Last week, our executive editor, Bonnie Davidson, and I were discussing how art is found all over the city, and not just at museums, art galleries and cultural centers. Instead, it seems to seep from the many institutions and can be found in architecture, on the brightly colored tile mosaics on subways walls, and even on top of buildings (our office is located near the crux of Antony Gormley’s Event:Horizon installation of 31 life-size sculptures of men perched on building cornices overlooking Madison Square Park). With this in mind, I decided to both enjoy the beautiful weather and explore the city for free, outdoor art. Luckily, this weekend was the Smith Street festival in Brooklyn, about a ten-block strip of live performers, international food and artisans peddling various wares. Local artists, artisans, street performers and food vendors are out and about throughout the year, but especially now that the weather is warm.
This was a wonderful opportunity to check out free art, and in addition to sampling a veggie samosa, Nutella crepe and a local amber ale, I saw a lot of really beautiful things. Below, the top ten local artists whose work was just as lovely as anything I could have paid to see in a museum:
1. Species By The Thousands: Brooklyn-based jeweler Erica Bradbury uses reclaimed metals and recycled textiles to form delicate pieces designed with the natural world in mind, such as fox face rings and horn pendants.
2. Kataplin: This family-run company makes clothes for kids and grown-ups with screen-printed fancy-free and totally adorable drawings and patterns. I totally would have rocked the pink “llama love” racer-back dress if it came in big-girl sizes!
3. Argentinian Victoria Bekerman’s bold yet minimalist jewelry is based on organic, sinuous shaped found in nature, such as calla lily gold filled earrings on French earwires, a gold vermeil “bubbles” ring, composed of interlocking circles, and a ruby-studded chain with a graceful leaf pendant.
4. Brooklyn Craft: sock stuffed animals, burger bibs and dino onesies and other adorable items for tots are joined by merchandise geared for adults, including wallets and wine bottle totes made from recycled billboard vinyl and tongue-in-cheek cross-stitching.
5. Martine’s Dream: Designer and former fashion stylist Debbie Martine’s line of floaty, tribal-print scarves and dresses in vibrant colors are perfect for the hot weather. I found myself really wishing I could swap my old sundress for one of her light creations.
6. Sindia Designs: Sindia Fernandez crafts contemporary earrings and necklaces that are beguiling yet simple enough to be worn daily. My favorite of her offerings was a pair of “Victorian wine” earrings, mini-chandeliers dripping with deep purple rubies. Her stuff also seems like it would make fantastic gifts.
7. Linn Designs: A former metalsmither at Tiffany’s, Masumi Hayashi now shapes necklaces and bracelets cascading with semiprecious stones, diaphanous rings and earrings and home accessories carved from poplar, Douglas fir, walnut and cherry wood.
8. Bullfrog Creatives, LLC: Jewelry with curvilinear shapes have a funky vibe, especially the sterling silver “squiggle shape” bracelet, based on designer Becca’s high school notebook doodlings, and the “snow with crosscut stalactite” necklace, a one-of-a-kind snow casting combines with paisley stone.
9. Lola Bean: A line of handbags made from shredded leather were what caught my eye, but this graphic designer, who cites Alice Tully Hall, Aimee Mann and mid-century Modernism among her inspirations, also crafts darling stationery, letterpress gift tags and a full line of jewelry.
10. Viva Zapata!: Made from vinyl that once covered Buenos Aires buses, these brightly colored vegan bags are both fun, functional and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. My favorite was the “Bandolera Rectangular,” which was a pouch a little larger than a wallet with contrast piping and a pull-tab zipper that ran halfway along the strap.
As its title suggests, Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, the newest exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is not easy to define. It is a series of six large (10 X 13 ft.) new works, each a complex creation of ink and acrylic on canvas. Combined, they are sort of the opposite of Clueless‘ Cher Horowitz’s description of “a full-on Monet…from far away it’s okay, but up close, it’s a big old mess.” From far away, Mehretu’s works seem subdued, subtle and soft, simple smudges of pretty, smoke- and earth-colored paint on canvas, like a puff of dust. Step within six feet of each piece, and an entire ant-farm microcosm world comes sharply into focus, seemingly out of nowhere: the artist has painstakingly created a complicated, grid-like network of lines on top of, within and under each smudge, spot, drip and suggestion of pastel paint. The result is like peering into another world during stormy weather, an urban planner’s sketches and blueprints gone haywire, or barely comprehensible under spilled coffee, or a city map superimposed with a seismic chart, an architect’s blueprint, a piece of Impressionist art and a child’s Etch-a-Sketch design, all at once.
King Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs is the third large-scale exhibition, following Da Vinci’s Workshop and Titanic, to be installed in the 30,000-sq.-ft. Discovery Times Square space. Like its predecessors, King Tut holds a weird, magical power over the minds of many; people today remained oddly fascinated, maybe disproportionately so, by this one particular historical moment. All of the pharaohs, their queens, their gods and goddesses, seem pretty fabulous to me, not just this particular boy one. But for whatever reason, his particular intrigue is the one that endures, resulting in this National Geographic-sponsored, 8-city tour that has already attracted seven million visitors lured in by the promise of sparkly, shiny, ancient gold and maybe a mummy or two. I suppose all the gold is fortified by a good old-fashioned mystery: to this day, the cause of Tut’s death at 19 is still a mystery.
This gossipy background information is likely only interesting to those more ensconced in the art world than myself: as someone who simply wanted to check out some radical art (and to experience that somewhat-forgotten sensation of shock), I can certainly say that, despite all of the art world purist hoop-la, the exhibition delivered. The show is turbulent, distasteful, sensational, disturbing, a helter-skelter smorgasbord of loud, bawdy sculptures and paintings, each dying to steal the viewer’s attention from the neighboring pieces. There is an awful lot to absorb, each part fascinating in its own rite, though sometimes fascinating in that terrible, morbid way that we’d rather not experience. (As a side note, I wouldn’t recommend seeing the show on a first date or with a parent-type, but that’s just me.)
Other massive figures include Ray’s Fall ‘91, an enormous Barbie-esque blonde in a courtroom-worthy blue business suit, Cuoghi’s Pazuzu, a twenty-foot-tall steel casting of a vicious, ancient winged demon and Liza Lou’s Super Sister, a remarkably beaded sculpture of an African-American woman sporting Daisy Dukes, a bikini top, defined muscles and a gun. She is looking at Robert Gober’s Surrealist installation of a dressed male leg supporting the grotesque anchor-shaped limbs of an unnaturally hairy child, which is directly across from a series of five Kara Walker gouache drawings depicting female American slaves, which is behind a giant trunk of fragmented mirrors. Like I said, it is a lot to take in.