Kuhl and Leyton Just Like Heaven 2007 acrylic tape on paper 60″ x 54″ [installation view]
Lee Tusman Have a Nice Millenium 2006 quilt – mixed media, t-shirts, found fabric 56″ x 54″ [installation view]
Renee Riccardo is the curator of a group show, “Homegrown”, currently at David Krut Projects, which draws artists and collaboratives from five corners of the country. The threads running through the project include thread, itself in the case of several pieces, and a number of other homegrown materials and practices including tape, plastics, ribbon, foam, shells, refashioned found objects, glitter and collage.
There’s much fun to be found here, but it’s not all as playful as the materials might suggest.
The artists represented are Scott Andresen, Karen Azoulay, Bethany Bristow, Orly Cogan, Robin Dash, Misaki Kawai, Kuhl & Leyton, Greg Lamarche, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Margaret Lee, LoVid, Adia Millett, Doug Morris, Anne-Francoise Potterat, Jon Rosenbaum, Erika Somogyi, Lee Tusman, and Jasmine Zimmerman.
Author: jameswagner
Tom Meacham at Oliver Kamm 5BE
Tom Meacham Untitled 2007 tape and acrylic on canvas 90″ x 60″ [installation view]
Tom Meacham Untitled, Diptych 2007 tape on canvas 60″ x 72″ [installation view]
Tom Meacham’s work is always about much more than what first meets the eye, and his current show at 5BE is only the latest demonstration of his subtlety and intelligence.
The patterns on the canvases are sometimes ink jet and sometimes tape, and only two of them are actually painted. That stack of stretched canvases isn’t just a stack of stretched canvases, and the seemingly-unrelated sculpture in the center of the gallery does not reveal much of its story to the casual visitor.
Sometimes an installation’s instruction sheet really is a welcome collaborator, and its necessity not an indictment of the strength of the work itself. Of course it helps if the stuff is beautiful to begin with.
David Noonan at Foxy Production
David Noonan Untitled 2007 silkscreen on stretched linen 84″ x 120″ [installation view]
David Noonan Untitled 2007 silkscreen on linen, plywood, dimensions variable (80″ tall) [installation view]
David Noonan returns to Foxy Production with a dreamy (each definition) show of silkscreens and collaged paper work surrounding one large sculpture installation, all incorporating found photographic images in his own rich sepia-like monotone.
not just about clouds
While looking at this shot on my screen I was trying to decide whether to post what would just be another Lower East Side cloud picture. Then I thought of an excuse: I would say something about how if clouds were alive and sang they might have a chance of displacing birds in my personal hierarchy of the divine. At that moment I noticed my simple cloud scene included the tiny fuzzy shape of a bird in flight and my question about its banality vanished.
For me it’s still all about the birds.
no word yet from the Democratic Party on Guantanamo
Still there, a monstrous abomination where not only its prisoners have been sent to rot, but its jailors as well, meaning every single one of us on the other side of the wire.
[image, otherwise unattributed, via salvationinc]
RHA and Queer Justice League march for assembly rights
We were colorful, loud, beautiful and cute, joyful and fierce, and we never really stopped moving, even when the march did. One of the group described himself today, after eleven hours of sleep, as a survivor of “the anarcho-queer olympics that was our participation in the parade.
The crowd was crazy about this “unpermitted” band of RHA and Queer Justice League activists, even if the serious message of their visuals and their chants might initially have escaped some of the people shrieking with glee behind the barriers on each side of the street. I walked down Fifth Avenue from somewhere in the 50’s and all the way to the river, and I never heard a single discouraging word.
In any event, on Sunday thousands of people saw the pink and white flyers we handed out and should be able to understand today that this group and its reason for being there on the streets related more closely to the original Stonewall than anything else in this 38th anniversary march.
