The opening party for 1stfans featured screenprints from Swoon's studio.

LOS ANGELES — I remember the moment well.  I was staying with a friend, Sara Marie Watson, out in Chongqing, a Chinese city miles and miles from Shanghai along the Yangtze River. Although Sara and I had common friends in the US, it did feel like we were a world away from home.

I stood on Sara’s porch and looked out onto the endless Chongqing skyline, a breathtaking view to be sure. But something else took my breath away: hanging on the door in Sara’s apartment was a familiar logo.  I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and confirm. It was a canvas 1stfans bag!

A few days ago, Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum announced that 1stfans, the museum world’s first socially networked membership, would be coming to a close after more than three years of great programming. It was a great concept for a membership program, consisting of monthly get-togethers at the museum and online discussions for members.

My project for the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed involved Morse code.

One of the interesting components was the 1stfans Twitter art feed, a private feed for artists to work and play with. The feed, which featured artists like Duke Riley, Mary Temple and Joseph Kosuth, was something I looked forward to during its two-year run, and it inspired a lot of thinking on my part about the meaning and method of social media-based art works.

The main challenge, as Bernstein noted, was that 1stfans existed as its own entity, with a private Twitter feed and its own circle of events separate from the usual membership events.

1stfans allowed us to see that most individuals looking to truly support us are interested in a deeper and more personal connection with the Museum and, often, people are looking for a more social experience within the structure of events and their relationship with the institution. It was the deep engagement of the program that was incredibly successful, but 1stfans was its own entity that was never fully integrated into the Membership structure.

I emailed Sara about the end of 1stfans, and this is what she wrote me from far-off Chongqing:

I was a young 20-something in New York, and it was the perfect, affordable way to get my toes wet in the art scene. Will [Cary, director of memberships] knew us by name, and it made us feel pretty cool when we showed up for the special tours on first weekends.

I do hope the Brooklyn Museum and others will use 1stfans as a jumping-off point for finding new and interesting ways to engage young, social media-savvy arts lovers. It was a true community, and I met many new friends through the program whom I consider friends to this day.

I’m not living in New York anymore, but a part of me is tempted to fly back just to attend the annual rooftop ice cream social to say goodbye. If you’ll be in the city, please consider supporting the museum with a $20 1stfans membership. You’ll only get one event out of that membership, but it will certainly be worth it.

Roy Lichtenstein's "Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But…" (1964) (© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Collection Simonyi, courtesy Art Institute) on the left with our added commentary on the right.

CHICAGO — There’s a massive Roy Lichtenstein retrospective opening this Wednesday, May 16, at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Or rather, there isn’t: the opening had to be postponed due to the huge number of people who signed up for the members-only preview.

I spoke to Chai Lee, Associate Director of Public Affairs at the Art Institute, who told me that staff were “pleasantly surprised” by the numbers, which are matching the levels seen for the Matisse: Radical Reinvention blockbuster of 2010.

“More than 3,000 people registered for the previews, and the lectures were all filled up as well. The Matisse exhibition also started out strong, but [attendance] ended stronger during the last days of the show due to fantastic word of mouth. The Lichtenstein show, however, is already starting out strong. Because of overwhelming demand from our members, we took this opportunity to extend the member preview days to this Friday, May 18,” Lee says.

The show, by the way, promises to be spectacular. It’s the first real retrospective of Lichtenstein’s work since his death in 1997, and curators James Rondeau and Sheena Wagstaff were even allowed to go through the artist’s work in storage by his widow, Dorothy Lichtenstein, to choose pieces for the exhibition. When asked which day the exhibition now opens to the public, Chai Lee replied: “On May 22, after the NATO summit.”

Ah yes, the NATO summit. Like the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium, the Art Institute will be closed for three days in anticipation of the expected drop in visitors to downtown Chicago due to the massive presence of police, helicopters and protestors. Somehow I don’t think that Lichtenstein, the man who appropriated that comic book image of the fighter jet and missile strike, would have minded the disruption too much.

The video was commissioned by LACMA for their first annual Art + Film Gala last year. The event honored John Baldessari and Clint Eastwood.

