Events

AD HOC ART PRESENTS

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Welling Court Mural Project:

* The community is hosting an authentic NYC street party for the event. If you plan on joining the celebration, come on down with your favorite food, beverage, or street party fixins to share.

There’s never too much of a good thing…

Welling Court Artists include: Alice Mizrachi, Beast, Chris Mendoza, Chris Stain, Celso, Cern, Cey Adams, CR, Cycle, Dan Witz, Darkclouds, Daryll Peirce, Don Leicht, Ellis G, Free5, Gaia, Garrison & Alison Buxton, Greg Lamarche, JMR, John Fekner, Lady Pink, Leon Reid, Matt Siren, M-City, Michael De Feo, Mr. Kiji, Pablo Power, Peripheral Media Projects, R. Nicholas Kuszyk, Remi/Rough, Ron English, Royce Bannon, Sofia Maldonado, Stormie Mills, Sweet Toof, Swoon, TooFly, Tristan Eaton, and Veng RWK.

The project represents a great pairing of individuals and groups interested in making their communities and the world a more engaged and creative place. Members of the Welling Court neighborhood in Queens wanted to beautify their neighborhood walls and enliven their surroundings and Brooklyn’s Ad Hoc Art, an arts organization known for supporting and expanding the accessibility of street art to the masses in NYC and throughout the world, was an perfect fit.

Ad Hoc’s vision was to showcase the diverse and rich history of artists driven by their passion for expression and dreams for a better world. The project’s roster represents over 50 years of the expansive and diverse history of street art, bringing together artists whose productivity spans from pre/graffiti legends to the latest movers and shakers. While a strong New York City contingency represents the city’s legacy as a bubbling brew of public expression, international players reflect the global impact of the movement that burst from the Big Apple.

The project begins at the intersection of Welling Court, 30th Avenue and 12th Street and extends north along 30th Avenue and then east along Main Avenue, across the street from the Two Coves Community Garden. The street of Welling Court is a beautiful reminder to the rich diversity that exists within New York City. The block is a melting pot representing people of African American, Greek, Peruvian, Ecuadoran, Mexican, Brazilian, Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Italian origin, to name a few.

Likewise, the artists come from diverse origins with Latin American, African American, Caucasian, and Eastern artists represented, as well as natives from Australia, Nicaraugua, Poland, Puerto Rico, the UK, & Venezuela.

Welling Court Mural Project

Opening party: Saturday, May 22nd, 4-10pm

11-98 Welling Court, Queens, NY 11102

Directions: Take the N or W train to 30th Ave & walk 10 blocks towards the East River or take the Q18 bus down 30th Ave to 12th St.

www.adhocart.org

Opera Gallery

AD HOC ART PRESENTS

May 14th, Friday; 2-6pm: Willoughby Windows 2 opens

Artists include: C. Damage, Chris Mendoza & Pablo Powers, Daryll Peirce, Faust, Hellbent, Jef Aerosol, Joe Iurato, Laura Lee Gulledge, LogikOne, Ron English, Skewville, and Thundercut.

THIS FRIDAY May 14th 2:00-6:00
Downtown Brooklyn: Willoughby Street between Bridge and Duffield
(Closest subways: Jay Street FAC, Borough Hall 2345, DeKalb BMQR)

SWOON

Saturday, May 8^th from 6-9PM

Urban Art Projects

136 Wythe Ave. at 8^th Street

Brooklyn, NY. 11211

Free beer and music!

Swoon will be creating an installation with the books themselves, and they will be sold right off the wall so be sure to stop in and get an exclusive piece of this project.

This event is open to the public.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Amy Franklin

Senior Publicist

212-229-7183

afranklin@abramsbooks.com

“…different than any street art I had ever seen. There was a sensitivity in the rendering

of the figure that I was astonished to see on the street. It was some of the freshest work

I had seen outside in the city since the early 1980s.”

—Jeffrey Deitch, owner, Deitch Projects

“A lot of us in New York have extremely personal connections to

Callie’s art…her figures walk out of the city and leap onto the walls.”

—Jeff Stark, artist and creator of Nonsense NYC

Swoon

By Swoon

With an introduction by Jeffrey Deitch

Artist Caledonia Curry is known as Swoon to admirers who follow her work on streets and in galleries all over the world. She is perhaps best known for the life-size prints and figural paper cutouts she has pasted on walls for the past ten years, each portrait taking on a new life as it is slowly destroyed by the elements. Much of Swoon’s work is like this—beautiful and powerful, but ephemeral.

