Items tagged with 'art'
Interesting in 2011: Laura Glazer
"I can only really be myself..."
All this week we're highlighting some of the interesting people we've gotten to know over the past year.
Laura Glazer's voice has a breathy, tiny, childlike sweetness about it, but it's not the kind of voice you're used to hearing on the radio. Still, since 2003, she's been introducing the Capital Region to all kinds of fun and interesting music on her radio program Hello Pretty City.
A little over a year ago HPC moved from its morning slot on WRPI to Sunday nights at 8 on WEXT. With that move, Glazer pretty much doubled her audience, and in the last year we've noticed her hosting live shows, appearing with WEXT at shows like Larkfest and curating the music line-up for events like the Local Harvest Festival.
But we were first introduced to Laura through her wonderful photography. For the last few years she's been photographing Phillip Patterson's efforts to transcribe the entire King James Bible by hand -- a project that was featured in the The Wall Street Journal earlier this week.
In addition her fun pins and drawings, Albany wallpaper and other art projects help make the Capital Region a more fun place to live.
Laura came to the Capital Region about ten years ago after having lived in Virginia, New York City, Minneapolis, Texas and a number of other places, but she's made a home in Albany. As she preps for the first Hello Pretty City of 2012, we talked with her about music, art, Albany, pinball and the party at Sponge Bob's house.
Interesting in 2011: Samson Contompasis
Living Walls Albany creator Samson Contompasis
All this week we'll be highlighting some of the interesting people we've gotten to know over the past year.
Drive around the city of Albany these days and you're likely to feel the influence of Samson Contompasis. He's the guy responsible for most of the large scale mural art that's been popping up on walls all over the city. He didn't paint it, but he made it happen.
It's likely you've heard of Samson before -- The Marketplace Gallery founder and operator is pretty well known on the Capital Region arts scene. But this past fall he brought the first Living Walls Conference to Albany. The event attracted internationally-renowned mural artists to Albany, and before they left, they transformed walls all over the city into public art. Some people like the work, others... not so much, but either way, it definitely got people talking. The conference also had workshops on sustainability and lectures, all of which Samson says were meant to create "an open dialogue between the people and city."
We caught up with Samson a few weeks ago while he was curating the mural art at Art Basel, an international art show in Miami.
LOL at ALB
Perhaps not ROFLMAO, but definitely smile inducing.
No, the Joe Bruno bust isn't at Albany International right now. But there's other stuff to see -- and funnier.
If you're heading out of town, or delivering/picking someone up to/from ALB over the holidays, take a few minutes to stop up at the 3rd floor gallery to check out the LOL exhibit.
You might even want to just take a trip out to see it -- even if you're not going anywhere -- just for giggles.
Dark Sky app funded, and other local Kickstarter projects
Dark Sky, the weather-just-ahead app from Troy-based web developers Jackadam (Jack Turner and Adam Grossman), reached its $35,000 goal on Kickstarter over the weekend. Its deadline was the end of this month -- and the project is still accepting funding through then.
Here are a few other local Kickstarter projects that caught our eye that are looking for funding -- or recently met their goal...
LEGOmania at the Albany Institute
Legos + creativity at the Albany Institute
This weekend, fortified by turkey and stuffing, teams from all over the Capital Region competed in the Albany Institute of History and Art's first LEGO Building Challenge. Teams of LEGO-maniacs faced off on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Their mission: create Albany architecture from either the past, present or future.
We got to judge the contest on Sunday afternoon along with David Brickman, Jim Kambrich and Rebecca Angel Maxwell. We saw everything from an awesome model of the 1864 Saratoga Race Course, to a Village People concert at The Egg, to a futuristic hydroelectric power plant...
John Crispin's Willard suitcase project
This is remarkable: photographer John Crispin is documenting suitcases -- and their contents -- from a long-closed state mental facility that have been preserved at the State Museum. He explains on his Kickstarter page:
In 1995, the New York State Museum was moving items out of the Willard Psychiatric Center in Willard, NY which was being closed by the State Office of Mental Health. It would eventually become a state-run drug rehabilitation center. Craig Williams and his staff became aware of an attic full of suitcases in the pathology lab building. The cases were put into storage when their owners were admitted to Willard sometime between 1910 and the 1960s. And since the facility was set up to help people with chronic mental illness, these folks never left. An exhibit of a small selection of the cases was produced by the Museum and was on display in Albany in 2003. It was very moving to read the stories of these people, and to see objects from their lives before they became residents of Willard.
