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An Art Show in the Hotel Chelsea
To say there’s something ghostly and seductive about the Hotel Chelsea is an understatement. It’s a gorgeous building with an amazing history, but too many beautiful things have ceased to exist there for it to seem alive. Artists, musicians, poets and other influencers who have changed the world as we know it today, once saw ...
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Little Skips and Finger Paint Make for Elevated Art
After getting off the Morgan stop a few weekends ago, art lovers were greeted by a giant Paper Mache robot, lounging on a sidewalk. Inside 56 Bogart, a lady was rolling around in a sleeping bag, and “living sculptures” were posing in crazy outfits at the end of the hall. Partly due to the recent discovery of ...
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Objects in Mirror are More Meaningful than they Appear
When Robert Rauschenberg set out to create his famed collages and assemblage pieces comprised of found objects, he created sculptures of the stuff of his lifetime. They were a living time capsule of sorts, discarded evidence of life as someone once knew it in the ’40s and ’50s. Perhaps taking a cue from this, Andrew ...
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What to Look Up For: Locomotives, Local Vegetables & More Art on The High Line this Spring
Spring has sprung, and aside from the lovely weather global warming has provided for us, another benefit is that the High Line’s Spring hours take effect this weekend! As of April 1, the High Line will be open to the public from 7am to 10pm. Aside from being a totally unique outdoor space, a great ...
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Contrapposto Now on Artinfo!: Chelsea Art without Galleries (Interactive Map)
Check out the original post for Artinfo HERE! Remember being a kid, that feeling you would get when you wake up to find the once bare ground outside is completely blanketed in pristine white sheet of perfect snow? Or waking up to find a sea of presents left for you and only you by a ...
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Removing the Glass Wall at Mighty Tanaka
Alex Emmart, Bushwick resident, runs The Mighty Tanaka gallery in DUMBO. Certainly NOT a traditional gallery setting. When entering The Mighty Tanaka in DUMBO, you’ll encounter a pair of Skewville sneakers in the lounge area with a pot leaf on them strewn above your head. Penises, breasts and vaginas are everywhere! And I mean everywhere. This is actually very appropriate ...
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Bushwick’s Favorite Gilf!
Before you cringe about thinking about your naked nanna, let’s start off by saying this is not the kind of Gilf you are probably thinking of. “It’s kind of like my secret word for me,” the street artists began to explain as she meticulously cuts and measured a stencil. “I know what it means, but ...
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Street Art of the Week! Frogger edition
This guy was seen licking the side of this building on 19th and 9th avenue. Have a cool street art photo to share? Send it to Terri@contrappostoart.com!
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What There is To Know. Bushwick in Chelsea.
Ben Godward. “Let the blood show (a piece of my circus),” 2012, urethane foam, beer bottles, and mixed media Imagine taking a tour of an art gallery through someone’s mind, where each and every fold of the brain is another corridor leading you to a brilliant piece someone had once seen or thought of. What ...
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Ken Kocses’ “Stupid” Art
It’s kind of hard to sit back and then remember what it’s like being a kid. Not your “childhood,” but being “a kid” specifically. A friend slaps a bracelet on your wrist that immediately curls up. Your brother yells that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon is on, but your sister is occupying the TV ...
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Skewville Kicks it up a Notch at Factory Fresh
The first photo by the author, the rest of the photos by Photos by Jakop Nazaretyan Photography, the courtesy of Factory Fresh. Skewville, a set of street art twin brothers, celebrated their birthday last Friday at Factory Fresh. Instead of cakes, games, line dancing and presents, there was beer, wooden sneakers, giant dice used as chairs, and the musical ...
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Gritty Street Art and Pristine Gallery Walls Combine for “Hybrid Thinking”
It’s the go-to place for street art. The people that know about a never before seen tag before the spray paint is dry. The place dedicated to immortalizing the most ephemeral of pieces. That’s right, I’m talking about Wooster Collective, an endless source of inspiration, a magical playground celebrating deviants and rebel artists all over the world, ...
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Color, Texture, and Sideways Glances at The Flag Art Foundation
I heard that a Rachel Whiteread piece would be on view at The Flag Art Foundation last weekend. Her pieces always move me. Her huge structures of something recognizable as a home are somber and distant, always one color, always cemented in, never hollow, never lived in. What I found when I ascended to the ...
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Ai Weiwei Show Sprouts Up in Chelsea
Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds show at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea is earning a lot of big buzz. It’s famed artist and activist Ai Weiwei. It’s super posh Chelsea gallery Mary Boone. It’s large numbers: 130 million handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds, (three to four million on view in New York) created by 1,600 artisans ...
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Look out Banksy, Hanksy is Here!
