Cultural Conversations

hMa Likes: Shonquis MorenoCultural Conversations with hanrahanMeyers architects

hMa recommends writer/designer Shonquis Moreno and her website shonquismoreno.com

Here is a short profile on Shonquis, excerpted from her website:

Brooklyn-based journalist Shonquis Moreno has served as an editor for Frame, Surface and Dwell magazines and writes on a freelance basis for publications such as T The New York Times Style Magazine (travel and design), Whitewall, Wallpaper, Metropolis, American Craft and Interior Design, among others. The lead author of Marcel Wanders: Behind The Ceiling, the designer's first monograph, Forefront, a book surveying international window display design, Eat Out! Restaurant Design & Food Experiences and Out of the Box: Brand Experiences Between Pop-Up & Flagship, she has also contributed to books published by Gestalten, Birkhauser and Frame on subjects ranging from architecture, interiors and furniture to product and packaging design.

hMa Recommends NYT: "The Fluid Human Dance That Is Grand Central" (re-post)Cultural Conversations with hanrahanMeyers architects

Between 8:30 and 10 a.m., enough people stand still, some in groups, to make the floor of the Grand Central Terminal look like an Italian piazza photo: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Excerpt from the article:

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: August 31, 2011

"Every city has its own choreography, formal or informal. The composer John Cage loved to point out how any street corner is theater of a kind; the dance critic and poet Edwin Denby wrote ardently of how daily life was full of things to see; and when one of Merce Cunningham’s dancers asked what a piece was about, he took her to the window, showed her the view of the sidewalk and said, “That.”

To observe large numbers of people moving and coexisting in complex simultaneity, I chose to make two visits to Grand Central Terminal in August. Its main concourse is among the city’s spectacular locales, giving you the chance to observe the complex patterns made by arriving and departing passengers. Its vast, tall rectangular block of space is framed by high windows, a ceiling embellished with constellations, and double staircases at either end. With its many arches leading to other parts of the station and its central, four-faced clock, it is more than the sum of its exits and entrances: it adds heroic drama to the very thought of travel."

Click here to read the full article on www.nytimes.com

hanrahan Meyers architects likes: "Howl Festival 2011" - City as Urban Theater

Allen Ginsberg reading his poems to the crowd in Washington Square Park in 1966: Photo by Jack Manning / The New York Times

For more than a century, the East Village has been home to poets, jazz musicians, Vaudeville and Yiddish theatre, artists represented by blue chip galleries and those painting in the subways, rock stars, and performance artists. Building on this tradition and inspired by long time East Village resident Allen Ginsberg's epic poem, the HOWL! Festival was founded in 2003. The mission of HOWL! Festival is to honor, develop, create and produce. With an estimated 100,000 visitors last year, the many performances celebrate local cultural icons and lionize, preserve, and advance the art, history, culture, and counterculture unique to the East Village and Lower East Side.  (from www.howlfestival.com)

The most recent Howl Festival took place last weekend June 3 - 5th.  More photos and information on the festival can be found here and here.

 

hanrahan Meyers architects Likes: "Parks to Parking Lots: All the City's a Stage" - City as Urban Theater

Photo: Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Excerpt from "Parks to Parking Lots: All the City’s a Stage"  from www.nytimes.com

By: Stephen McElroy

“Don’t I have a nice theater?” Stephen Burdman asked as he stood in a green field in Central Park near West 103rd Street on a recent Saturday afternoon. During a rehearsal break he was pointing out sites used in past productions by his company, New York Classical Theater.
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“This was the heath in ‘Lear,’ ” he said, and then, “This was the forest of letters in ‘As You Like It.’ ” Ten minutes later Mr. Burdman, along with cast and staff members working on Molière’s “School for Husbands,” were huddled under a tree during a downpour.

So it goes for providers of outdoor entertainment.

Clouds loomed over Riverside Park in Manhattan the next day, but the stars were better aligned for the cast of this month’s Hudson Warehouse production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” The weather was chilly but dry as the company rehearsed, and though every so often a dog and its walker traipsed across what stood for the stage, things went smoothly.