I have been given the incredible opportunity to photograph these cases and their contents. To me, they open a small window into the lives of some of the people who lived at the facility.
He explains more in the video embedded above. His Kickstarter project has already reached its funding goal -- and then some.
Crispin has been posting some of the images from this project on a blog. The collections of items are beautiful in a way.
Crispin says on Kickstarter the State Museum has more than 400 suitcases in its collection. A handful of them were on display at the museum in 2004, and later became a traveling exhibit (exhibit website). There was also a book that came out of the exhibit, The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic . [Village Voice] [USA Today]
(Thanks, Jess!)
Capital Comics Collective
After several attempts at networking with local artists, mostly of the painter and photographer varieties, cartoonist T.J. Kirsch still felt out of the place. The scenes just didn't feel right to him.
So he formed his own.
Fast forward four months and the Capital Comics Collective has not only become a place for local comic artists to meet like minded folks and develop ideas -- they've already managed to publish their first min-comics anthology.
Small Batch Editions
"Poolside" by Sebastien Barre, one of the first prints available through Small Batch Editions.
Worth a look: Small Batch Editions, a startup business from local curator Melissa Stafford, which is aiming to put together new art buyers with up-and-coming photographers. As Melissa explained in an email:
The idea is something that has been building in my mind for at least 3 years now. In the course of working at the gallery in Hudson I often met a lot of people who fell in love with a photograph or painting, but were unable to afford it. I also met a lot of artists struggling to sell their work. Considering the economy these days and how limited most budgets are, I wanted to create an opportunity for both artists and buyers to have a meaningful exchange; by publishing special limited edition prints at more affordable prices I hope to grow the market for unrepresented photographers, increasing their visibility. At the same time, we as collectors get to discover new and exciting work and support the artists we love.
The initial lineup of photographers includes some local names you might recognize: Joe Putrock, Sebastien Barre, Holly Northrop.
Small Batch Editions hasn't officially launched yet. Melissa is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to cover some of the initial costs. Contributors will be able to pre-order prints and be eligible for other rewards. (And, as with all Kickstarter campaigns, the money is refunded if the goal isn't met.)
You might recognize Melissa's name from Carrie Haddad Photographs in Hudson, where she was the gallery's first director. Here's a little bit more about what prompted her to start Small Batch Editions...
Wandering through Yaddo
On Sunday, for only the 5th time in its 111 year history, the mansion and private grounds at Yaddo were open to the public. About 1,400 people wandered the rooms where people such as Langston Hughes, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, John Cheever and thousands of other artists gathered, ate, slept, held court and of course, created.
The house is gorgeous and filled with impressive antiques, but what we loved was being able to wander through a place where so many amazing and creative people have lived and worked. If there was ever a place we wished that walls could talk, this was it. We walked through the rooms imagining moments of inspiration, unguarded conversations and wondering what kinds of things might have happened in rooms full of so many creative people.
If you weren't one of the 1,400 who took the tour, here's the quick version...
Living Walls in action
The Elk is still unnamed, but we're playing with Elke. Too on the nose?
Update: Check out Sebastien's account of getting his wall included. He also has photos from a bunch of other murals.
Last night we got to watch a little of the Living Walls project in action. And it was cool.
We caught muralists Broken Crow in the midst of putting up this giant Elk on the wall of a house on Spring Street in Albany.
The finished product, and some thoughts from Broken Crow, after the jump
The Living Walls project
The first completed Living Walls mural was done by Gaia and Nanook. It's on Livingston Avenue between Broadway and North Pearl
Cities are living, breathing creatures. Like other living things, they thrive on positive reinforcement, growth and creativity. And sometimes they exhale the slow reek of decay. Samson Contompasis, owner and curator of the Marketplace Gallery, looks around Albany and sees beauty and possibilities everywhere. He wants to take decaying or barren vistas and make new life out of them, turning them into awe-inspiring pieces of art. So he's launched Living Walls, a public art project aimed at making Albany a bit more alive with art.