Swoon’s projects are often grand in scope, requiring weeks of preparation and huge numbers of collaborators to make them a reality. And then they disappear. Her art collective, Toyshop, was known for organizing massive street parties and demonstrations in New York City that were elaborate and dynamic, but fleeting. Her most recent focus has been on armadas of boats fashioned from scavenged junk and then launched by crews of craftsmen into the Mississippi and Hudson rivers and the Adriatic Sea.

This book captures Swoon’s work—her portraits, boats, installations, and parties—and presents them with reflections from collaborators and colleagues. Deitch Projects owner Jeffrey Deitch provides an introduction to the artist and her work, and other contributors include: culture critic and curator Carlo McCormick, Nonsense NYC founder Jeff Stark, journalist and Toyshop-member Rollo Romig, gallery owner Thomas Beale, and playwright Lisa D’Amour. Swoon herself writes the captions and the essay for her Miss Rockaway project.

As a prelude to her next project, building konbit houses in earthquake ravaged Haiti, Swoon is working with Urban Art Projects and a team of engineers and architects to produce a domed sculpture to raise awareness of the housing crisis in Haiti.  Pending NYS Parks approval, the sculpture will be exhibited in Urban Art Projects’ inaugural Williamsburg Waterfront Sculpture Exhibition in East River State Park during the month of May.   This project is also sponsored by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, and in addition UAP received a FY2008 Initiative Grant, and the Sponsoring Member of the local legislative initiative pursuant to which this Contract is funded is Assemblyman Joseph Lentol.

To celebrate the release of Swoon‘s new book and her project with Urban Art Projects, there will be a book-signing with the artist present at Urban Art Projects’ headquarters, located at 136 Wythe Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, on May 8^th 2010 from 6 to 9 pm.

About the author

Swoon has been creating street art in New York City since 1999. She studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and has traveled internationally to create exhibits and host workshops. Her work can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate Modern, or on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, NY.

Jeffrey Deitch is the owner of Deitch Projects in Manhattan.

About Urban Art Projects

Urban Art Projects is a 501(c) (3), Internal Revenue Service-recognized charitable, educational nonprofit corporation, in Brooklyn, New York. The organization was formed in 2007 to provide the organizational framework for public art exhibitions, both nationally and internationally.

Swoon

By Swoon

Abrams

May 2010

US $35.00; CAN $45.50

192 pages

200 full-color illustrations

Hardcover

ISBN 978-0-8109-8485-1

ABRAMS The Art of Books Since 1949
Founded by Harry N. Abrams in 1949, ABRAMS was the first company in the United States to specialize in the creation and distribution of art and illustrated books. Now a subsidiary of La Martinière Groupe, the company publishes visually stunning illustrated books in the areas of art, photography, cooking, interior and garden design, craft, architecture, entertainment, fashion, sports, pop culture, as well as children’s books and general interest titles. The company’s imprints include Abrams, Abrams ComicArts, Abrams Image, Abrams Books for Young Readers, Amulet Books, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, and STC Craft/A Melanie Falick Book. Abrams also distributes books for The Vendome Press, Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate, Royal Academy of Arts, Booth-Clibborn Editions, Five Continents, and others.

www.abramsbooks.com

SIGNAL GALLERY PRESENTS:

Signal Gallery is delighted to be presenting the second solo show in London, by legendary French street artist Jef Aerosol. Jef is well known to London audiences, having appeared in a large number of group shows and in other venues for many years. Jef is a household name in his native land.  He has been in the vanguard of the vibrant French stencil art scene. His distinctive and elegant artworks have graced streets in France since 1982. Jef has continued to produce new work and develop his style and has shown all over the world. Recent shows in New York, Japan and Ireland are ample evidence of his irrepressible spirit and talent. For the show in Signal, called ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’, Jef is celebrating the female form in all its glory. Staying away from portraying celebrities, these women will anonymously represent their sex. The works on show will sometimes hark back to familiar poster imagery of ‘girls’ from the post-war years, while others will have a very contemporary feel. However, it’s certain that Jef’s innate elegance and charm will be strongly in evidence and show will be brimmed full of attractive and irresistible images. About the show, Jef says :

” This is a show dedicated to women, a sexy show, a sensual show… Women ‘s curves have always fascinated artists and I’m no exception! Being quite inspired by the aesthetics of the 50s and 60s, I’ve always felt attracted to the pinup style and the erotic imagery of those times. And sexy girls have also always been one main rock’n’roll source of inspiration. Later on, fishnets and lace have come back to the scene with the punk and goth trends. The women shown in those brand new pieces aren’t celebs or stars, but isn’t every woman a star? That’s the reason why you can see stencils of red stars in all those new paintings!”

