new york artists

Celebrating Fame in Black and White: Alfred Eisenstaedt and LIFE Magazine

Alfred Eisenstaedt was one of the four original photographers Henry Luce hired to launch LIFE Magazine in 1936. Born in Poland in 1898, Eisenstaedt became a professional photographer in the 1920s and ‘30s, working for the Associated Press to document the transformation of Europe. With the rise of Hitler, he immigrated to the United States in 1935, and would work for LIFE Magazine from its inception until its final publication in 1972. More than 90 of his photographs were LIFE covers, and over 2,500 of his photo essays were published by the magazine.

The November 5, 1965 LIFE featured Eisenstaedt’s elaborate photo essay on businesswoman/socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, an occasion that has now inspired the Hillwood Museum to organize an exhibition centered both on that article and on Eisenstaedt’s work at LIFE–Mid-Century Master: The Photography of Alfred Eisenstaedt.

AIPAD’s NYC Photography Show: ‘Eight Photographs Out Of Thousands’

Earlier this month (April 4-7), the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, widely known as AIPAD, celebrated its 39^th edition of The Photography Show. Situated at Pier 94 on the Hudson River in New York City it featured nearly 100 fine art photography galleries and project spaces from around the world. Also on premises were numerous talks, and some two dozen plus booths populated by book dealers, publishers, and photography related organizations.

Roughly speaking, 57% of the galleries represented came from the US, with the majority from New York City (29) and California (13). Twenty galleries came from Europe (France 7, London 6), 2 from Asia, 2 from South America, and one – the Stephen Bulger Gallery from Toronto, Canada. I specifically mention Bulger, as I have seen a number of wonderful exhibitions there, and I have long loved the city of Toronto.

Aida Izadpanah, Alignment series, Handmade, fired, painted porcelain on wooden board, 12 x 12,” 2019

Elga Wimmer PCC presents “Material Culture,” an exhibition of five Iranian artists, curated by Roya Khadjavi that includes staged photographs, installation photography, porcelain sculptural reliefs, minimalist abstract art and abstract porcelain landscape paintings. The term “material culture” implies that the artists do not visualize their outcomes in advance, but rather their art emerges through the working process, by means of intuitive experimentation in which clues for resolution ensue from the materials. The show includes works by Massy Nasser-Ghandi, Aida Izadpanah, Maryam Khosrovani, Dana Nehdaran and Maryam Palizgir.More

Broadway’s Imperial Theater- ‘Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations’

Ephraim Sykes, Jeremy Pope, Jawan M. Jackson, James Harkness, and Derrick Baskin in AIN’T TOO PROUD (all photos by Matthew Murphy)

There are few examples of jukebox musicals – a denigrating term if ever – that have blown me away. In fact, without over taxing my brain, Jersey Boys, which dramatizes the formation, success and eventual break-up of the 1960s rock ‘n’roll group The Four Seasons is the only jukebox musical of import that immediately comes to mind.

Directed by Des McAnuff, and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, Jersey Boys opened on Broadway at the August Wilson Theatre to rave reviews in November 2005. Winning four Tony Awards, one for Best Musical, after 4642 performances it closed in January 2017.More

New York’s Petzel Gallery with Dana Schutz: “Imagine Me and You”

Dana Scutz, Beat Out the Sun, oil on canvas, 94 x 87.5,” 2018

Petzel Gallery presents “Dana Schutz, “Imagine Me and You,” an exhibition of twelve new large-scale oil paintings and five bronze sculptures that makes visual commentary in multilayered social, personal and political tableaux. Schutz confidently confront the viewer directly, with breathtakingly fierce, even brutal images. They are not “pretty”; the artist is not overly preoccupied with aesthetics, or with traditional “good taste.” Her assertive art is instead utterly honest, prepped to seize the awareness of a media-saturated public for whom art, film and television supply an overload of daily visual sustenance.More

New York’s Pershing Square Signature Center: ‘Clueless, The Musical’

L-R: Dove Cameron, Zurin Villanueva in “Clueless, The Musical,” a world premiere Off-Broadway production, from The New Group, at The Pershing Square Signature Center. All Photo credits: Monique Carboni.

For those that loved Clueless, the 1995 cult movie starring Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd, watched the TV series (1996-99) based on the film, and perhaps read all twenty-one of the Cher young adult books, well, Clueless is back, this time as a two and a half hour, acrobatically dance-heavy, in-your-face, over the top, teenage hormonal-exploding, fun-filled, six-piece band-backed musical. And that’s saying a mouthful!

