Photo By Gail
Kelly Akashi’s work often explores the impermanence of the natural world. In 2024‘s Monument (Regeneration), the artist draws inspiration from nature’s regenerative resilience. A delicately latticed borosilicate-glass sphere – balanced between fragility and strength – rests a top a weathered, steel plinth reminiscent of a tree trunk.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Kelly Akashi, Monument (Regeneration)
Photos By Gail
I was walking west from the 6 train at 103rd Street on the way to the Museum of the City of New York when I spotted this very cool mural, which looked to me at first like a Native American interpretation of the Statue of Liberty. It turns out that the artist is Mexican muralist Sego, and this striking piece is done in his signature organic style. Entitled Freedom and Emancipation of The Natural World, the mural was painted for the Monument Art Festival, which took place in October of 2015.
Continue reading Statue of Liberty Mural By Sego, East Harlem
All Photos By Gail
Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument 2.0 (2015) was a guerilla action intended to refocus the national conversation on civil liberties and privacy two years after Edward Snowden’s highly politicized leaking of classified National Security Administration documents. In an act of solidarity with Snowden, artists Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider covertly installed this nameplate and hundred-pound bust (sculpted by Doyle Trankina) of the controversial figure at the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park.
Continue reading Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument 2.0
All Photos By Gail
Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) deploys a wide range of influences in her work, combining art-historical and pop-cultural citations with explorations of material, color and form. Her hybrid sculptures enact a range of dialogues — between handcrafted and commercially produced objects, aesthetic and consumer goods, among others — and engage broader social and political histories of exchange.
The Andy Monument by Rob Pruitt (Photograph By James Ewing)
Rob Pruitt’s really awesome Andy Warhol Monument statue has been up at the intersection of 17th Street and Broadway since March of this year. The statue stands just a few yards from one of two former addresses of Warhol’s (in)famous Factory Studio. During the time I’ve lived in NYC (23 or so years) that same location has housed two nightclubs (Area and the short-lived Palace De Beaute), a porn shop and a Petco, which is what it is now. You can visit the statue, and marvel at its shininess, until they take it down on October 2, 2011.