November 2011
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Watch
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CONTACT is honored to present CONTACTinRESIDENCE and November’s Artist-in-Residence, CONTACT co-founder Legacy Russell, with her year-long durational project OPEN CEREMONY, showcased by public arts presenter Trust Art.
About CONTACTinRESIDENCE
Each month one artist will be selected by the CONTACT staff and featured on the CONTACT Journal as an Artist-in-Residence in our virtual space. Making...
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Patti Smith at The Wadsworth
Patti Smith fans are nice. On the bus to bleak, windy Hartford, I notice others, fingering their copies of Just Kids, hyping themselves up for the ever-approaching Patti Smith exhibition, reception and performance. I shiver, probably both of out of anticipation and due to the premature chill of autumn turning to winter. I had chosen to wear a a skirt, perhaps in order to look nice for Patti,...
October 2011
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Art and Boxing
(image copyright Jules Allen)
i. Ringside
This Sunday Gleasons boxing gym in Brooklyn hosted a book release party for renowned photographer Jules Allen’s newest book Double Up. The monograph compiles photographs taken by Allen at Gleasons in the seventies and eighties, back when Fight Night was as much of a event as football on Sundays, when Boxing was still broadcast on network TV...
September 2011
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Political Art Without Artists?
by Nicole Demby
“The scene changes to an empty room. Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village schoolteacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess.”
So Susan Sontag depicts the abandonment of poetry, philosophy, and art by these disciplines’ greatest luminaries in The...
May 2011
2 posts
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'Content over place': CONTACT talks with artist...
CONTACT: Describe yourself. Who are you and how did you arrive at your creative practice?
Jason Lazarus: I went to DePaul University in Chicago, I pursued a marketing degree, and worked in marketing for a non-profit theatre at the University of Chicago. It was there I started experimenting in photography, taking night classes, basically becoming enamored by authoring my own visual language,...
March 2011
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Arrivals/Departures and Miatta Kawinzi →
Tonight, CONTACT visited the exhibition Arrivals/Departures. The work of artist Miatta Kawinzi was striking and worth a nod. Though an artist who is known for exercising a myriad of media, in this case Kawinzi made use of pastels and raw materials to build out brightly colored drawings on found material surfaces, fastened to the wall with flat-faced silver screws.
The work in this exhibition was...
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CONTACT Sleeps With "The Inflatable Mattress"
It ain’t art until it’s sitting across the kitchen table from you. Or perhaps doing your dishes. Or drinking a glass of wine on your couch. Or commenting on the lack of pulp fiction on your bookshelf.
CONTACT rang in New York City’s [in]famous Armory week by hosting an animated performance artist on the rise: Kenya Robinson ( nom-de-guerre: Kenya (Robinson) ). Though there was...
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A One-Night Stand With The Dependent
Q: What do you get when you take a grouping of artists and self-proclaimed “alternative” art spaces and squeeze them into floors 12 and 14 at the local Sheraton?
A: A commercial art fair.
Regardless of how anyone would attempt to spin it, Friday’s The Dependent — which rang the bell for the commencement of the debacle that some “in the know” might call Armory...
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Defining "To Make": An Armory Week Warm-Up
CONTACT geared up to Armory week with a special visit to iCI’s Brendan Fowler talk at Untitled Gallery. Untitled is one of many sleek new shoebox-sized niches to pop up in Lower Manhattan, teetering precariously at the edge of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Rushing from work to check it out, I found myself having passed the space several times over before realizing that the window, small...
November 2010
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Rain, Rain, Come Again
CONTACT had the recent pleasure of attending An Evening With The Raincoats at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York City this evening. This program was put on as part of MoMA’s Pop Rally winter roster.
MoMA is really onto something with their Pop Rally programming; though often the tailored kitsch of these events cannot help but force a lens through which to view everything from the art...
April 2010
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'Oscar the Grouch meets Claes Oldenburg': CONTACT...
PULSE Art Fair. This time — New York City. The doors are closing up, but D.I.Y. food project founder Tracy Candido of Sweet Tooth of the Tiger and Legacy Russell of CONTACT were inside the warehouse doors just long enough to encounter the work of Megan Whitmarsh — and what marvelous work it was.