When?
Private View: 6th May
Open: 7th – 22nd May

Where ?
Signal Gallery, 96 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3AA, England
www.signalgallery.com
Tel: 07766 057 212

ROA

ROA
a Solo Exhibition

Opening Reception May 14th, 7-10pm

This May, Factory Fresh goes wild as it opens its doors to the zoetic art of Belgium-born artist ROA. The artist’s organic animal forms, huge in both their reputation and impact, will grace the walls of the gallery this May, reminding spectators of the forgotten natural world beneath the city’s streets.

Through his large-scale installations of very wild wild-life on the industrial canvas of the city, ROA produces a juxtaposition of the overtly natural against the mechanic that is both feral and nostalgic, a reminiscence of what the world used to be before cement and concrete. ROA is famous for his large black and white works that depict both the outer and inner appearance of rodents, bulls, roaches et al, who slumber on garage doors and cement blocks, copulate in abandoned alleyways and decay on brick walls. His work is sprawling and uncontainable, and will be filling Factory Fresh as such, barely pinned down to found materials, clustering in our corners and escaping out into our surrounding streets.

ROA began pulling animals out of the depths of the industrial world in his hometown of Ghent, Belgium, where he explored the area around his home and was inspired by the life that lurked in its lonely smokestacks. His resulting work snarls at you from wherever it prowls, awaking a visceral reaction that comes from seeing something familiar yet unknown, an uncanny portrayal of the animals within and around ourselves that our contemporary lifestyles have made null.

Since his Belgium beginnings, ROA’s work has hit the ground running like the animals he depicts, scattering on four legs all over major cities, showing up on the walls of galleries and abandoned factories alike. His work has been shown in London, Berlin, Warsaw, and sold out in two days in Paris. He now returns to New York, arriving at a very different kind of factory than the industrial wastelands his animals are known to inhabit, ROA’s show at Factory Fresh promises to be untamed and animated as his pieces.

On view till May 30th.

FACTORY FRESH GALLERY

1053 FLUSHING AVE

BROOKLYN,  NY

Thinkspace Presents:

(April 15^th, 2010 – Los Angeles) Thinkspace is honored to welcome back New York based artist Allison Sommers for her second solo show with our gallery, following a smaller exhibition in our project room last spring.

In this new series Sommers aims to engage with the metaphor of Schlaraffenland, the world of plenty, to explore the facets of gross abundance and to complicate what it means to take pleasure in the flesh.  In Schlaraffenland, everything and everyone is part of a grotesque banquet of plenty, and consumption of others is not a transgressive act, but rather a necessary engagement of the world around them.

There is an eroticism that charges Schlaraffenland with excitement and danger; while some creatures give themselves freely for consumption, others are trapped, tricked, or cajoled into giving bits of themselves up to the feast.  The uncertainty this creates in the relationships between her creatures, who are at once both so cheerful and dangerous, is fascinating.  It’s the tension created by this ambiguity that invigorates the world of these creatures: seductive, dangerous, peculiar Schlaraffenland.

We are also excited to welcome back João Ruas for his second solo show in our project room this May. ‘III’ asks the question – what divides the sacred from the mundane? Is that a universal or a personal matter?  Can a moment, a place, or a person in your life ever be sacred? These questions were the starting point of obsessive and transforming thoughts and drawings which resulted in this series of works. Iconography obviously plays a big part in the aesthetic being explored by Ruas in ‘III’, but so do everyday life, everyday dreams and everyday fears. Sacred can give you hope and happiness. Sacred can bring you disillusionment and tears.

Allison Sommers "Coconut Woman"

In our main gallery space::

Allison Sommers

‘Schlaraffenland’

Abandoning deference for playful irreverence, Allison Sommers draws on her interests in renaissance and baroque art, toying with staid motifs and trading solemnity for nose-thumbing whimsy. She delights in deconstructing the seriousness of historical tropes of art, and tempers sweetness with subtle touches of dark foreboding and sexual deviance.

