Photo By Gail
It’s a good thing I have a sharp eye or I would have walked right by this fun street art sticker, which cleverly portrays the hideous orange face of Dump as an Orange Dum Dums sucker! Bwhahahaha! They got the sucking part right, that is for sure. Just six more that of this loser. January 20th can’t come soon enough.
Photographed at the Southeast Corner 23rd Street and 8th Avenue.
All Photos By Gail
In the absence of any organized celebrations for the holiday, I spent the afternoon of July 4th stretching my legs in midtown and enjoying the sites ‘on exhibit’ in the museum of the streets. At the southwest corner of Madison Avenue and 57th Street, I paused to appreciate a monumental sculpture that I’ve been passing by for years now, which is Alexander Calder’s bright orange, steel installation known as Saurien.
Saurien reaches a height of 18 feet at its tallest point, and the piece reminds me of one of Louis Bourgeois‘ monumental spiders, in that it stretches its ‘legs’ across the entrance to the IBM building, inviting visitors to walk under and around it. Although I’ve never read this in a formal description of the sculpture, one critic has claimed that this Calder is clearly meant to represent a dinosaur, with its stegosaurus-like spikes emerging from the top two arches. I can see that.
The irregular-edged, top forms inspired me to take this shot, with the spikes set in contrast against the skyline. Artsy!
While Calder is most famous for his kinetic sculptures and delicate, hanging mobiles, Saurien is an example of the artist’s fixed work, which are called stabiles. Saurien was created in Calder’s Connecticut studio in 1975.
Alexander Calder’s Saurien is Located in Front of the IBM Building in Midtown, at 590 Madison Avenue, on the Southwest Corner at 57th Street, NYC.
Photos By Gail
Zuccotti Park in the Financial District is perhaps most famous for being ground zero for the Occupy Wall Street movement, but it’s also home to several pieces of monumental public art. For example, behold this bright red, 70-foot-high painted steel installation by sculptor Mark di Suvero, entitled Joie de Vivre (Joy of Life), which went up at the corner of Broadway and Cedar Street in June 2006. The sculpture is comprised of “open-ended tetrahedrons” as described by di Suvero, and was formerly located at the Holland Tunnel rotary.
Update: I was in the area on July 25th and took a couple of new shots (above and below). You can see the city has put barriers around the sculpture to keep people from congregating in the park.
Photo By Gail
With elements of both figuration and abstraction, Walter Price’s paintings shift between everyday realities and invented worlds. Couches and cars float and merge into landscapes as space expands and contracts. Price’s subjects are drawn from his own experiences as well as familiar cultural symbols. The artist’s fluency with color, texture, and form gives physical weight to these liminal, dreamlike spaces. In making each new series of works, Price also sets limits. Sometimes he challenges himself to create a big impact on a small scale; in other paintings, as with The Things That Horse Ourselves for Uncertainty (2018), he reduces his palette to only a few colors. Mixing fragments of memory, recurring signs and symbols, and abstract figures engaged in unclear, ambiguous interactions, the paintings refuse the viewer’s efforts to find a fixed perspective or narrative.
Photographed in the Whitney Museum in NYC.
All Photos By Gail
This dress, part of Dutch designer Iris van Herpin’s Autumn 2102 haute couture collection, was 3D printed using a process called Stereolithography. It was built layer by layer in a vessel of liquid polymer. The polymer hardens when struck by a laser beam. This technique allows for more texture and transparency than selective laser sintering. Graphic and organic elements come together to evoke dimensional lacework.
Fabricated from ark orange epoxy by Materialise, hand-sanded and hand-sprayed with a technical transparent resin, this is the second 3D printed dress by van Herpin to be featured as part of this blog’s Eye On Design series.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as Part of the Manus X Machina Fashion Exhibit, which has Now Closed.
Tongue Chair on Display at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum (All Photos By Gail)
With its curvilinear form, the Tongue Chair (1967), designed by Pierre Paulin (1927 – 2009) demonstrates the innovative construction methods and synthetics that allowed Paulin to make highly sculptural upholstered furniture in the 1960s. His forms foretell those of plastic furniture in the latter half of the decade.
Tongue Chair Photographed as Part of a Modern Design Display at the Museum of Modern Art
Photos By Gail
This old-school FDNY Call Box on the corner of Bowery and Rivington, is easy to spot, as it is painted a bright florescent orange. According to Bowery Boogie, the call box was formerly an art installation; part of Two Rams Gallery’s Alarm! exhibition, which ran from February 5 – 22nd, 2015, and for which the call box was painted bright florescent Red. As the exhibit has now ended, I imagine someone felt it was necessary to achieve closure by painting it orange.