Here, the artist and the products of her labor speak for themselves.
Sweet Tooth: Your ...
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CONTACT Visits Artist Sandra Payne
Across the street from the Bowery Hotel, one of the most opulent monuments of the East Village’s recent gentrification, Artist Sandra Payne’s live-in studio on the top floor of a six-story walk up is a magic and timeless curated world. Payne, now in retirement from a career at the New York Public Library, has filled her studio apartment with years of her work, stored in cabinets, on...
March 2010
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"...and Counting" with Wafaa Bilal
Image courtesy of Wafaa Bilal
Tonight, I waited in a room with a handful of artists and activists for Iraqi conceptual artist Wafaa Bilal to eat a burrito. Or rather, we waited for the commencement of the second act of Bilal’s latest piece “…and Counting” - a living memorial to the casualties of the war in Iraq - which consists of Bilal first tattooing the major...
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The Artist-Run Space of the Future
A research brief and some incomplete thoughts about the artist-run space of the future from the Institute for Applied Aesthetics, Office of Research Experiment Stations.
Edited by Christopher Kennedy
Image courtesy of The Institute for Applied Aesthetics.
“John Cage and Allen Kaprow Met on a Mushroom Hunt…” - StrataSpore
The artist-run space of the future is a mushroom, delicate yet...
February 2010
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CONTACT talks to artist CHRISTOPHER MIR
Christopher Mir, Triad, 2009
CONTACT had the pleasure of encountering artist Christopher Mir at the PULSE Art Fair this December in Miami, Florida. Months after warm weather, art super-powers, and neon-clad crowds, the talented Mir takes a moment to talk with CONTACT about the themes in his work, his objectives as an artist, and a muse named ‘Evan’.
CONTACT: Tell us a little about...
WatchLinda Yablonsky saves the day!
January 2010
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Let Them Eat Cake?
Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art
Jen Denike’s recent piece in the Brooklyn Museum’s Reflections on the Electric Mirror was raw footage of the artist holding and sifting through a set of signs that informed the viewer that THERE ARE NO HAPPY ENDINGS.
Previously having borne witness to Denike’s work in bits and pieces and feeling generally nonplussed about the function it serves,...
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WatchHappy Endings, Jen Denike, 2006
December 2009
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CONTACT PROJECT connects with artist Fernando...
One of the highlights of this year’s NADA Art Fair was a sculpture by Artist Fernando Mastrangelo exhibited in Miami Gallery Charest-Weinberg’s booth.
The piece is called “This Too Shall Pass (Jesus)” and it’s stark and minimalist confrontation of gang culture provided a raw if not sobering pause in the midst of the bells and whistles of the week.
Recently,...
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Faces From the Dancehall: Ebony G. Patterson's...
Artist Ebony G. Patterson is not the first to portray black subjects with the grandeur of nobility. What sets the work apart is Patterson’s choice to depict young black men with bleached faces. Presented as kings, Patterson provides a provocative depiction of the popular trend of skin bleaching in Jamaica’s Dancehall scene.
American art critics have been cautious in their...
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Reflections on "Odalisque"
Lalla Essaydi takes a contemporary spin on an age-old art historical trope. Her work provides some insight about the artist’s personal perspectives regarding Arab female identity within modern culture. Other artists throughout history have played with similar notions of “othering”. While the history of the body of the odalisque itself is politically and sexually charged and cause...
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A Miami Manifesto
Let’s talk about Miami, Florida.
Getting off the plane I was expecting to be assaulted by silicone and neon stretch pants. Instead, I was met with suffocating heat, a refreshing reprieve from having spent the last several months freezing my ass off here in New York. The silicone and neon stretch pants came later, as we drove down the strip in Miami Beach; those accustomed to Miami heat were...
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If a tree fell in the art world would anyone...
When they got it right, Art Basel Miami and its spin off art fairs exhibited works by artists with their heads in the clouds but both feet on the ground. During a week in which galleries from around the world attempt to catch the eye of the wealthiest art collectors there were still moments in the sucession of large and extravagant pieces when one might come across works concerned with that...
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