“Signs of Life” by Chiharu Shiota

At Galerie Templon in NYC, we stepped into Berlin-based, Japanese artist, Chiharu Shiota’s ethereal  installation “Signs of Life”. Creating the large-scale installation on site over two weeks by weaving knotted threads, Ms. Shiota transports us into a web where the  woven threads create dreamlike scenes that explore and question the idea of  the “web” as a living organism akin to the neurons in our brains.   As if stepping into another dimension, we are faced with pages torn out of books and the artist’s own bronzed arms entwined within the webs which “represent the treasures offered up by memory, to be seen but not touched.” As we wonder amidst the spectacular installations and sculptures,  we are prompted into our own recollections, the pages torn out of our own life stories. 

EL DORADO – The New Forty Niners by Cecile Chong

New York City is “the most linguistically diverse urban center in the world, probably in the history of the world.” The New York Metropolitan area is home to nearly twenty million people, who speak a total of over 800 languages. Forty-nine percent of households in New York City speak a language other than English. Artist Cecile Chong, originally from Ecuador and now living and working in New York, is interested in how and where world cultures overlap and interact. She created this installation, “EL DORADO – The New Forty Niners,” as a tribute to that forty-nine percent of households. The installation consists of one hundred “colored “guagua” (Quechua for baby) sculptures,” forty-nine of which are painted gold. It is a visual representation of the linguistic diversity of the city, and an endorsement of immigration and community.

The Musical Brain on the High Line

In New York City, you never know when or where Art might happen. From now until March 2022, you can take a stroll along the High Line and encounter “The Musical Brain.” The group exhibition, named for a short story by Argentine writer César Aria, reflects on the theme of the power that music has to bring people together. For his contribution, Brooklyn-based artist Raúl de Nieves has created colorful figures placed on park benches throughout the High Line to honor the magical and intricate stage costumes that musicians wear. To me, they are reminiscent of some of David Bowie’s magnificent costumes. Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Pieces of Poetry

Pieces of Poetry: a community mosaic celebration in Fort Greene Park is a celebration of Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, and Marianne Moore, three notable literary figures from Fort Greene. The mosaic depicts a bookshelf with the titles of the honored writers’ most famous works and is comprised of hundreds of glass shards collected from the park. Installed in the southwest wing of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument Plaza, the artwork is designed by Brooklyn-based artist Courtney McCloskey, who collaborated on the piece with students from neighborhood schools, including P.S. 20; The Greene Hill School; Science, Language, & Arts International School; and Brooklyn Technical High School.

Brick House

Brick House by Simone Leigh is the inaugural commission for the High Line’s new series of a rotating selection of new monumental, contemporary art at the recently opened Plinth section of the park. Located off 30th Street and 10th Avenue, the sixteen-foot-tall bronze sculpture depicts a woman whose skirt is reminiscent of the clay house architecture of the Mousgoum people of Chad and Cameroon and the sculpture draws from the Batammaliba architect culture of the people of Benin and Togo. As to its placement on the High Line, Leigh tells the New York Times: “I thought: ‘What better place to put a Black female figure?’ Not in defiance of the space, exactly, but to have a different idea of beauty there.”

NYCxDESIGN 2019

NYCxDESIGN, New York City’s yearly festival of design, highlights the unique creative, cultural, educational, and economic opportunities in the city. The festival showcases over a dozen design disciplines through exhibitions, installations, trade shows, panels, product launches, and open studios that in total will engage more than five million visitors and residents. This week we stopped by a few of the festival’s exhibit locations. At the Design Pavilion in Times Square, the headquarters for the festival, the highlight for us was “Chairousel,” a collaborative art piece by the students from the School of Visual Arts’ (SVA) 3D Design and Interior Design Departments that features a collection of chairs — each of which is a representation of what inspires each design student — that spin around on a refurbished 1960s carousel, on top of which is a twenty-six-foot high chair. At the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), we stopped by two exhibits. The Graduating Student Exhibition is a culmination of each artist’s unique experience as a student of FIT, and The Future is in the Making exhibition reveals both the “processes of thought and ideation” behind artwork that took several years to create along with the final artwork itself.

Viewfinding

Viewfinding is a public art installation and queer poetry collaboration by Sarah E. Brook, a New York-based artist whose work utilizes “translucency, layering, color gradients and architectural references to investigate the relationship between expansive external and internal (psychic) space.” Located off the 68th Street Entrance to Riverside Park South, the interactive light sculpture is comprised of five wooden trapezoidal panels within which are strips of cast acrylic painted in colors from rich blue to fiery pink, all meant to reference the sky at sunset. Twenty-six poems by queer poets are attached to the bench below the panels. Through her art, Brook invites the viewer to explore “how vastness can dismantle limiting narratives of being” and “offers viewers the opportunity to seek their own resonant orientation to the work through chosen sightlines, alternately illuminating, obscuring and revealing corridors of visibility.”

Earth Day New York 2019

This week the Earth Day Initiative hosted its annual Earth Day New York Festival in Union Square, meant to inspire attendees to make increasingly environmentally-friendly choices. This year’s festival was a special edition of the event — the start of a year-long countdown to Earth Day’s 50th anniversary in 2020. In addition to the dozens of exhibitors, including non-profits, green businesses, kids' activities, and live performances, the outdoor festival featured artists who created works of art — live and on-site — surrounding environmental themes that were inspired by the recent Green New Deal proposal. Among those featured was Molly Egan, a Philadelphia-based artist who, in anticipation of the art installation, said that her artwork depicts “people making more sustainable choices like recycling, composting, replacing plastic water bottles with reusable ones, and eating more environmentally friendly foods.” John Oppermann, Earth Day Initiative’s executive director, emphasized the importance of interactive events like Earth Day New York and noted how important the event has been since its founding in 1970: “That was a time when people really raised their voices and said, ‘We need to do something about these environmental issues.’ A lot of the safeguards we have in place today, we take for granted.” He added: “That is something we should keep in mind…when we see attacks on environmental protections we have now.”

Prismatica

Prismatica is an interactive “art trail” of twenty-five kaleidoscopic prisms located in three public plazas in downtown Manhattan: 75 Wall Street, 77 Water Street, and 32 Old Slip. The seven-foot-tall prisms are covered in a dichroic film and, depending on the angle and light hitting the prism, can reflect every color in the visible spectrum. During daytime the prisms, which are able to spin, glimmer under natural light and send explosions of color over the surroundings. At night they provide atmospheric and colorful lighting. The project was originally created by Canadian architecture firm RAW Design for the 2014 Luminothérapie Competition in Montreal, and has since traveled across North America to such places as Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, Washington’s Potomac River, and Niagara Falls. Roland Rom Colthoff, director of RAW Design, says that they “wanted people to play around” and “have fun” with the prisms. Prismatica’s stay in New York will end after five weeks on April 21st.