It always raises an eyebrow when a street artist gets a gallery show. An artist, who has become famous (or infamous) for the very fact that they spend nights dodging cops and scaling buildings to use walls and fences as their canvas, is now sitting with their feet up eating bon bons while someone ...
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Art Attack: Long Weekend Edition
This weekend, when you’re done running in a circle screaming “three day weekend, three day weekend!” with your fist in the air like you just scored a goal in the world cup, you may begin to experience some of these symptoms: extreme discomfort and lack of stimuli in the left side of your brain, a ...
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The Beauty and Terror of Anna Pipes
Potraits of the artist by Terri Ciccone. Photos of the artwork by courtesy of Anna Pipes. The wind is knocked out of you. You can’t figure out if you’re so incredibly happy or so impossibly mad, and you’re confused how they can feel so similar. You might burst, explode, boil over, your face hurts from ...
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Big Snow Buffalo Bares it’s Bones
There’s something brewing inside Big Snow Buffalo Lodge, a new Bushwick music venue that caught my attention, and it wasn’t a band. Instead of filling the place with the usual music venue decor – posters, stickers and some graffiti – the owners decided to make the walls into a sort of living, breathing art project that’s continuously developing. ...
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Luck Strikes a Library
This is going to sound bizarre, but I have grown up dreaming about trash. I loved to imagine what kind of people could throw out the things I viewed as the discarded treasures of New York City. Having grown up only an hour outside of this city, I wrote poems and day dreamed about the ...
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Berliner Takes over Factory Fresh Mural
There’s an alley alongside the Factory Fresh Gallery in Bushwick that is both welcoming and foreboding. If you’re not used to the somewhat desolate and industrial area, it shines like a sign that says “walk over here and you’re going the right way.” It’s foreboding in that it looks like a passageway out of Law ...
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Ryan Ford & Brad Henderson vs. Contrapposto
When I first met Brad Henderson, he was poking at a piece from Don’t Try to Play me like an Indoor Sport at Bushwick gallery Factory Fresh. My heart started pounding. What is this guy doing? He poked and poked away, his eyes an inch from the work, jabbing and sliding and jabbing and sliding with his ...
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Burgerman’s World
Character Art It took Jon Burgerman no time at all to display what makes him tick when I met up with him in a café in Williamsburg. Before I could even see him take a marker out of his pocket, he had already begun sketching caricatures of the people in the café in each segment ...
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Maurizio Cattelan lets it “All” hang out at the Guggenheim
If you’ve ever had your life flash before your eyes, or thought you saw your childhood all laid out in front of you; every fear, gripe, or theme that seemed to rule your young life, then you haven’t seen Maurizio Cattelan’s “All” at the Guggenheim Museum. The Italian artist created a sight specific installation for ...
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Guide to Gallery Hopping Across the Country
Whenever I get to explore a new city, my first stop is hitting the gallery scene. Representing what is new, fresh, and exiting in art, every city’s gallery district shows a pretty clear vision of the cultural tone of the place and the people contributing to it. Not to mention, it’s one of the most ...
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John Baldessari Conveys the Contrapposto Message to Jason Shwartzman
Shwartzman: “I guess what I’ve realized is I’m afraid what if i go inside the museum look at all the art and I just don’t get it” Baldessari: “The best thing is to not be intimidated, and if you don’t like something just say you don’t like it that’s the thing, art should be fun”
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Jim Carrey: Street Artist?
Is Jim Carrey becoming an artist/street artist? Or is this another case of celebrity gone crazy? But aren’t all street artists somewhat crazy? We’re not here to judge, but we are here to follow the funny man’s transition into becoming an artist. First, we saw this video after he got in trouble for spray painting ...
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Nick Cave: For Now
Nick Cave’s show titled, For Now at the Mary Boone gallery is shocking. When you turn the corner to see the pieces, you stammer back in surprise. If you know his works deal with race gender and class, and his pieces cover figures so you could never tell what race gender or class they are, ...
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What to See This Weekend
Recently, many people have been asking me how I find great art exhibits, or what art exhibits I recommend. Here are my picks for how to kick off the first weekend of Fall with some great art! Galleries: The Pace Gallery’s “Social Media” This show explores the emotional sides of the internet. By using ...
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Talking Heads, Womping Globes
Courtesy of testpressing.org The High Line. It is a gift to New Yorkers. A real chance for us to crawl out of our cramped apartments, unravel from our tiny office chairs and stretch our limbs in the open airy space. An opportunity to take in the bright blue sky with our eyes, a little ...
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“Illegal Art” Addresses 10th Anniversary of 9/11 with Interactive Piece
This is the first of many 9/11 10th anniversary pieces I expect to see around the city When I went on my lunch break today, I saw what I thought was children playing with sidewalk chalk, which seemed odd to me on 5th avenue. After I continued to walk and observe, I noticed many ...