New York Classical and Hudson Warehouse are among a number of companies preparing free outdoor productions of classic plays — mostly Shakespeare — for performance this summer in parks from Inwood to the Battery in Manhattan, and in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, too. The smaller companies may find themselves competing for attention not just with the Public Theater’s shows at the Delacorte in Central Park, but also with the Royal Shakespeare Company, presenting a five-play repertory at the Park Avenue Armory (where tickets are decidedly not free) as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

“I try to think of it as a fantastic boon that there is continued interest in exploring Shakespeare’s work,” said Hamilton Clancy, artistic director of the Drilling Company, which offers Shakespeare in the Parking Lot (literally) on the Lower East Side.

Some other artistic directors had a similarly glass-half-full view of the crowded theatrical field. “Good theater benefits all theater,” said Judith Jarosz, a producing artistic director (with David Fuller) of Theater 2020. “If somebody on the Upper East Side goes to the Armory and has a positive experience, it’s all the more possible they’ll go to the park and see something else.”

Jason Marr’s feelings about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s coming to New York from Britain are a bit more complicated.

“To be honest, as a theater artist, I’m always left feeling very torn about the projects that are of this scope and scale,” said Mr. Marr, the artistic director of Hip to Hip, a Queens company. He acknowledged wanting to see some of that company’s shows himself, “but at the end of the day, I feel that they’re preaching to the choir,” he said. “Sometimes these sorts of projects are for the culturally elite.”

Mr. Marr’s mission, similar to those of several artistic directors interviewed recently, is inspired by Joseph Papp, who started presenting Shakespeare more than 50 years ago and saw his work as anything but elitist.

“I always felt that we should travel,” Papp is quoted as saying in “Free for All,” the 2009 book that provides a history of the Public Theater through interviews with Papp and others. “I wanted to bring Shakespeare to the people, that was the whole idea. I had to reach the thousands of people who lived and died in their neighborhoods.”

But today it can be tough to get even a free ticket to the Public’s summer shows at the Delacorte. Fortunately, though, for those in New York, enthusiasts of the classics can try to check out the productions of the Public and the Royal Shakespeare Company, but can also find plenty of free alternatives, including an all-female “Henry V,” one of at least three productions of that play (another involves a boat ride to Governors Island).

Click here to read the full article on www.nytimes.com

David Scher at Pierogi; William Lamson at the Boiler: Friday September 10th, 2010Cultural Conversations with hanrahan Meyers architects

David Scher, Faro (detail)

PIEROGI  177 North 9th St  W'burg Brooklyn  |  WWW.PIEROGI2000.COM  |  T.718.599.2144
Two new exhibitions Friday, 10 September (7-9pm)—

DAVID SCHER regular is best at PIEROGI  | 177 N 9th St  W'burg Brooklyn
WILLIAM LAMSON A Line Describing the Sun at The BOILER  |  191 N 14th St W'burg Brklyn

David Scher
At the edge of the paper, non-paper. At the edge of sense, non-sense. In David Scher's new work he continues the development of a personal vernacular in tangible form; a development that began when he drew his first sketchbook at only three years old. Drawing comes as naturally to him as hammering nails. "As the universe does not have an idea, neither do these paintings. Why establish a stopover between oblivions?" (Scher 2010)

Words that come to mind when thinking of Scher's work include, but are not limited to, humorous, ingenious, prodigious, and multifarious, biting, generous, and inimitable. Each drawing and painting is a world unto itself, while a language of figures, exquisite line, and mark-making link one to the next. In each of these worlds there is a provocative sense to Scher's non-sense. Bugs, creatures, flyswatters, three-legged figures, and odd men and women populate his imagery. “My…approach consists of establishing fields where multiple things occur in proximity. These are familiar fields, including walls, tabletops, stages, shores, and pages. My work is composed within these constructs using diverse mediums and instruments as the subject demands.”

William Lamson
A Line Describing the Sun features a new two-channel video and sculpture created in the Mojave Desert earlier this year. Begun at the Center for Land Use Interpretation's artist-in-residence program in Wendover, Utah, Lamson finished the project in a dry lakebed west of Barstow, California. The video and sculpture are both a record of two day-long performances in which the artist follows the sun with a large Fresnel lens mounted on a rolling apparatus. The lens focuses the sun into a 1,600-degree point of light that melts the dry mud, transforming it into a black glassy substance. Over the course of a day, as the sun moves across the sky, a hemispherical arc is imprinted into the lakebed floor.

