Like most still life’s, Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life #57 (1969–70) presents a number of ordinary objects — including an orange, a bouquet of flowers, a light switch, a radio, and a checked tablecloth. The artist spent three years developing this monumental work. The “main difficult . . . and the one that took so long to resolve as cropping or not cropping the radio,“ he said. “I wanted to crop it to keep it more in a painting reference rather than something like a stage set.”
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
One of my favorite contemporary furniture designers is Chris Schanck, and I always look forward to seeing his latest pieces when I attend The Salon Art + Design show each fall. Schanck’s work embraces the tension between dilapidation and opulence, asking us to find unconventional beauty in the imperfect. His contribution to this year’s fair was the Stuffed Shell Chair in a copper finish. Let’s take a closer look at this beauty.
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.
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.
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.
