Lena Dunham was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film”.  She studied creative writing, likes to write and make movies, but her bigger passion seems to be twitter. Ms. Dunham’s feature film “Tiny Furniture” was awarded Best Screenplay Spirit Award this past February.  I’ve just started to follow her tweets.

Courtesy of the artist

Vince Contarino is a New York based painter. His multi-layered canvasses explore the  language of abstraction.  From first glance there is something illusive in Contarino’s canvases, a tension between the forthright and the concealed. The artist often repurposes forgotten brushstrokes and colors, pasting them into his collages and works on paper. The result is something both beautiful and challenging, a floating soup of the painterly. Contarino’s belief in the ongoing relevance of abstraction is mirrored in his extracurricular activities. His most recent curatorial project, “The Working Title”, organized with painter Kris Chatterson, opens at the Bronx Art Center next Friday. I recently had the chance to speak with the artist over the phone. Continue Reading More »

© Trisha Brown, Walking on the Wall, 1971 at the Whitney Museum © Carol Goodden

Barbican (London) Opens New Exhibit: “Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s“

The work Laurie Anderson created while living in downtown New York City in the 1970s is inextricably linked to the place and time in which it was made. These are the focus of a new exhibit opening today at the Barbican Art Gallery in London titled Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s.

The new exhibit, which runs through May 22, is the first major presentation to examine the experimental and often daring approaches—from dancing on rooftops to cutting fragments out of abandoned buildings—taken by these three leading figures in the rough-and-ready arts scene developing in downtown Manhattan during the 1970s. Anderson, choreographer Trisha Brown, and artist Gordon Matta-Clark were friends and active participants in the New York art community, working fluidly between visual art and performance. Continue Reading More »

Mobile phones were made for convenience, and cellular technology has universally transformed our engagement with the world.  It is possible to remain completely solitary; physically, mentally, spatially, while simultaneously engage completely within your own mobile network. The notion of photography as an art form hasn’t changed but its mode of transmission and its potential for ubiquitous perception has with the rise of smartphones.

Since cell phones are constantly carried by their owners, they allow one to capture an image at any time, and with the undeniable prevalence of 3G internet connections, these images can be instantly shared with large audiences via social networking platforms. Mobile Uploads is an attempt to concentrate these images into a more intimate — yet still maintaining the live and constantly ‘uploading’ — environment. Continue Reading More »

Beginning March 29, The Bruce High Quality Foundation will take to the streets (and highways) on a five-week, 11-city, coast-to-coast road trip that crosses state lines and institutional boundaries to inspire and enable local art students to define the future of their own educational experience.

Traveling in a limousine painted as a school bus, BHQF will visit university art departments, art schools, art institutions, and alternative spaces across the nation, bringing together concerned educators, artists, arts administrators, and—most importantly—students to brainstorm on the future of art schools. What are they for? How should they be organized? If not for careers, what is the essence of art itself? These fundamental questions have long haunted artists, and the BHQF are interested in putting the questions back in the hands of students across America.

BHQF will kick off the trip on March 29 from 6:30–8:00pm at the Cooper Union in New York, and continue on to institutions in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Denver, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland.

More information here.

Robert Knoke is in town. The German artist has a show opening tonight at NP Contemporary Art Center in the Lower East Side. We met previously at Scope New York, following with a brief interview. If you follow Robert’s trail, you’re in for exciting times. From the art scene to fashion and even art-house films. You can see his work in person or meet the artist tonight during the opening of Robert Knoke: This Is Not, showing from March 10-May 1st, 2011.

NP Contemporary Art Center
131 Chrystie Street
New York, NY 10002

"El Triunfo De La Muerte" (courtesy Besharat Gallery)

In the early days of my nerdom, I used to stay up late before the book fairs my elementary school held, marking and then erasing, and then marking again which books I wanted to buy when the fair opened. Our teachers provided us beforehand with a catalogue of the books that would be at the fair, but my mother capped how much I could spend. It meant budgeting. I hated not being able to buy whatever I wanted, but the limitations made me appreciate all the more what my restricted dollars bought and what they could not. I would wander the stacks of books, learning titles I hadn’t known existed, and I would be grateful for my exposure to them; later I would look in the library for those I hadn’t been able to buy. Continue Reading More »