What’d you have for dinner last night? Or, more importantly, were you also watching television, checking your email, playing with your cat, cooing at your baby, watching the clock at the deli, working late at the office, or juggling some other dozen daily activities that have little to do with savoring food? According to a Public Health Nutrition study 50% of our eating is now done simultaneously while doing something else entirely. Photographer Miho Aikawa captured a varied group of New Yorkers having dinner — from a thirteen year old girl in Carroll Gardens munching on pasta in bed with her computer to a daily commuter enjoying a sandwich and a beer on his way to Pleasantville to a monk from Myanmar eating a large meal cooked by and shared with friendly locals. Pop in on them at dinnertime in our slideshow.
New York City street photographer Frank Oscar Larson documented daily life in the bustling metropolis during the ’50s. The Queens Museum of Art will be exhibiting Larson’s compelling black and white snapshots, which the former banker took primarily in his spare time on the weekends. Larson’s photos of Times Square show a more innocent side of the Midtown junction, and his candid portraits of everyday life are quietly intimate. Many of the images were entered into photography competitions, but largely remained undiscovered. His grandson recently uncovered over 100 envelopes of medium format negatives dating back to the 1920s — images Larson used to develop in his basement darkroom in Flushing. The artist’s work will be honored at the museum from February 5 to May 20. For more information on Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories, visit the museum’s website. Check out our preview of the exhibition in the gallery past the break.
We love the Pritzker Prize-winning architectural team of SANAA because they gave us the New Museum, a whimsical steel stack of a building that sits at the intersection of Bowery and Prince Street in New York’s Lower East Side shouting out a rainbow colored “HELL, YES” to everyone who walks by. We love them even more for their minimal houses filled with light, quirky furniture, and lots and lots of plants.
SANAA is Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa. Based in Tokyo, their architecture has been described as metaphysical, dreamlike, and ethereal. A reaction to the chaos and cluttered complexity of the modern world, says Kristine Guzmán, architect and curator at MUSAC, “SANAA’s houses are capable of transforming a person’s way of life.”
Taking cues from our favorite houseplant loving design icons, here’s our guide to bringing a little SANAA into your world. Click through to check it out and let us know what inspired you the most in the comments!
What, exactly, is outsider art? The label evokes a jumble of adjectives, from amateur to self-taught, shoddy to innovative, mad to genius, naive to prophetic. With this question in mind, we attended the 20th annual Outsider Art Fair in New York City over the weekend. Browsing through the over 30 booths, we asked curators, scholars, and the artists themselves what the term “outsider art” means to them, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of having one’s work labeled as such. As expected, the answers varied. View what those in the field had to say, along with some of the Fair’s highlights, after the jump.
Take a stroll through New York City in the mid-80s. Visit the pre-”Disney-fied” Times Square with its XXX theaters and Evangelical protestors. See glimpses of Manhattan and Brooklyn, before gentrification. Every time we look back at New York — in the 1900s, the ’40s, the ’70s — we get a twinge of idealistic nostalgia. Yet, it wasn’t all cheap hot dogs and naughty peep shows. “Gritty” isn’t an aesthetic. But go right ahead, nod and swoon and let the photographs of Steven Siegel transport you to the times, places and people since then displaced by the passing of decades and NYC’s vicious real estate market. For more Steven Siegel’s New York, check out dozens of photos in his set, hundreds on his Flickr page and his stellar short films of Subway graffiti and Coney Island.
With owner Hilly Kristal dead and a freaking John Varvatos store taking up space in its original Bowery location, it seemed safe to say that New York’s most storied punk club, CBGB, was gone for good. But in the age of retromania, can any significant musical landmark ever go quietly into that endless, drunken night? Apparently not! Gothamist says, “We have it on good authority that the legendary venue is still alive in spirit, and angling to take over a new space in Manhattan.” It seems the club will be rebuilt out of pieces from the old CBGB, which are currently in storage. Of course, it’s worth wondering whether anything that doesn’t involve Kristal, 315 Bowery, or, you know, the ’70s can fairly call itself CBGB. We’re pretty ambivalent, and leaning towards “no.” So let’s talk about it in the comments, shall we?
Most people wouldn’t expect to see Romanesque Revival architecture, fancy pants Guastavino tile, and brass chandeliers in a New York City subway station, but the City Hall stop (opened in 1904) along the Lexington Avenue Line features all that and more. Longer trains, longer platforms, and low ridership caused the city to close it off to the public in 1945, but its elegant architecture has endured for over seventy years. You can still catch a glimpse of it while rounding the loop heading back uptown, or during a tour (book ahead). We felt inspired by the ghost station to take a look at other secret stops along the underground: houses, societies, and entire cities. Head past the break to explore unusual underground marvels around the world.
Get ready to take a serious head trip through pre-World War II Manhattan, from Wall Street to Harlem, in this 1938 video from Castle Films. You’ll get glimpses of the Bowery, “famous in song and story, but a dingy street today,” the Lower East Side, “its squalor and tenements rapidly being replaced by wider streets and better housing — but the push markets still survive,” Harlem, whose population is “not always prosperous, but seemingly, always happy,” and of course, “Chinatown: exotic, mysterious, where thousands of Orientals live apart in their own peculiar way… a fascinating place, especially on ceremonial occasions.” Well, we won’t deny that Chinatown is rather fascinating, but we’re happy to report that our fair city has come a long way — at least in some respects. Click through to watch the video, and let us know what you think in the comments!
Japanese artist and architect Yutaka Sone carved an intricate sculpture of miniature Manhattan entirely out of marble. Using photographs, Google Earth images, and references after experiencing several helicopter rides, Sone’s version of New York’s iconic city is an interesting take on antiquity and classical stone sculptures of the past. The chiseled, ghostly work is impressively detailed for its small size and one of the most beautiful “maps” of the city we’ve ever seen. [Image credit: Yutaka Sone/David Zwirner Gallery]
A call to boycott Flashdancers, a PSA about stray cats and anti-freeze, “fresh meat” from Baltimore seeking encounters… “This collection of street posters, mad scribblings, political screeds, religious rants, and paranoid raves was collected on the streets of New York City from 1985 to the present,” writes Kenneth Goldsmith — poet, professor and founding editor of UbuWeb, the largest archive of avant-garde material available online. Aside from concrete poetry and sound art, UbuWeb also hoards odd, raw artifacts like these. Ooh, goodies!
Armed with a portable razor and inspired by “Jim Shaw’s collection Thrift Shop Paintings, Adolf Wölfli’s visionary scrawls, and outsider music,” Goldsmith has reaped that gallery that is the street, dutifully slicing off hundreds of flyers from NYC walls and posts, uploading some to UbuWeb:Outsiders. Warning: These might be offensive, illegible and/or loopy. So, let’s get to it, because “mindless self indulgence needs a fucking drummer” and anti-bird porn advocates are counting on you. Read More »
