The Lower East Side (LES) neighborhood has been the subject of countless movies, songs, and stories — but now the downtown locale has its own coloring book. Legends of the Lower East Side is a collaboration between Outlaw Art Museum owner and photographer Clayton Patterson, and artists Troy Harris and Orlando Bonilla. The roughly $12 book (not on sale just yet) features 24 of the neighborhood’s most iconic and colorful characters — several no longer with us. In keeping with the spirit of the project, Patterson intends to sell them locally. Everyone from artist Dash Snow SACER and activist Ai Weiwei are included. Click through for a preview of the book, see who you recognize, and debate who should or shouldn’t be included below. Read More »
The art of awkward conversation: role-playing hosts Vicky & Lysander cordially invite you to the dinner party from hell. Unless, of course, your sense of humor borders on the absurd and you find social button-pushing hysterical (we do), in which case get yourself down to the Lower East Side sur le champ. Grand Opening — the revolving art space that previously housed D.I.Y. workshop Trade School — has been remade as a hipster-rustic dining room complete with questionable art and rough-hewn shelves hosting china and leather-bound books. Vicky, a Houston oil heiress played by Shannon Walker, and Lysander, a questionably-straight man about town (Damon Cardasis), are the fictional marrieds who conduct over-the-top conversation while twelve guests chow down on fried chicken and cupcakes. It’s BYOB, and trust me when I say the B considerably helps the proceedings.
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Ever wanted to learn the art of mushroom foraging but running your own LLC has left you strapped for cash? Trade School is a pop-up workshop concept run by OurGoods.org from the Lower East Side revolving storefront Grand Opening. The community-fueled programming capitalizes on skill sets, bartering tutorials (composting, swing dancing, feltmaking, staging a play) instead of currency. From now until February 28, the choices are limitless.
Just don’t call them hipsters.
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First things first: if you live in New York and want to impress out-of-town visitors, wander on down to a grimy stretch of Eldridge Street below Canal and ogle the neo-Gothic synagogue on the east side of the street. Said to be the first house of worship built by Eastern European Jews in the United States, the Eldridge Street Synagogue is a primer in Lower East Side social history as well as a architecture buff’s wet dream: a completely restored neo-Moorish interior with 70-foot vaulted ceilings, trompe l’oeil walls, stenciled detail work, a central chandelier with 75 bulbs, and 68 stained glass windows. And now, boundary-pushing contemporary artist Kiki Smith.
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Captured is an incredible portrait of New York’s LES and Clayton Patterson, who has chronicled it through 30 years of tumult and cleanup.
Now screening for free online at SnagFilms, the documentary stills the neighborhood’s third-world years, when the Lower East Side was a laboratory for vice, loco art, and counterculture thought. With his wife Elsa Rensaa, Patterson used the camera (and, later, camcorder) to record the era’s radical spirit and populace, its drag queens, druggies, punks, and young ruffians.
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