Produced by the ever-adventurous The New Group (Sweet Charity, The Jerry Springer Show), and adapted for the stage by Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 1982) from her original film script, and directed by Kristine Hanggi, Clueless, The Musical is currently running Off Broadway at Pershing Square Signature Center’s smallest theater, through January 12, 2018.More

New York Gallery, Elga Wimmer PCC: ‘The Safarani Sisters: Reincarnation’

Bahareh and Farzandeh Safarani, “5:30 a.m. In the Basement,” Oil paintings on canvas overlaid with video projection, 60×36 inches, 2018.

Roya Khadjavi Projects presents “The Safarani Sisters: Reincarnation,” a series of fourteen new video-paintings in which the identical-twin Iranian sisters, Bahareh and Farzandeh Safarani, create a plausible world of visual intrigue. The exhibit features the artists in a performance-based genre of photography, painting and video. Reincarnation refers to the rebirth of one’s psyche into a new body, but here it is the twins’ inner life that undergoes a process of transformation. The Safaranis incorporate the ambient play of shadow, light and reflection to stress interior versus exterior reality in their psychologically potent episodic narratives. The video projections create convincing atmospheric visual and kinesthetic effects. Windows play an important role as metaphoric unconscious portals that signify each twin’s quest for self-revelation.More

Three Exhibitions at New York’s Hammond Museum & Japanese Stroll Garden

Sam Bartman, Majestic Waters (2001), mixed media on reflective plastic sheet, 17 x 17″.

With three exhibitions opening at the Hammond Museum, the big surprise is the work of Sam Bartman. Born in Brooklyn, NY in 1922, Bartman has spent the last 60 years of his life creating stirring paintings that combine some of the most the incompatible materials. In experimenting with what he calls his “special sauce”, Bartman has somehow tamed a mix of resins, varnishes, motor oil, glitter and automotive paints with oils and acrylics that results in everything from endlessly crackling surfaces to minute swirling storms of color. There are even the occasional brushstrokes that push the variously drying materials around, leaving fossil-like impressions of battered brush hairs sorrowfully spent in a furious wake of swished paint.More

Arendt-Heidegger: A Love Story Brought to the Stage

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.” – Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), left.

Thinking is not merely l’engagement dans l’action [engagement in the action] for and by beings, in the sense of the actuality of the present situation. Thinking is l’engagement by and for the truth of Being. The history of Being is never past but stands ever before; it sustains and defines every condition et situation humaine – Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), above, right

In bringing the lives of political theorist and philosophical thinker Hannah Arendt and philosopher Martin Heidegger to the stage at The Theatre for the New City – the play ran through October 14 – playwright Douglas Lackey, known for his historically grounded, highly-researched, and deeply thought out plays (Kaddish in East Jerusalem, Daylight Precision, A Garroting in Toulouse), has now tackled an historical subject more directly related to his so-called ‘other life’, that of a practicing professor of philosophy.

Through a series of 23 trenchantly sketched scenes in two acts, the Arendt-Heidegger play billed as a love story, covers the years 1924 when the brilliant, and wide-eyed, 18-year-old Hannah Arendt – some forty years before she coined the eponymous term ‘banality of evil’ which brought her world-wide fame – first meets her teacher, the 35-year-old, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, soon to be lionized for his book Being and Time (1927), and ends in 1964 in a dramatic confrontation between both parties.More

Lunch with Georgia O’Keeffe (at the New York Botanical Garden)

New York Botanical Gardens, Enid A. Haupt Conservatory

The most magical ‘back to nature’ attraction for out-of-town-tourists, as well as native dwellers, is New York’s City’s Botanical Garden, situated in the Bronx. With over 250 acres, containing unique tropical and desert habitats, rose and rock gardens, a lily pond filled with goldfish that come to the surface to talk to you, the county’s largest Victorian-era glass house, and miles of lushly planted paths to both walk or tram, this National Historic Landmark preserve is a wonderful way to spend a glorious day. And most astonishing is a 50 acre old-growth forest of massive maples, oaks, and chestnuts that has stood, blessedly so, unmoved since the American Revolution. I might add for those that love to shop and eat, there are two eateries, two picnic areas if you prefer to bring your own lunch which I and three friends did, and a wonder-filled gift shop, offering Botanical Garden-raised plants of all kinds for sale. One of those is currently gracing my living room.More