Christian Awe working on the pictures for Wynwood Kitchen and Bar October 2010, photo by Bernd Borchardt II

This year, during Art Basel week at Miami Beach, NYC-based gallery – The Hole’s Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman – curated new sets of sculptures and murals at Wynwood walls by artists including Ryan McGinness, Ben Jones, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Ron English and Kenny Scharf. The wall art covering the Wynwood District is becoming a refreshing alternative to the white-cube confines of more conventional gallery spaces in which art is traditionally sanctified. The labyrinths of walls at Wynwood are sponsored by Goldman Properties who benefit from the revitalization of the district, and these murals without a doubt enhance the aesthetics and property values of the flat-roofed run-down warehouses. The artworks from previous years by Shepard Fairey, Futura and Kenny Scharf have weathered well enough to become part of the Wall’s growing ‘permanent collections.’

Shepard Fairey Murals at WKB restaurant in the Wynwood District, photo by Martha Cooper

Additionally, Goldman’s restaurant on NW 2nd Avenue, Wynwood Kitchen & Bar (WKB), has been transformed from floor-to-ceiling with murals by Shepard Fairey and Christian Awe, magnifying the neighbourhood’s appeal as a watering-hole and cultural nexus for artists all year round.

Gallerist Jonathan LeVine contributed with an exhibition titled Urban Alchemists within the Wynwood complex, showing works from his stable of artists, including those by Dan Witz, Jim Houser, Doze Green, Invader, Jeff Soto, and WK. Tony Goldman and his daughter and partner Jessica Goldman Srebnick kicked off the event with more than 2000 people attending the live performances and dancing to DJ’s Andrew and Andrew. Jeff Soto painted a mural and Invader created a pixilated mosaic on one the walls of Levine’s space.

Friendswithyou, one of the exhibitors at Wynwood also created a playful field of fun inflatable displays at the Paper Mag/AOL event held in the Design District the same night with Pharrell perfoming live and Shepard Fairey attending. And Ryan McGinness later showed up at Club Madonna, a strip club, where he airbrushed and painted nude dancers during a night of rather dubious artistic events.

Ron English at Wynwood Walls by Martha Cooper

Stuck-Up sticker wall at Wynwood Walls Miami 2010. Photo: Martha Cooper

Stuck-Up sticker wall after opening night. Photo: Dale Posner

Sunday marked the closing of another successful Armory Week in New York. Following the trend of Art Basel in Miami, the aisles were teeming with enthusiasts, artists, collectors, and dealers who seemed not to be aware in the least about our turbulent economic climate. Damien Hirst prints had five and six stickers next to them, denoting sales. It truly was a collector’s fair.

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Made up of the Park Avenue Armory show, Scope, Fountain, and Piers 92 and 94, this was the most important week in New York for collectors and gallery-owners alike.

Mike Bevilacqua

James Casebere

James Nares

It seems to be a good rule of thumb to not expect to meet any artists when making your way around art fairs. As one fantastic art—who will remain nameless—told me: “Why do I want to walk around an art show? I’m just going to get frustrated looking at all the crap that’s selling and wonder why mine isn’t up there. It’s very hard to get inspired that way.” As I’ve come to understand it, art fairs are another way for big-budget galleries to boast to one another about who has the most fabulous pieces in their collections and who has the biggest artists in their respective stables. Deitch is always certain to have at least a few Warhols, Basquaits, Harings, Barry McGee installations, ad infinitum. Tony Shafrazi usually counters back with a fantastic collection of David LaChapelle, Dennis Hopper, and Jasper Johns. Expect to see Richard Prince, Picasso, Ed Ruscha, and a handful of other A-listers at Larry Gagosian’s monolithic booth.

Regardless of what you think about the fanfare behind the art fairs, they’re enjoyable to peruse. Until December’s Basel in Miami, stay tuned for more about these cultural instigators.

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Sven'tgolle Sven'tolle. Photo by Stacy Kimball.

Photo by Stacy Kimball

Mel Bochner. Photo by Stacy Kimball

Jacob Hashimoto. Photo by Stacy Kimball

]]> http://www.spreadartculture.com/2010/03/10/new-york-armory-week-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.spreadartculture.com/2009/12/21/abes-penny/ http://www.spreadartculture.com/2009/12/21/abes-penny/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:33:37 +0000 Michelle http://www.spreadartculture.com/?p=656 By Michelle Cheung

Abe's Penny 1.2.1 featuring Melanie Flood and Sam Witt

A hopeless lover of letters and quaint chapbooks delivered by my romantic vision of a postman, I have secretly lost faith in the survival of print and snail mail. But my recent discovery of Abe’s Penny, a weekly art and literary micro-magazine printed in postcard format, has revived my hope. Abe’s Penny is a new and refreshing addition to this clonal world of publishing. Barely one year old, it has already garnered great excitement from artists, mail enthusiasts, and magazine lovers. Not to mention, their recent appearance in the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair at Art Basel was well received, with many attendees finding the magazine’s concise image and text format a unique perspective. This was exactly the intention of Anna and Tess Knoebel, the co-founders of Abe’s Penny, when they started the weekly publication. “We saw a challenge in adding more art and writing to an overstimulated and harried world,” the sisters explained, “so we knew we wanted to keep it short and accessible.”

