Why go to just one art gallery when you can hit up a whole cluster? We love to binge on several art venues in one go — that’s why we teamed up with VINCE to bring you the Walk of Art. Equipped with a nifty Google map, you can hop between the best galleries, museums, and artist-resource hubs with our customized guides to New York, LA, and Chicago. From the New Museum’s opus of Eastern Bloc nostalgia to titillating, meticulous pop/pulp collages in an outsider-art gallery, check out some of the highlights from the current exhibits on each city’s itinerary.
Bashir Sultani uses a salt shaker to make art, documenting his creative process in a series of intriguing YouTube videos. Subjects of the artist’s portraits range from pop-culture icons such as Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen, and President Obama to legendary figures like Kurt Cobain, Bruce Lee, and Albert Einstein. Check out Sultani’s fascinating time-lapse videos after the jump.
Joseph Arthur is a creative dynamo. Since being discovered by Peter Gabriel in the mid-’90s, the extremely prolific singer/songwriter has delivered eight albums and ten EPs, staged gallery shows and released a book of his visual artwork, and even opened a museum. Last year, he debuted Fistful of Mercy, a side project that featured three-way collaborations with Ben Harper and Dhani Harrison, and this year brings the release of his newest album, The Graduation Ceremony. We caught up with the artist in the midst of a ten-show run at NYC’s Living Room to talk about the record, learn about his favorite collaborations, discuss his painting career, and discover his most surreal moment (hint: it involves Lou Reed and Dolly Parton).
With its massive Art Project, Google employs its dominance over digital media to present a vast online archive of the world’s most enduring and beloved fine art masterpieces, along with street-view tours of the institutions that house them.
Each featured museum was given free rein in selecting the breadth and scope of its contributions, resulting in an array of ancient and modern works, cross-referenced by place and artist. The real treats are the mega-high resolution on the zoom-enabled pics, viewer’s-eye tours of impressive architecture — and the chance to play online curator yourself with priceless objects of beauty.
Erin. C. Garcia’s new book Photography as Fiction culls some of the most vivid imagery from the archives of LA’s J. Paul Getty Museum.
Garcia, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the Getty, has gone to great lengths to select some of the most robust and telling photographs in the museum’s collection. The results, which include offerings from Man Ray, Joel Peter Witkin, Thomas Eakins, and Alfred Stieglitz, run the gamut of the form’s more breathtaking representation of story.
Notorious for his banned cover art to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, George Condo is a wild, prolific painter with a masterful eye for the grotesque.
Employing a twisted, kitsch vision of comic and tragic muses, Condo paints powerful, psychological portraits, based on memories of old-master paintings and keen observations of everyday people. Working in a style that he has dubbed “artificial realism,” Condo turns the world around us into a surreal playground for the bizarre.
Exploring issues of racial and gender identity, Lorna Simpson blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in her poignant photographic and video installations.
Mining eBay and flea markets for vernacular photos of African Americans from the era of segregation, Simpson recontextualizes the imagery to coax new meaning from lost memories. Photo-booth pictures get paired with the artist’s wistful drawings, while alluring, pin-up-like snapshots are re-created with Simpson simulating the unknown subjects’ playful poses.
New York’s Morrison Hotel Gallery showcases the rich and diverse world of fine art photographs both of and by rock, blues, and punk’s greatest legends, from Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen to Blondie and Björk.
Co-founder Henry Diltz is responsible for the gallery’s namesake Doors album cover (and dozens more classic-rock memes), and shows photographers as varied as Jim Marshall and Autumn DeWilde, with a special appreciation for photography by artists better known as musicians, such as Julian Lennon and Dave Stewart. The epically thorough website is searchable by band, year, and genre, and includes special web-only exhibitions.
Painter Will Cotton has a sweet tooth when it comes to art, fashion, eye candy, and real candy — including Katy Perry’s bubblegum pop.
Cotton’s lustrous, sticky-sweet visions of seductive innocence depict nude angels nestled in confections suitable for Marie Antoinette (the Sofia Coppola version). An accomplished painter with an already impressive c.v., Cotton skyrocketed to international attention for the cover art on Perry’s Teenage Dream, before going on to art direct the pop-culture touchstone that is the “California Gurls” video.
Back in October, Banksy took over the opening sequence of The Simpsons, using the show’s famous couch gag as a platform to portray a grim, colorless “Simpsons factory” run by impoverished workers drawing the individual cells for an episode and assembling Simpsons merchandise, with decapitated dolphins and dying unicorns numbering among the exploited workers. (If you missed it, you can watch the clip here.) Today, Banksy updated his website with his original sketched storybord for the intro. Take a look at his preliminary drawings after the jump.
. We caught up with the artist in the midst of a ten-show run at NYC’s Living Room to talk about the record, learn about his favorite collaborations, discuss his painting career, and discover his most surreal moment (hint: it involves Lou Reed and Dolly Parton).
