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Art

Last-Minute Holiday Gifts: DIY Famous Photographs

By Adda Birnir on

[Editor's note: We're reposting this feature from last year due to popular demand and the fact that we're wondering if most of you got to see it the first time around. Enjoy!]

On a recent holiday shopping trip uptown, in order to escape the hordes cascading down 5th Avenue, I ducked into one of New York’s contemporary art museums. While sauntering through the maze of galleries I came upon a certain photograph that gave me pause. I studied the slap-dash camera angle and the basic lighting, and thought to myself: “Really? This is what it takes? I can do… Read More

Art

The Architecture of War: A Look at Saddam Hussein’s Palaces

By Adda Birnir on

Photographer Richard Mosse has recently returned from a month-long trip to Iraq to photograph what remains of Saddam Hussein’s dozens of palaces, now used by American soldiers as make-shift combat headquarters. This month, the American army is set to handover the last of the palaces back to the Iraqi army. Mosse, who has previously photographed war-torn areas of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, sat down with us to discuss his latest project and the deeply disturbing, though darkly humorous, aspects of the ongoing war in… Read More

Art

Pic of the Day: Um, Do You Mind?

By Adda Birnir on

Despite the snarkification of our culture thanks to the likes of Gawker, Perez Hilton, and Simon Cowell, its hard to improve upon Barbara Kruger’s biting feminist witticism. So why… Read More

Art

Interactive Art: Climb Up On It!

By Adda Birnir on

This summer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art invited Brooklyn based artist Roxy Paine to design a site specific installation in The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. In keeping with the garden’s aboreal surroundings, Paine has installed a variation on his classic stainless steel defoliated trees. For the rooftop installation Paine has situated each tree that comprises the small copse sideways, as if blown over by a strong gust of wind. Fittingly, Paine has titled the piece Maelstrom. (The Met’s rooftop bar is also serving a cocktail of the same… Read More

Art

Pic of the Day: Kim & Thurston, 1983

By Adda Birnir on

For this fine Wednesday’s pictorial pick we decided to pay homage to the king and queen of rock’n'roll couples (and our Soho neighbors) Kim and Thurston. This picture, taken by Stephanie Chernikowski in 1983, is on view in the Looking at Music: Side 2 exhibition opening today at MoMA.

Art

Quiz: Where’d You Take That Picture?

By Adda Birnir on

The preponderance of landscape photography exhibitions invading our nations’ museums got us here at the Flavorpill thinking about the vast tradition of American landscape photography. By and large, landscape photographers — working in tandem with a team of painters and writers — have accounted for our popular understanding of what America looks like. Back in the 19th century, Timothy O’Sullivan introduced Americans to the sweeping vistas of the Southwest with his survey images, in the 1930′s WPA photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange documented the trials and travails of blighted farmers in the great plains, and in the 1970′s William Eggleston threw his hat in the mix with his whiskey soaked images of the… Read More

Art

Pic of the Day: Christy Bush, “Cross Country”

By Adda Birnir on

In Christy Bush’s new series, Jackson, currently on view at Bespoke Gallery in New York, the artist continues her chronicle of American adolescence. In Bush’s earlier series, Soundtrack to Nothing, exhibited at Bespoke in 2006, she documented the lives of an expansive community of alternative music listening, concert going, youth. For Jackson Bush focused on one subject, a beautifully adrogynous teenage boy living in Georgia. Shot over the course of a few years, though not shown in chronological order, the images come together to create a breathtaking portrait of what teenage life looks like and how we adults like to imagine… Read More

Art

Interactive Art: Grow It!

By Adda Birnir on

Artists Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray are hard at work discovering creative, city friendly, and most importantly, artistic ways for you to practice your environmentalism. Their latest project, called Window Farms, and is an ongoing experiment in designing functional and beautiful ways to grow food in your apartment/house/loft window using only materials available in your recycling bin and the local hardware… Read More

Art

Interactive Art: Wear It!

By Adda Birnir on

New York based Canadian artist Marc Hundley makes delicately hand stenciled posters, flyers, and t-shirts. He began making the simple pieces as gifts for friends, but they soon gained a cult-like following in the downtown arts community and were picked up by galleries such as the Lower East Side’s former Rivington Arms and Los Angeles’ Cherry and Martin… Read More

Art

Pic of the Day: Stark Naked Love! The Struggle Continues…

By Adda Birnir on

Heading into the archive for some midday love, ahem, midday stark naked love, today. American/Korean duo Marc Voge and Young-hae Chang’s simple flash animations are still some of the most delightful and delicious, not to mention butter basted, fun to be had on the… Read More