Tess reminisced the act of getting mail in the country: “I like to think that when you get your copy of Abe’s Penny in the mail, you can finish reading it by the time you get to your front door.” For a magazine, I suppose it’s as fast as it gets. The single-page delivery eliminates leaves of mediocrity common in most magazines. Abe’s Penny, therefore, gives us the curated essentials. In this information-loaded world, its condensed style is a relief for readers. While you may find other magazines easy to dispose, these postcards, like pieces of art in the mail, are collectibles.

I sat down with the ethereal looking Knoebel sisters over a cup of coffee last week to learn more about their venture. Their chosen moniker, Abe’s Penny, alludes to the essence of the publication.  “If you think about it,” explained older sister, Anna, “the penny is the smallest denomination there is. And the postcard is the smallest possible publication.” The idea of Abe’s Penny, as it turns out, was born five years ago over a car ride home for Thanksgiving. But it was only this March that the sisters sent off the first cards. “We wanted to gain more experience in our careers before we started Abe’s Penny,” reasoned Anna. She spent those five years in publishing, most notably as managing editor of the art-focused zingmagazine. Tess, on the other hand, studied art history and worked as a fashion designer.

Abe's Penny 1.8 featuring Cornelia Hediger and Adam Wade

But art is not only their profession, it’s in their blood. Growing up with artist parents in an amusement park in Pennsylvania and the culturally rich New York City, it is no wonder they have such a multi-dimensional taste in art and literature. The sisters exuded a modern, sophisticated but down-to-earth and lighthearted quality that, I suspect, comes from their interestingly unique upbringing.  And it shows in their work.

Each Abe’s Penny card is delivered weekly and, over the course of a month, you experience a visual and textual story unfold. Like matchmakers, Anna and Tess curate the magazine by pairing up a new artist and writer for each issue, which contains four serials. So, it’s not only interesting to see parts of a story progress each week, but you also witness the collaborative relationship between the two artists. Past contributors include a diverse group of recognized talents in photography and various literary forms such as poetry and screenwriting.

There’s something about the postcard format that makes each image and piece of writing much more moving and personal. The fact that the addresses on the cards are hand-written intensifies its personal charm.

When I met the sisters last week, I had mentioned that Abe’s Penny would make a perfect holiday present. I, myself, had been waiting for someone to get the hint. This is only the beginning for the Knoebel sisters. While other exciting things are in their horizon—Anna is soon expecting a little baby girl and Tess her own fashion line—the sisters are focused to make Abe’s Penny even bigger (figuratively, of course). In the works is a kiddie version of Abe’s Penny for younger art and literary lovers called Abe’s Peanut.

Abe’s Penny can be subscribed through their website.

SPREAD ArtCulture caught up with George Horner, an administrator at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery, at Art Basel and talked about David LaChapelle and Dennis Hopper’s new exhibitions.

SPREAD ArtCulture: When did these new LaChapelle images come about?

George Horner: These images were shot in Hawaii recently because David has a lot of land there. It was actually once a nudist colony that he bought years ago. He flew in Michael Jackson impersonators and look-a-likes for this shoot. He was a huge Michael fan and was really affected by his death. The look-a-likes go through real pains in this series, in order to be as genuine as possible.

He’s certainly not poking fun at Michael; he has complete reverence for him, almost to the point of absurdity. Mr. LaChapelle, who never photographed Mr. Jackson, said he wanted to depict the singer as a “martyr crucified by the media.” These photographs are kind of like the three different stages of Michael: Michael in the eighties with the curly hair, then Michael of about two thousand or so, with the light skin, straight hair, and the extreme nose job and chin implants that he claimed he never got. At the end, where he’s actually dead, the glove has fallen off. We’re selling it as a triptych because it’s almost like an altarpiece. Mr. Shafrazi has an incredible eye for installation.

SAC: What of this new Dennis Hopper work?

