns and cornice, fitting in with the architecture of the museum. It will add 665 feet of gallery space to the museum.

“Henry Clay Frick stipulated that we care for the house and collection as it evolved over time and this portico will help us do that,” she said.

Work on the portico is expected to start in the fall and be completed in September 2011.

Carl Krebs, architect with Davis Brody Bond Aedas Architects and Planners, who will build the portico, said that it will fit naturally with the East Side community.

“It represents a minimal, modest and incremental change to the appearance of the museum,” he said.

A private foundation will fund the building of the portico gallery and the museum is currently raising funds to support the additional costs of maintaining the new gallery space.

Plans for the proposed portico.

Tweet This Post

The most striking image of the John Lindsay exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York is a blown-up New York Times Magazine cover from 1973. The cover is a photo of Lindsay’s face that shows how events during his seven years as mayor of New York City ravaged his youthful looks: a white line connects welfare to his grayed temples; the 1969 Queens snowstorm put a crease around his mouth; the long, hot summer of 1966 deepened the frown lines on his forehead.

This picture, shown in the exhibit, was taken in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the day after John Lindsay won his mayoral race. Lindsay was an ardent civil rights supporter in Congress.

America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York is, ostensibly, a look at a mayor who was chosen to lead the city out of urban decay, only to see it split apart. But the exhibit, accompanied by a book edited by New York Times reporter Sam Roberts and an hour-long PBS documentary, paints a portrait of a changing city that rarely gets explored in this much detail.

The late 1970s is arguably the most romanticized time of modern New York City—especially 1977, the year of the Koch v. Cuomo mayor’s race, punk rock, disco, Son of Sam, the blackout, arson, the riots and the fiscal mess. Still, the Lindsay era, spanning 1966-1973, has some responsibility for the Koch era—for better or for worse.

“He comes in the midst of a wave in the process of transforming New York,” Sarah Henry, the exhibit’s curator, said of Lindsay. “There was a sense that a change was going to come.”

Lindsay’s two terms in office coincide neatly with what we think of as “The Sixties,” the 10 years from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s that recalls student protests, Berkley and hippies.

But in New York City, Lindsay, a liberal Upper East Side Republican who served in Congress before City Hall, had to address the problems that old Democratic politics didn’t solve. The exhibit shows how his policies seemed to inflame and alienate segments of the city, especially white middle-class New Yorkers. Campaign paraphernalia, tabloid headlines, television reports and photographs illustrate the fever pitch over civil rights policies, labor relations and Lindsay’s social programs that earned him the derisive title “limousine liberal.”

Henry also acknowledges how the Lindsay administration physically changed New York City with zoning rules to create European-influenced street cafes and pedestrian-friendly blocks. Maps, scale models and pictures of Lindsay studying development plans show his thumbprint on the city, including the Theater District and South Street Seaport.

Before the exhibit opened, historians were skeptical, anticipating a whitewash of Lindsay’s career, which sputtered to an end after lackluster campaigns for president and U.S. Senate.

But Henry doesn’t quite let Lindsay get the last word. His claim that New York was still a “fun city” or his supporters’ insistence that he kept the city’s racial tensions “cool” never overshadow her portrayal of New York in the middle of a tumultuous transformation.

“We wanted to use the lens of his mayoralty as a window,” Henry said, “into society, culture and politics.”

—
Through Oct. 3, Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Ave. near 103rd Street, 212-534-1672; $6 to $10.

Tweet This Post

Hand crafted cards from Beau Ideal Editions—just one of the many items available at MARTE on 3rd.

In the coming weeks, MARTE will be hosted by select Manhattan public schools that will also receive funds raised by sales. MARTE on 3rd will help P.S. 63 get much-needed air-conditioning units. Other schools will get funding for arts programs and after-school activities. At each participating school, the Parents Association will team up with Community Flea, a division of this paper’s parent company, Manhattan Media, to run the markets from summer through the holiday season, enabling the schools to use part of their space for students to sell their own goods.
So shop till you drop—there’s no buyer’s remorse, since MARTE is a fundraiser for the host school!

June 5 & 6, P.S. 63 William McKinley School, 121 E. 3rd St. (betw. 1st Ave. & Ave. A), www.themarte.com; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Free.

Tweet This Post

Gathering to make crafts may seem more suited to the Midwest than to our steel and concrete city. But tell that to the dozens of henna-haired hipsters, Starbucks moms, silver tops and Michelle Obama look-alikes (and a few men) who showed up April 17 at the New York Public Library’s main branch to chat and knit, and cut and paste. According to Rare Books librarian Jessica Pigza, co-host of “Handmade Crafternoons,” these do-it-yourself salons “bring people into the library, build community and provide a space for creativity.”

Pigza, who blogs at The Handmade Librarian (handmadelibrarian.com), calls herself a dabbler, a “dilettante,” but she’s pretty accomplished. She wears dresses, tops and even a cape that she sewed from vintage patterns. By day, she’s in the rare books division, devoted to reader services and fielding remote reference questions by email. But one Saturday a month, she and Maura Madden, author of Crafternoon: A Guide to Getting Artsy and Craftsy with Your Friends All Year Long, co-host a crafting commune.