I’ve uploaded some additional (thumbnail) images of these animated street lobbyists below [click to enlarge]:
NYPD rough up, arrest civil rights lawyer and wife
Geeeesh. Lawyering while black. Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh, since there’s no way to demonstrate that the New York police officers who beat a civil rights attorney and his wife yesterday would have behaved any differently had the citizens not been black and had they known one was an attorney. More likely it was just business as usual for a force which too often seems to be out of control.
And Speaker Quinn tells us we should trust these guys to decide who can be on the streets?
From Newsday:
City and state officials are denouncing the arrests of a civil rights attorney and his wife after the couple intervened when, they said, police beat a handcuffed teen in central Brooklyn. Protesters returned to a police station yesterday to rally against the arrests and alleged brutality.
Michael Warren, who once represented Tupac Shakur and the teens charged in the Central Park jogger case, and his wife, Evelyn, said a police supervisor also beat them Thursday after kicking the subdued teen during his arrest on suspicion of car theft.
“They tackled him to the ground,” Warren told reporters yesterday at a news conference outside City Hall. “They handcuffed him right away. He was not a threat.”
The couple said that six officers beat the teen “like a rag doll.” A sergeant turned on the couple when they stopped their car to ask police what they were doing, Warren said. He then arrested the couple.
This story was not in our edition of the NYTimes this morning, but here’s the link to the report in Newsday.
[image from dennisflood]
NYPD secretly granted permits to Dyke Marches for years
Friday night’s NYC Dyke March
In the middle of everything else he was balancing this weekend Tim Doody of The Radical Homosexual Agenda [RHA] forwarded this I-Witness Video item to me on on Saturday, when I only read it very quickly. It seemed so fantastical that I wanted to check out the story before I repeated it, but no one I talked to outside of the RHA this weekend seemed to have heard anything about it. Actually of course, I should never have had any doubts about it since the byline is that of Eileen Clancy, the video activist who was instrumental, along with many others, in exposing the lies and political arbitrariness of the NYPD arrest sweeps and citizen lockdowns during the RNC.
This is only an excerpt, from a story which only gets more interesting in a public transcript included in the remainder of the full text:
Saturday, 23 Jun 2007
by Eileen Clancy
Through the spring and summer months, the New York City Police Department has continued its campaign to shut down, suppress and contain political demonstrations, often in a completely unreasonable, ill-informed and even insulting manner. Recently, the Police Department has outright refused or stalled permits for events organized by the African Diaspora Education Society, Gays and Lesbians of Bushwick Empowered, the PrideFest and the Audre Lorde Project’s Trans Day of Action.
Yet, even as many groups scramble to assemble pro-bono teams of attorneys to fight for permission to hold events, the NYPD has secretly issued a parade permit to the largest annual unauthorized political gathering on a Manhattan street, the 15th annual New York City Dyke March. Later today, tens of thousands of lesbians and their supporters will sally forth onto Fifth Avenue in a parade of lesbian visibility without knowing that their display has received the seal of government approval.
That’s right, unrequested by and unbeknownst to the organizers, the NYPD has granted legally permitted status to the Dyke March and has done so for years.
How do we know this? Because Assistant Chief Thomas Graham, the commander of the Disorder Control Unit and the NYPD’s expert on managing political demonstrations, says so in sworn testimony.
When I first read this story I felt like I was having a through-the-looking-glass moment. Then I got really mad. For years an alert and dedicated citizenry has been working very hard, putting their energy, time, jobs and money on the line, to exercise Constitutional rights which the police and their political allies refuse to recognize, but all along the constabulary has been justifying their occasional and apparently random passivity internally, and protecting their own rights and freedom of movement, by officially granting permits not requested.
It’s incredibly patronizing, of course, but much more is going on here. Nothing may better illustrate the arbitrariness of police power in New York City, where not only does the NYPD make law on its own, but it can [appear to] violate those laws whenever it so chooses.
[image from Nicole Marti‘s Flckr page]
Queers slam Quinn during Stonewall anniversary march
scene early today at the support truck bike for an “unpermitted” march RHA/Queer Justice League contingent
[more tomorrow]
broken
untitled (Lambda) 2007