GH: The photographs are photographs that Dennis took from about 1960 to 1967. Taschen just put out a new book all about the photographs. It was incredible the circles Dennis was privy to, he was a really privileged character, being a movie star. He was an artist then and he’s an artist now. It’s not like this is new work, like he’s decided to take some photographs now. These photographs are forty-five years old. And, you know, he’s a collector. He’s been a collector his whole life and he’s been an artist his whole life. He was one of the first people to buy Warhol, and Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns, and Rauschenberg. He was a real champion of pop art. It spoke to him somehow.

SAC: Why billboards?

GH: So, an early inspiration of the pop artist were billboards. Rosenquist was a billboard artist. A lot of the photographs are of billboards. A number of years ago, Dennis had this idea that he wanted to go full-circle: he had the billboards and he took photos of the billboards and the billboards become photographs and then you take those photographs and you turn them into billboards again. It’s like the full journey. He employs billboard painters to paint them. It’s not that he couldn’t or I don’t know if he has that in him—that’s not the point. It’s really more like paying homage to the old school and to the original inspiration to a lot of these pop people and kind of paying homage to a dying art. There’s fewer and fewer companies that still hand-paint. Everything’s digital now. These particular ones were done by a company we found in Brooklyn called Colossal and they did a fantastic job. Of course Dennis was there every step of the way, it’s not like “Do this, I’m going to walk away.” It wasn’t like that at all. He was really there and worked with them and Mr. Shafrazi did, too. They’re really beautiful.

Nothing could stop Art Basel from having another successful year in Miami. Not a recession, not adverse conditions—though heavy rain and flooding destroyed a few works of art—could keep the droves of people from returning to south Florida and jamming the aisles of all participating spaces and the streets of the Design District.

What felt like most of Miami—and New York, LA, and Europe’s art communities—flocked mostly to the Miami Convention Center in search of fine art and design. The more adventurous patrons made their way across the causeway and back to the mainland.

Comparing SCOPE to Art Basel at the Convention Center is like comparing the Uptown and Downtown scenes in New York; they’re total opposites. For those who have never been, Art Basel is made up of several different parts: Art Basel, SCOPE, Pulse, Art Asia, and the bevy of neighborhood galleries that fling open their doors during the week and curate exhibitions of their own. Truth be told, these are often the most interesting shows to experience, as they have no preconceptions and are akin to Dash’s old shows at Deitch circa 2005: completely uninhibited.

New York Street Artist Judith Supine's Newest Work

One such show was “Art Whino,” which was held at Charcoal Gallery on 1st Avenue in Miami. A somewhat industrial and raw space, the exhibition was curated with the likes of Barry McGee and early Shepard Fairey in mind. Silkscreens as far as the eye could see, paired with stencils on canvas…on top of other stencils on canvas, chunky oils, and collages. Paired with knowledgeable curators and the artists themselves mixing with their constituents, it had a refreshing absence of the structured art-fair feeling.

"It's Better to Burn Out Than to Fade Away," at Charcoal Gallery's Art Whino

In the big top, Gagosian and Deitch were the undisputed heavy-hitters. Jeffrey brought out his customary big guns—Julian Schnabel, Barry McGee, Shepard Fairey, Keith Haring, Swoon, and Ryan McGuiness—while Gagosian countered with the likes of Richard Prince, Basquiat, Warhol, and Jeff Koons.

Barry McGee's "99 Bottles on the Wall"

"Aung San Suu" by Shepard Fairey at Deitch Projects

Jeff Koons at Gagosian

Stay tuned for more Art Basel updates throughout the week.

Art Basel Miami Beach 2009: The Eighth Edition of America’s Most Prestigious Art Show

From December 3 through 6, 2009, Miami Beach, Florida, will be home to the 8th edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, the international art show. More than 250 leading galleries from North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa will take part. Chosen by renowned galleries of the Art Basel Miami Beach Selection Committee, the galleries will show works by more than 2,000 artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Special sectors are devoted to very recent artworks, curated exhibits, performance, and art in public spaces.

This year, the layout of Art Basel Miami Beach will be extensively redesigned, including larger spaces for many galleries, and an innovative floorplan to maximize the visitor experience inside the Miami Beach Convention Center. The Art Positions sector, focused on special projects by young artists and galleries, formerly situated at Collins Park, will now be sited in the center of the Miami Beach Convention Center. Art Galleries, the main section of the show, will again feature the Art Kabinett program, which spotlights curated presentations in the selected gallery’s booth, while Art Nova will present new works by more than 170 artists.

The totally new Oceanfront exhibition environment will be created by an artist commissioned by Creative Time, the legendary New York-based public art organization, and host a daily program including the Art Basel Conversations, Art Perform, Art Video and Art Film. Presented in the public spaces between and around the Oceanfront and the Miami Beach Convention Center, this year’s Art Projects will connect the two main areas of the show.

For the latest updates on Art Basel Miami Beach, visit www.artbaselmiamibeach.com.