Photo by Shira Kronzon

By coordinating events and sharing her curiosity about crafts and books online, Pigza is one of many librarians keeping the New York Public Library relevant in a time of flux.

“Jessica has been particularly effective in using blogging to more directly connect with the craft and design enthusiasts among our patrons,” wrote Ben Vershbow, the library’s digital producer, by email.

Her library blog channel Hand-Made (www.nypl.org/blog_series/hand-made; not to be confused with her personal blog) encourages artists and other creative types to tap into the wealth of research material and ephemera at the main branch. Treasures include vintage valentine collections, textile samples, maps, menus and photos.

“It’s an interesting time at the library,” said Pigza, who lives with her husband and their dog in Washington Heights. “There is a lot of open thinking about what we can do.”

Each Handmade Crafternoon is two hours long and moderated by a local craft book author. Esther K. Smith, who wrote Magic Books and Paper Toys, taught attendees to make pop-up paper garland books last year. Kata Golda, author of Hand-Stitched Felt, demonstrated the art of stitched felt mice. At the April 17 session, Madden introduced books from the library’s collection, followed by a show-and-tell session among attendees.

I made a birthday card for my sister, snipping the letters of her name from the bridal magazine pages. My 14-year-old contentedly pressed and pulled cotton into a swirling tornado, which, sadly, got squashed in our bag during the two-mile walk home. The atmosphere was chummy and relaxing (halfway through I was filled with a sense of technology-free well-being). Some of the individual projects were inspiring, especially a knit baby blanket in rich red, orange and gold connected squares.

The last event before a summer hiatus is scheduled for Saturday, May 15.  Moderator Natalie Chanin, founder and head designer of Alabama Chanin, will share some of her Southern sewing and sustainable fashion techniques.

Pigza and Madden plan to run the series for at least another season and hope to take the model to branch libraries in the future. It is easy to imagine how craft gatherings sprouting from the main branch to libraries all over the city (and beyond) might connect us to more than just crafts and books.
>
May 15, New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwartzman Building, 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, 917-275-6975; 2 to 4 p.m., Free.

Tweet This Post

If Hallmark has the commercial cornered on Mother’s Day, a new art exhibition, Inspired: An Exhibition in Celebration of Mothers, hopes to revitalize the holiday’s heart and soul.

Dana DiPrima, the show’s guiding force, says the concept evolved from her own tradition of sending annual Mother’s Day notes to friends and family. The cards, which have always elicited a warm response, prompted an unexpected comment last year from her artist-friend Jan Testori-Markman, who pointed out that the design was created by a male artist. Testori-Markman asked DiPrima if she might consider using her original artwork for future Mother’s Day cards. Not only was DiPrima deeply touched that her friend embraced her tradition, but she felt that Markman’s expressive artwork could take her project to the next level. Over the next months, the duo collaborated on the design and layout of a new card, bringing another artist-friend, Mary Reilly, onboard.

As the project expanded, DiPrima wondered about the possibility of having an art exhibition celebrating mothers.

Jan Testori-Markman, Untitled. 2009, graphite on paper, 23.5” x 18”.

“I was out walking in the park one day when I just said, ‘I know this great space, and I know these mom artists whom I love and who are so terrific. And I bet we could get a couple more artists and we could turn this card into a physical celebration of mothers,’” DiPrima recalled.

Soon two other artists—Alexandra Avlonitis and Jodi Bassi Markoff—joined the project and space was secured at The Culture Center, on Columbus Avenue, during Mother’s Day weekend.

The exhibition, which will show about 20 works from each artist, is a meditation on the many faces of motherhood. Avlonitis will present her painting “From What I Remember,” along with other expressionistic landscapes; Testori-Markman will feature her multi-media “Global Landscapes and Cultural Patterns;” Bassi Markoff, who integrates photographs, painting and words on
canvas, will include her “Lost in Hanoi;” and graphite-artist Mary Reilly will present her “Be My Love” and selected landscapes.

Admittedly, Mother’s Day is impossible to pin down in so many words. But DiPrima hopes that visitors will find an atmosphere conducive to reflection on this
holiday. And if you haven’t yet bought a gift for mom, consider the artwork on display, all of which is for sale.
>
The Culture Center, 410 Columbus Ave. (betw. 79th and 80th streets), 212-769-1600; Saturday, May 8, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday, May 9, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Free.

Tweet This Post

Feiwel, an Upper West Side textile artist, recently began creating framed “fabric collages” and free-standing boxes with biographic significance. She said it all started when her sister, who worked at Scholastic at the time, asked her to make a 40th birthday box for J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series.

“A box is a great item for remembrance,” she said, explaining that it’s not only a piece of art, but something that’s useful as well.

Textile artist Patricia Feiwel created a 40th birthday box for author J.K.Rowling.

Feiwel, who earned a BFA at Carnegie Mellon University, has been designing textiles for more than 25 years, creating custom lines for high-end retailers like Barney’s and Bendels. For those interested in her newest endeavor, she suggests keeping an eye out for interesting items that might work in a three-dimensional collage format.

