Gilding NYC

05/28/2024

AT&T’s Golden Boy, gilded in 2020 in Dallas Texas with Marc Roussel of Roussel Studios. Originally named the Spirit of Electricity, sculpted by Evelyn Beatrice Longman in 1915. Its first location was on the top of 195 Broadway in downtown NYC. It was moved in 1983 to the lobby of Phillip Johnson’s AT&T building. The third location was in Bedminster NJ , where I first gilded it in 1991 , while working for Christine Roussel Inc. The sculpture is cast bronze 24 feet tall weighing 16 tons. Gilding a sculpture of this scale requires gilding in sections in 7 different sessions. We used Lefranc 12 hour oil size , and 23.75 karat loose leaf over a newly primed surface.

12/20/2022

Since the early 70s, the tree at the American Museum of Natural History has been dedicated with paper ornaments. This year it features origami critters—beetles, butterflies, and grasshoppers—that represent exhibits past, and attractions coming in the new year. Read on for the newest opening, in February: http://nyer.cm/zoYcb9g

12/15/2022

Last month, we asked our audience to tell us how they stay connected to their late loved ones. They tell us about the objects they keep, the altars they built and how they pay their respects.

12/14/2022

Claes Oldenburg operated “The Store” from December 1, 1961, to January 1, 1962, out of a storefront he rented at 107 East Second Street in downtown Manhattan. Oldenburg converted the back of the space into a studio; the front became a shop where he sold paint-and-plaster reconstructions of everyday household items, including the women’s undergarment seen here, to both art-world initiates and curious passersby. As Oldenburg explained at the time, “I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”

Later in 1962, he exhibited some plaster commodities from “The Store” alongside new soft sculptures made in collaboration with his then-wife, the artist Patty Mucha, at the Green Gallery on West Fifty-Seventh Street. Fashioned out of canvas stuffed with rubber, objects such as ice cream cones, hamburgers, and calendar pages were transformed into lumpy, unstable sculptures that encouraged viewers to play an active role in reinterpreting familiar forms.

See “Braselette” currently on view in the exhibition “New York: 1962-1964.” Plan your visit: https://thejm.net/3uJURks

🎨: , “Braselette,” 1961, Muslin, plaster, chicken wire and enamel. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Gift of Howard and Jean Lipman (91.34.5) © Claes Oldenburg, courtesy Pace Gallery.

12/13/2022

The French-Caribbean artist Julien Creuzet has been selected to represent France at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.

12/13/2022

“I have always said that I only make tofu because I am a tofu maker. One person cannot make so many different kinds of films. It is possible to eat many different types from around the world at a restaurant in a Japanese department store, but as a result of this overly abundant selection the quality of the food and its taste suffers. Filmmaking is the same way. Even if my films appear to all be the same, I am always trying to express something new, and I have a new interest in each film. I am like a painter who keeps painting the same rose over and over again.” – Yasujirō Ozu

Remembering the great filmmaker on his 120th birthday. 💜

12/12/2022

12/12/2022

By the 1970s, Miami Beach’s popularity as an entertainment and tourism capital had waned; instead, the city was increasingly populated not by vacationers but by elderly Jews—often émigrés from the Northeast, many of them Holocaust survivors. The photographer Andy Sweet’s images of the community that grew there show that there can be, even in one’s later years, a distinct enjoyment to be found in the body and in the brilliant world around it. See more of his pictures: http://nyer.cm/IEWxBSh

11/20/2022

A cartoon by Hartley Lin.

See more from this week’s issue: http://nyer.cm/Nf2pFkF

11/19/2022

MAD mourns the recent passing of designer and architect Fernando Campana, one-half of the Campana Brothers. Founding their studio in 1984, Fernando and his brother Humberto became two of the world's most influential designers. The brothers incorporated found objects and vernacular crafts, tactics that enabled them to engage with Brazil's popular culture and artisan community. The MAD collection piece, The Paraíba Chair, is an excellent example of their practice. It is named for a coastal state where the brothers partnered with a nongovernmental organization, OrientVida to employ underprivileged women, teaching them to sew dolls and stitch them onto stainless steel chair frames. This collision of materials – handmade irregularity meeting sleek modernity – encapsulates the oppositions of Brazil's creative cultures. Fernando's creativity, innovation, and community involvement will be greatly missed.
______________
Campana Brothers
Humberto Campana
Fernando Campana
Paraíba Chair, 2005
Handmade Brazilian dolls, canvas, and stainless steel

11/19/2022

11/19/2022

In Baldwin Lee’s photos of the American South, taken in the 1980s, moments of joy and play break through ramshackle surroundings: a couple kiss in a dingy doorway; a kid pulls his shirtless and shoeless friend along on a cart, down a dirt driveway; an older man tenderly examines a flower in his garden. A new book and solo exhibition of Lee’s work makes the case that he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making. See more from the photographer’s collection: http://nyer.cm/5tnVX6I

11/19/2022

This Photograph is wonderful ❤

11/18/2022

Happy birthday to Georgia O’Keeffe, born on this day in 1887!

In this work, called Narcissa’s Last Orchid, the splayed white blossom echoes the forms in the artist’s bone and antler paintings from the 1930s. Here she deposits a rim of white pigment dust along the edges of the petals, endowing them with a tactile quality and creating the illusion of three-dimensionality in places where the petals appear to fold back on themselves, casting shadows. The flower itself seems to merge with the landscape behind it, and strokes of pink and blue fleck its white fringe.
As the title suggests, this is a specific orchid. Narcissa Swift King, a friend of O’Keeffe’s in New York, sent her an orchid that became the basis for this pastel, which was first exhibited in 1941 at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place. In notes she wrote to accompany an exhibition a year earlier, O’Keeffe had likened the activity of perceiving a flower to that of nurturing a friendship: "Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time."

Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887–1986; born Sun Prairie, WI; died Santa Fe, NM; active New York and New Mexico
Narcissa's Last Orchid, 1940
Pastel
54.5 x 69.1 cm (21 7/16 x 27 3/16 in.)
,frame: 74.5 × 89.7 × 4.5 cm (29 5/16 × 35 5/16 × 1 3/4 in.)
Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of David H. McAlpin, Class of 1920
© Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/14878

10/18/2022

From the 1950s until a few years before she died, in 2009, destitute at the age of 83, Vivian Maier took at least 150,000 pictures, mostly in Chicago, and showed them to nobody. Now she has earned her place alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand, and other giants of the American street. See her vivid photos, which might have languished in obscurity if not for a chance acquisition: http://nyer.cm/XiKehD5

10/14/2022

What is a still life painting?

The term “still life” describes a genre of art that shows inanimate objects from the natural or man-made world, such as fruit, flowers, dead game, and vessels like baskets or bowls. Still life paintings can vary greatly in subject matter and sometimes have hidden meanings. This still life from the by Joseph Solman depicts a book, a to***co can, and a colored napkin.

🎨: , “Still Life with Book, To***co Can, and Colored Napkin,” 1941, Oil on canvas

10/14/2022

The exhibition celebrates the women of Mesopotamia.