He's brought together a slew of mural artists, some local and some nationally regarded, to help create works of art around the city. The public art project will be accompanied by a lecture and workshop series that will run September 16 and 17.
You may have already seen the first completed wall, which is at 74 Livingston Avenue between Broadway and North Pearl Street. That one was done by the artistic team of Gaia and Nanook, who came up with the concept for the piece after touring Albany.
Samson loves to talk about the power of art, legal or illegal, massive or fleeting...
Raising the Albany Barn
The former St. Joseph's Academy, future home of the Albany Barn.
Six years ago Capital Region residents Jeff Mirel and George Kansas decided to help raise money for victims of the tsunami in South Asia. A few weeks later they'd packed 2,000 people into the Palace Theater to see dozens of local artists and musicians, raising nearly $30,000.
Fast forward five years.
That successful Rock2Rebuild concert has spawned another effort: the Albany Barn. Organizers hope the project will be a creativity incubator that helps provide resources for artists, offer arts programming for the region, create educational opportunities for inner city kids, and acts as a catalyst to revitalize neighborhoods.
"Then & Now" at Albany Center Gallery
Opening today at Albany Center Gallery: "Then & Now (Small Prints)" by Thom O'Connor.
The artist, a former UAlbany professor, is a photographer and accomplished print maker. From the blurbage (link added):
Thom O'Connor's work has been consistently praised and highly valued for its construction and thoughtfulness throughout his career. O'Connor is recognized internationally as a master of printmaking, and for his innovation and skill with new techniques. In an Albany Times Union article, author William Jaeger explains, "O'Connor's prints survive because they have unusual visual sensitivity, [and] show extraordinary craft. There is an undercurrent of drama that suggests, without delineation, a very human dimension to the works."
The show opens today and runs through September 10. There's a reception on August 12 at 5 pm.
Look for this Friday: "Forgive Our Trespasses," an exhibit opening this Friday at the Albany Barn, of urban exploration photos by Sebastien Barre, Paul Gallo and Darren Ketchum. There's a reception with the artists starting at 5 pm.
image: Thom O'Connor
Marks of Identity
Something to look for at Troy Night Out: "Marks of Identity" by William DeMichele at the Photo Center Gallery. From the blurbage:
For over 30 years, William DeMichele has been a Capital District professional photographer, and for the last 2 decades he has traveled 5 continents to document the colorful world of tattooing. his approach to photographing tattooed men and women is to use a formal studio setting and to concentrate on the person in front of the lens. "these are portraits of people with tattoos, not tattoos on people", DeMichele proclaims. the result in and intimate look at those who have made a commitment to literally wear their hearts on their sleeve.
The opening reception for is tonight. The exhibit runs through August 21.
photo: Bill DeMichele
"Pulp Fiction Paintings" at the Mandeville Gallery
Action! Sex! Intrigue!
Now open at the Mandeville Gallery at Union College: "Pulp Fiction Paintings
Selections from the Robert Lesser Collection." From the blurbage:
This exhibition contains 37 paintings from the Robert Lesser Collection of Pulp Fiction Art and is on loan from the New Britain Museum of American Art. ... The paintings, roughly 30" x 40", were done as covers to the "pulp fiction" genre of the 1930's and 1940's. The subject matter includes adventure, mystery, science fiction, war, and westerns. Tarzan and the Shadow are two protagonists that are well known today. ...
The influence of pulp fiction is vast, seen in the development of later forms of detective and science fiction literature, super heroes, and film noir. The hyper-American imagery was later taken up by the Pop Artists of the Sixties.
After buying his first painting of the Shadow Lesser says, "I began to realize, my God, for these little ten-cent pulps, they had magnificent oil paintings for the cover art. I was amazed how great some of it was, how well trained these artists were."
