Chelsea Gallerista

Marla of micro-desserterie The Three Tarts - a favorite of Oprah - offers 15% off lemonade and their signature artsy ice cream cake sandwiches tonight. See you there on 20th and 9th Ave!  I just got an email about the Chelsea Art Walk  tonight. Here's the official page: Art Walk Chelsea Ice cream, cold drinks, the coolest art - what more could you want if you're surrounded by a scorched concrete while your hedge funding acquaintances have all fled to the Hamptons with their Barackberries for the summer? It turns out I'm actually the FourSquare Mayor of this and a number of establishments in this area. For the uninitiated, FourSquare is a mildly addictive little game you "play" on your GPS-enabled mobile phone. It detects your location, and you hit a button to "check in". It awards you "badges" - a bit like Brownie Guide/Boy Scout emblems - for various levels of participation. The person who's been loitering in an establishment fo...

"She learned shipbuilding techniques," says Gallery Director and artist Lauren Bakoin, of  the Louise Kruger and her enigmatic art. ( View in YouTube if this video is truncated at the right).  If you live in a tiny studio in Manhattan, you can't possibly entertain the idea of hoarding sculpture of any significant size - even tabletop pieces have to be carefully curated between your fruit bowl, magazine stash and cellphone charger. But on this occasion, I came close to dropping serious rent money on a Louise Kruger original.  Being a yoga teacher myself, I was drawn into Lori Bookstein Fine Art by this sculpture in the window depicting Pincha Mayurasana , or Forearm Stand: Actually, it's somewhere between a forearm stand - the head should be off the ground - and a headstand - the hands should be cupped behind the head. Who cares? It's a fantastically dynamic piece, and I've been coveting it ever since. The decision to own it was mitiga...

Along 9th Ave in Chelsea are some eclectic little home decor stores that have every right to be called galleries - they sell eye candy you can actually afford - and display in your own gallery at home. One store I always enjoy popping into is NEST. It's perfectly sited to catch the loft-proud gay neighborhood, selling objets d'art and jewelry that you find yourself gazing for longer than usual, and turning over and over in your hands. It actually feels like a little sparrow's nest, full of treasures plucked from around the traps - not too minimalist, not too maximalist, not too ethnic, new agey, or mass produced, not too self consciously hip.  Just plain interesting. You can tell that each and every piece has been selected with thought, then placed in the tiny shop like it was your tiny studio apartment. It's curated by owners Lana Sexton and Henry Stozek, a refreshingly 'tude free duo who don't hide behind a billboard-sized iMac pretending you aren'...

It's been my lucky week. I've been to two galleries where the artists were present and unmobbed. First, Wendell Castle  with his sensuous "repurposed trees" at Barry Friedman. Then, the maestro of ephemeral sculpture, Andy Goldsworthy. Andy is renowned for his transient sculptures constructed largely in nature - woven blades of grass forming a mesh with the sky completing the spaces; sticks marching in thin air;  petals arranged as a solid blaze of color on a pond before lazily dispersing. Quite simply, he's taken the simple rock cairn to the n+1th degree. The documentary "Rivers and Tides" brought his work to the ADHD attention of the masses. So it was intriguing to see him execute his shtick in the decidedly unnatural environment of the world's most celebrated city. The exhibition consisted of sequences of photographs and real time video. A single water splash photographed over time; a serpentine mark on pavement gradually obliterated by...

UPDATE March 2014: Great article about Wendell's latest freestylin' furniture FOR once at a gallery opening, it was obvious who the artist was. On the wall:  a photo of a bearded gent sporting Kermit-on-acid green spectacles and a pinstriped jacket.  Floating around the room was a person matching that exact picture. Bingo! I've always thought the artist should always wear a sash or button at his/her reception saying "Ask me about my art!" I guarantee that "is there artist here?" is the #1 thought bubble at these openings. He or she is not necessarily the nouveau Warhol in the shredded jeans and impossibly pointy boots, or the artsy one in the middle of a huddle. And it's embarrassing to think you just wandered blithely past him/her or worse, asking where the restroom is. But I digress. Wendell Castle's exhibition at Barry Friedman gallery featured "12, unique stack-laminated wood chairs", hand carved by this 77-year old ...

Anyone who has wandered into a Kid Robot store will know the  Munny  (pronounced Muni) doll.  It's a blank, white vinyl character you can decorate yourself with pens and crayons. If there was a word like "androgynous" with an expanded meaning to encompass "indeterminate creature" then it would describe the Munny. It's vaguely human, vaguely animal,  vaguely neither. Jan Huling, a former advertising creative, decided to bead the heck out of the minimalist Munny, making it decidedly maximalist.  The result is a stunning twist on this famous, faceless anime icon. I stumbled across it in Lyons Wier Gallery, an inviting, accessible corner space on 7th Ave which rubs shoulders with the more pedestrian Jamba Juices,  Pinkberrys and falafel joints, quite distant from the main westside Chelsea Gallery district. "We're on the cusp, I enjoy the location and being away from the Gallery scene," said Michael Lyons, one of the new breed of gallery owner I...

New York Fashion Week has gotten off to a sad start. 40 years young Alexander McQueen, a celebrated fashion designer, hanged himself in a hotel room yesterday . I happened to walk past his store in the Meatpacking District, today. It's right near Stella McCartney's store, currently depicting big pixelated signs saying LOVE. Flowers were laid on the pavement and the blind was drawn. As if in sympathy, many other stores in the area were closed, when they'd normally be open - a Friday night at 7pm. I don't have any McQueen threads - the pricing is stratospheric. But I have occasionally wandered into the store for a poke around. Boutiques in NYC are like mini-museums where you can actually touch the art, try it on, and if you've got the cash, take it home. Imagine trying that with a Picasso! However, a few months ago I happened to be passing by a building in Chelsea which often has a sandwich board out front advertising warehouse sales - in this case, one for Al...