“You need to look at the world and think of things out of context that you can use in your boxes,” she said. “The best boxes are the ones that put different and unusual things together.”

To learn more about this three-dimensional approach to collage, check out Feiwel’s upcoming class at the JCC, “Box Art: Collage Your Treasures.” The class aims to help participants combine textures and colors to tell a story with personal items through the form of a cigar box.

Feiwel said she picked the JCC as a venue because she wanted to share her art with her neighborhood.

“I love this neighborhood,” she said. “I really believe that this neighborhood has a particular spirit, and it’s the kind of spirit that would enjoy this kind of art.”

–
April 25, Jewish Community Center, 334 Amsterdam Ave. (at 76th St.), 646-505-5708; 1 to 5 p.m., $120 (also May 27).

Tweet This Post

On Feb. 11, Brin’s work, which he describes as “whimsical, fanciful and original,” will appear in his first solo show at a brand new space in Chelsea. The work will be on display at Gallery 307, 307 Seventh Ave. between West 27th and 28th streets, through March 12.

Brin is happily ensconced in his fifth career, after working as an ad man, feature writer for the Daily News, teacher at the Dalton School and “house husband” and dad to his son and daughter.

“I’m seeking creative recognition,” said Brin, surrounded by his work in his apartment on East 79th Street. “I feel like I have something to offer.”

One of Brin’s creations, Block Gallery, made out of wood, paper, metal, plastic and latex paint.

The show and the gallery are projects under the umbrella of the Carter Burden Center for the Aging, which offers programs that support elderly residents of the Upper East Side. The center, named after the former East Side Council member who wanted to create a local hub for seniors, teamed up with the organization Elder Craftsman to sponsor the gallery as a space for under-exposed artists to show their work.

“Imagine that you have a passion for art and that you have no vehicle to share it,” said Bill Dionne, the center’s executive director. “When Carter Burden started this program 35 years ago, the idea was to give voice to people that he felt did not have a voice. This is another way for us to do specifically that.”

“The art market and the art world is very sort of youth-centric,” said Marlena Vaccaro, curator of Gallery 307.

When she began interviewing artists for the gallery’s first solo show, she didn’t know what she was looking for, but she knew that Brin’s work was perfect when she saw it. His collages feature elements as disparate as dry cleaning tickets and obituaries, with colors and textures mixing and drawing in the viewer’s eye to examine the minute details of each carefully crafted piece.

Brin began to construct his found-object collages and sculptures after he recovered from brain surgery 13 years ago.

“Now I have a second chance,” he said.

He also gives second chances to the materials he uses—things that would otherwise be discarded if he didn’t use them to adorn his three-dimensional canvases and abstract figures.

He likes to use objects that can be rendered unrecognizable once he incorporates them into his work—although one exception is the small metal museum badges from institutions like the Met, MoMA and the New-York Historical Society, which make regular appearances. He finds the colorful badges on the street outside the museums and adds them to his “box of stuff” until he finds a use for them.

Brin also has kept a series of illustrated journals for more than 40 years, and a few of them will be on display at the gallery. He insists that his work does not follow any particular ideological or political agenda, and that he often doesn’t conceptualize a piece until he’s already working on it.

“People are self-conscious about their taste in art,” Brin said. “They go to a gallery and look to the left, look to the right—does the other guy like it?”

He said that the public knows what they like, and he thinks that his work speaks to a general audience that doesn’t need art-world knowledge to enjoy it.

Brin said that he simply wants “publicity that would help me be recognized as a major artist.”

Vaccaro stresses that while the gallery exists to showcase the work of older and developmentally disabled artists, she still holds each artist’s submissions to rigorous standards, and she thinks that Brin’s work would stand up in any gallery.

She also hopes that aside from recognition, artists will be able to make a profit from the art they sell through Gallery 307.

“We’re just trying to show art and then all this other good stuff happens,” Vaccaro said.

Tweet This Post

That fall, he combined lessons from his travels with a budding interest in photography to co-found the Nuru Project, a non-profit that holds one-night photography exhibitions and auctions to benefit various organizations in developing countries. The project has previously held fundraisers benefiting the United Nations World Food Program and the non-profit Acumen Fund.

The Nuru Project’s latest event is “Stand with Haiti,” a Feb. 4 photo auction and fundraiser to benefit the organization Partners in Health, which has longstanding operations in Haiti.

The ruins of the presidential palace five days after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti Jan. 12. lvaro Ybarra Zavala/Reportage by Getty Images

“Partners in Health has been at work in Haiti for over 20 years,” said Bloch, 27. “Obviously, they’re doing great work now after the earthquake, but more importantly, they’ll be there long after.”

The auction will feature images of Haiti from photographers who shoot for the New York Times, National Geographic and other prominent publications.

“It’s always a tricky balance,” Bloch said. “On the one hand, you want to raise awareness and have powerful images, but on the other hand, you want to showcase the people and beauty of a particular place.”

For more information, visit nuruproject.org.

–
Feb. 4, Gallery 25CPW, 25 Central Park West (at 63rd St.), nuruproject.org; 7 p.m., $20 to $100 suggested donation.

Tweet This Post