Here are a few images from the exhibit. Comments from the curator. And a recent review of works from the collection.
"Pulp Fiction Paintings" is on display until September 25. There are a few events associated with the exhibit, including movie marathons and a talk, "Pulp Fiction and the Modern Reader," by Skidmore's Janet Casey (September 15).
The Mandeville Gallery is in the Nott Memorial at Union.
images from the Robert Lesser Collection, via the Mandeville Gallery
Mitch Messmore: from Schenectady to Beirut and, eventually, back
Mitch Messmore takes the Capital Region art scene very seriously. The Schenectady native has spent the past several years championing local art and attempting to bolster the arts community through his work with various organizations. In 2007, back when cities started getting the art walk bug, he founded Art Night Schenectady. This was just after he became the chairman of the board of the Capital Region Initiative Supporting the Arts and just before he was named the executive director of the Upper Union Street BID. He's also been involved with Upstate Artists Guild, Existing Artists and the Schenectady Photographic Society, just to name a few.
In November of last year, Messmore moved temporarily to Beirut to be with his wife while she is there working on a SUNY research project. You might think that while he is living in the Middle East, Messmore's penchant for local art would have at least been put on the back burner, but the multi-media artist has remained as active and committed as ever, continuing to run Art Night Schenectady via Skype, email and phone with the help of a posse of volunteers.
Now, Messmore has launched Art Night Beirut as a sister organization to the one in his hometown. His exhibiting his abstract paintings at a Beirut gallery. And he's thinking about how to turn the Capital Region into the cultural hub of the Northeast...
All Utopias Fell
Worth the bout of acrophobia.
We were out at MASS MoCA recently and finally had a chance to check out All Utopias Fell, Michael Oatman's outdoor installation there. We're glad we did. It's fun.
The installation is a collection of three elements. From the MASS MoCA blurbage:
The Shining is a 1970s-era 'satellite' that has crash-landed at MASS MoCA. This beautifully reflective, repurposed Airstream trailer - with large parachutes and active solar panels - is inspired by an earlier era of pulp aeronauts like Buck Rogers, Tom Swift and Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, as well as the works of Giotto, Jules Verne, NASA, and Chris Marker's 1962 film La Jetée. Visitors will be allowed to climb a staircase and enter into the craft where they will encounter The Library of the Sun. Hybridizing a domestic space, a laboratory and a library, it has the feel of a hermitage, where the occupant will 'be right back', only it is 30 years later. ... Once inside the craft, visitors will also be able to view Codex Solis, a massive field of photovoltaic (PVs) or solar panels. At 50kw, the field will generate 7% of the power consumed by MASS MoCA. In addition to this 230-foot long grid, mirrors are interspersed in the middle of the field, and suggest an absent text. The arrangement of mirrors and solar panels is based on a specific quote by an unnamed author, and will not be revealed by the artist; instead the public will be encouraged to spend time with the piece, watch the reflected sky, and solve the riddle as birds and planes, inverted, fly by.
The trailer is great. It's like something from an alternate reality, in which you could have gone camping in space during the 1960s -- and the owner of this particular trailer was a bit on the obsessive side. The inside is a meticulously constructed world, down to the jars of tomatoes.
All Utopias Fell is a seasonal exhibit. It's perched at the top of a few flights of metal stairs outside the old power plant for the factory that preceded the museum at the site. The exhibit is open through October.
After the jump: an interior pic, plus a few bonus pics.
Canned Art on Delaware Avenue
They're almost too nice to throw trash in -- but you should throw your trash in them.
These new trash cans, which will soon be out in front of businesses on Delaware Ave in Albany, are part of a new collaboration between the Delaware Avenue Merchants Association and the Upstate Artists Guild.
Local artists painted all the cans, and each can has a theme based on the business in front of which it sits. Keith Picard, a Spectrum co-owner and a member of the DAMA, says it's just another way the merchants association is working to bring art to the street.
You can get a closer look at some of the cans after the jump.
Sculpture in the Streets 2011 is kinetic
Looking for the George Rickey sculptures on the streets of Albany is a little like playing a giant game of Where's Waldo, or trying to find the toaster in the tree. Once you see them, you don't understand how you could have missed them, but at first they're oddly hard to spot.