Allison Sommers studied early modern history at the University of Virginia, where she was able to legitimize a lifelong love of the historical narratives and themes of the Old World, much of which continue to inform her work. She currently lives and works in New York City, where she lives with her husband, Gerrit, and their hedgehog, Ludwig. She has previously exhibited work at Ad Hoc (NYC), Gallery1988 (Los Angeles and San Francisco), Distinction Gallery (Escondido), DvA Gallery (Chicago), and at the Gen Art Vanguard New Contemporary Art Fair during Art Basel Miami in 2008 and the Aqua Art Fair during Art Basel Miami 2009.

Take a ‘Sneak Peek’ at the works for ‘Sclaraffenland’ coming together:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkspace/sets/72157623393138819/

Artist website: www.allisonsommers.com

Joao Ruas Untilted

In our project room:

João Ruas

‘III’

Born in Brazil, 28-year old artist João Paulo Alvares Ruas was still a young child when his interest for visual art started to grow. Comic books were his first bridge to lines and colors, during high school much of his time was devoted to creative thinking due to the almost alternative education institution he studied under. Later, he took Design as his choice in University.

After a three year stint in London, Ruas went back to his home town, São Paulo, where he works and lives.

Take a ‘Sneak Peek’ at the works for ‘III’ coming together:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thinkspace/sets/72157623517671516/

Artist website: http://feral-kid.com/

About Thinkspace Gallery:

Established in November of 2005, Thinkspace exists as a catalyst for the ever expanding new contemporary art movement that is exploding forth from the streets and art schools the world over. We are here to help represent this new generation of artists, to provide them that home base and to aid them in building the right awareness and collector base necessary for long-term growth.

Our aim is to help these new talents shine and to provide them a gallery setting in which to prove themselves. It is our hope and dream that through these opportunities these individuals will prosper and continue to grow to amaze us all for years to come. With the love of and for our community, and with the talents of so many incredible artists involved, we believe that this movement will provide the necessary proving ground for the ideas and dreams of today to become the foundations of a new tomorrow.

Thinkspace Gallery is located at 6009 Washington Blvd, in the heart of the Culver City Arts District, Culver City, CA 90232. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and by appointment. For more information, please call 310.558.3375, visit www.thinkspacegallery.com, or email contact@thinkspacegallery.com.

For Press and Publicity Inquiries Please Contact:

Andrew Hosner

M: 310.403.8549

contact@thinkspacegallery.com

Opening Reception:

Fri, May 7^th 7-10PM with both artists in attendance

The Mandoline Grill Food Truck will be out during the opening reception – come hungry!

Both exhibitions on view: May 7^th – June 4^th

thinkspace

6009 Washington Blvd.

Culver City, CA 90232

#310.558.3375

www.thinkspacegallery.com

www.sourharvest.com

Hours:

Wednesday thru Saturday

1 p.m. – 6 p.m. (or by appointment)

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

FOR  IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA RELATIONS
Billi Kid
bk@publicworksdept.com
(646-228-4140)

Public Works Department’s ‘Eames Inspiration’ Online Charity Auction to Benefit
Operation Design, a Creative Mentorship Program for NYC Public School Students
Limited-Edition Collection of Eames Chairs Re-Imagined by 20 Graffiti and Street Artists to be Featured in Barneys New York Windows.

May 11th through June 1st

Aakash Nihalani, Billi Kid, Blanco, Cake, Celso, Cern, Damon Ginandes, Darkcloud,
David Cooper, Elbow-Toe, James and Karla Murray, Joe Iurato, Matt Siren, NohJColey, Peru Ana Ana Peru, Skewville, Sofia Maldonado, Stikman, UR®New York and Veng.

April 14, 2010 (New York, NY) – The Eames Foundation, Eames Office and Herman Miller have teamed up with the Public Works Department of New York to present an online auction featuring a unique collection of iconic Eames® Molded Plywood Chairs as re-imagined by some of today’s most celebrated graffiti and street artists.  Beginning May 11th, the limited edition “Eames Inspiration” collection will be on display in the windows of Barneys New York

(Madison Avenue and 61st Street) and auctioned online to benefit OPERATION DESIGN, a creative mentorship program that organizes architects, artists and related professionals to work with New York City public school students to create motivating and inspiring projects.

MORE INFO FOR THIS EVENT TO UPDATED LATER