The original performance documented in the video produced a 366-foot arc. The sculpture on view in the gallery is a 23-foot scale model of this mark, created using the same apparatus over the same amount of time, only traveling at a slower pace. Lamson excavated the mark by pouring water over it, softening the dry mud on either side of the line and eventually causing the insoluble glass to separate from its muddy surrounding. Over the course of the excavation, the single continuous line broke into hundreds of pieces. Its reconstruction in the gallery simultaneously evokes the geologic record and an archeological relic.

While Lamson's video works have often found him playfully and strenuously interacting with his environment (both in the natural world and in his studio), this new work brings to bear the forces of nature in the act of drawing and mark-making. In this way, it continues the investigations he began with Automatic, a project in which he used wind and ocean currents to power a series of drawing machines. A Line Describing the Sun is part performance, part video work, part earthwork, and part drawing exercise.

Video Still, William Lamson A Line Describing the Sun

LISA Salons : Leaders in Software and ArtCultural Conversations with hanrahan Meyers architects

Paul Amitai, past LISA presenter

Leaders in Software and Art (LISA) is a society of creative thinkers centered around monthly salons.  Founded by Isabel Walcott Draves in fall of 2009, LISA is a membership organization with the following
aims:

- To join interesting people together for fellowship, camaraderie and
good food and drink
- To introduce the membership to fascinating endeavors
- To become the first stop for the best new art in the world
- To advance the artistic and/or technology careers of its members
- To help creative software entrepreneurs grow their businesses

Past presenters include:

- Mark Napier has been commissioned to create net artwork for SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, and more, and is represented by Bitforms. He combines his training as a painter with 15 years of expertise as a software developer to create "art interfaces", software that addresses issues of authority, ownership and territory in the virtual world.  http://potatoland.org, http://marknapier.com

- Paul Amitai is a visual and sound artist whose work has been presented internationally at venues such as Scope Art Fair (New York), Art Chicago, and Manchester Exchange Square (UK).  He has performed electronic and improvisational music with the likes of Run-DMC and the Skatalites; is a curator of film, music, and art for venues like the Knitting Factory and Eyebeam; and has written about arts and culture for publications like Signal to Noise and The Onion.  http://paul-amitai.com/.

- Marty St. James is a London-based artist who has concentrated on performance art, video and
installation art (time based-media) and digital works since the 1980's.  He exhibits internationally and his work has been shown, among other places, in a one-man show at the National Contemporary Arts Centre in Moscow and alongside alongside major works by Picasso, Bacon, Warhol, Freud, and Warhol at the National Portrait Gallery in London.  http://martystjames.com, http://www.theprojectroom.org/martystjames.html

- John F. Simon Jr. has been producing art professionally for nearly 20 years and has seen his work acquired by the Whitney, the Guggenheim, MoMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, and many others.  He has exhibited internationally and is represented by the Gering and Lopez Gallery.  The main way that he shows his software art is through sculptural wall hangings with LCD screens he calls "art appliances" which he has made and sold since 1999.  numeral.com.

The next LISA salon is on Thursday August 12th.  For more info, visit:

http://softwareandart.com/

or email Isabel Draves (founder) at isabel at draves.com

ExecSense Webinar with Norman Weinstein 6/16:"What You Would Learn from Reading the Top 10 Architecture Books of All Time and How to Apply the Concepts Today"

In What You Would Learn from Reading the Top 10 Architecture Books of All Time, ExecSense examines how architects can apply the most important and timeless design concepts from these books to their practice today. Take the 60 minutes to view this webinar (on your computer, mobile phone, iPod or printed out) to learn everything you need to know from these “architect classics,” without having to spend the hours reading each book, and be able to capitalize on new ideas and design concepts that you can immediately implement.

If you cannot call-in to attend the webinar and view the presentation at 4:30 EST, Wednesday, June 16th, ExecSense will email you the PowerPoint, audio and supplementary files by the next day for viewing at your convenience (you simply need to register before the webinar occurs). If you would like to ask an anonymous question or request a specific topic to be covered during the webinar, please email the moderator at lauraj@execsense.com after you have registered to attend.

Read more + register here:  http://execsense.com/details.asp?id=1342