The five moving metal sculptures are this year's edition of Albany's Sculpture in the Streets project. If something about them seems familiar, think about the Empire State Plaza -- there's been a Rickey sculpture on the ESP for years. There's also one on the RPI campus (where Rickey spent three years teaching in the architecture program), at the Albany Institute of History and Art and on the second floor at Albany International Airport.
Maybe it's the size or steel gray color that makes them blend into the background a bit -- another large metal object in the middle of a city. They kind of disappear into the landscape. But then the wind catches one and you find yourself standing in the street trying to figure out how it does that.
River Street Festival photos 2011
Thanks, Casey!
That's Casey above -- she created AOA's sponsored entry in the Troy River Street Festival's street painting contest this past weekend. It's a bird sitting on the Egg. Heh.
Thanks to Sebastien for the photo -- here's a set with more of his photos from the festival. And Bennett's posted a lot of good photos of the street painting artists creating their panels.
There are a bunch of other photos from the street painting contest after the jump. There were a lot of good entries this year.
Jess Fink has created the best book about Victorian robot sex that we've ever read
Admittedly, it's also the first book about Victorian robot sex that we've ever read.
Troy artist Jess Fink is a successful illustrator and t-shirt designer. If imitation is flattery, she's gotten a lot of compliments for her work.
Jess also creates comics. One of those comics -- Chester 5000 XYV -- was recently published in graphic novel form. And it's gotten praise in a bunch of places, among them: Paste, The AV Club, and io9.
So, what's Chester 5000 XYV about? Oh, it's just another Victorian-era tale of a man who creates a sex robot for his wife -- in all its graphic detail.
A mesmerizing video from where Troy's old city hall will soon no longer be
Rob sent along this clip -- it's a video for a J. Tillman song (he's also part of Fleet Foxes). The video was shot in Troy. You'll recognize the spot when the former city hall arrives in the frame.
The video was shot by Matt Blodgett. It's dreamy and mesmerizing.
About the old city hall: It's on its way out. Demolition started back up again today.
Art on Lark 2011
In case it has somehow escaped your attention: Art on Lark is this Saturday in Albany. Lined up this year:
+ The Living Walls project will have a group of artists creating a mural on Hudson between Willet and Lark.
+ There will be a pop-up gallery organized by Albany Underground Artists in the former Planned Parenthood building, along with food from the Chefs Consortium (food is $10).
+ The Grand Street Arts' Youth FX program will be screening six short films. (Liz talked with some of the filmmakers in the program earlier this year.)
+ And an outdoor gallery organized by Albany Center Gallery.
Also: a bunch of good local music organized by WEXT. The schedule for that is after the jump.
Chalk it up, Casey
Hey there, chickadee.
We're happy to announce that we've picked Casey to create the panel for AOA's sponsored entry into the Troy River Street Festival street painting competition.
We really liked Casey's work -- that's one of her prints above (a few more after the jump). And we thought her style would translate well to the sidewalk. Check out her Etsy shop, Lady Sparrowhawk.
Thanks to Pearl, Richard, and Elisa for also sharing your work. We bet you all would have done a good job.
The River Street Festival is June 18 in downtown Troy.
AOA wants you to draw on the sidewalk
Chalk it up!
One of our favorite parts of the annual Troy River Street Festival is the street painting competition. So we're sponsoring an entry this year.
One problem: we don't have an artist.
So, we're looking for an artist to participate in this year's competition. We'll cover the entry fee -- you cover the sidewalk.
Sound like fun? Post a comment to this entry with a link to some of your work by noon this Friday -- we'll pick one winner. (If you don't have work online, please email us with an image.)
The street painting competition is organized by the Arts Center of the Capital Region. It's open to everyone, but space is limited. The entry fee is $15.
The River Street Festival is June 18.
Earlier on AOA:
+ River Street Festival sidewalk chalk 2010
+ Sidewalk chalk winners 2009
+ Sidewalk chalk 2008
... said Jenna about The quintessential Capital Region food?