And who doesn’t love the fact that he knows that he will be remembered as the “guy who put dots over people’s faces.” And you better believe that I will be bookmarking his wifi password for future reference.

What are the three things Baldessari would tell a young artist?

1. Talent is cheap.
2. You have to be Possessed but you can’t will.
3. Being at the right place at the right time.

Well said.

h/t Craig Platt via NY Mag

Now the Getty team has come up with a video to demonstrate how to save your precious sculptures that I’m sure you all have. I, for one, have been wondering how to properly anchor my ancient Greek busts and now I know. Thanks, Getty!

I’m sure most of this can be translated to preserve art from other eras but then again would anyone notice if a John Chamberlain fell over and got dented? Though this does make me appreciate the genius of Félix González-Torres’s candy installations (earthquake proof!)

Quayola, "Strata #4" (2011) (image courtesy Bitforms gallery, NY)

Davide Quagliola (aka Quayola) an Italian digital artist, loves art. He loves his Roman heritage, brimming with Renaissance and Baroque innuendos. And he loves classical images, and the beauty of the algorithm.

Quayola  has created one of the most startling custom morphing technologies from his super-duper London based server rendering farm, transforming paintings from the ceilings of churches and museum collections to go inside, underneath and outside trompe l’oeil and encaustics. “Strata #4,” one of  his video works on view at Bitforms gallery in Chelsea was commissioned by the Palais de Beaux Arts in Lille, using the iconic paintings from the museum’s Flemish collection of Peter Paul Rubens’ and Anton Van Dyck’s grand altarpieces.

Quayola, "Topologies - Velazquez, Las Meninas" (2010) (image courtesy Bitforms gallery)

What Quayola really looks for is the alchemist’s secret, the golden rule or mean of proportions that can underlie eternal works. His HD video series about two paintings in the Museo del Prado‘s collection “Topologies — Velazquez, Las Meninas” (2010) and “Topologies – Tiepolo, Immacolata Concezione” (2010), structurally dissolve as you view them. In collaboration with an HDR photographer he works with huge images, 20,000 x 20,000 pixels, running a raw analysis to discover what is really within the paintings. Employing  a triangulation algorithm that generates thousands of polygons, he takes these icons of perfection and turns them into a mesh continually deforming itself.

Through distancing himself from the Italian land of his birth by residing in London, Quayola has decontextualized his heritage just enough to thrust it into a new century.

You can watch Quayola’s “Strata #4″ (2011) online.

Quayola’s Strata continues at Bitforms (529 W 20th Street, #2, Chelsea, Manhattan) until June 16.

The graff pic tweeted by @therealkidult and the Marc Jacobs tee via @MarcJacobsIntl (via Twitter)

You have to wonder if something is edgy anymore if a fashion label can quickly flip the “transgression” into merchandise within a few days.

Early last week, graffiti writer Kidult expressed himself on the front of the Marc Jacobs shop in downtown Manhattan and tweeted the image with a question:

I did some ART? http://t.co/tPMjNfgL

May 8, 2012 12:51 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@therealkidult

kidult

The same week the clever people at Marc Jacobs took the lemons they were handed and turned it into lemonade — yes, they created a tshirt (which retails for $689) to document the “art” on the front of their store:

Available now for $689. Signed by the artist, $680. http://t.co/ZDNMEQMS

May 8, 2012 6:25 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@MarcJacobsIntl

Marc Jacobs Intl

While Kidult is obviously not happy, the people at Jacobs clearly came out on top … and strangely the tshirt fits perfectly into the brand’s taste for tongue-in-cheek self-criticality.

Btw, now another site has just gone meta with the whole thing and produced their own tshirt of the tshirt … and their version retails for only $35.

Kidult’s Twitter page proclaims that the “Revolution will not be Televised” but it does appear to be prone to merchandising.

h/t Henry Chalian

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A view of the Met's Schiaparelli and Prada exhibition (all images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

It’s inevitable not to compare the new show at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute to last year’s blockbuster, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, however unfair that might be. But it doesn’t matter, because Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, a pairing of two disparate designers that gives far too much precedence to the latter, falls flat, regardless of what preceded it.

The exhibition opens to a sleek viewing area with glossy plastic benches in front of a projection of Miuccia Prada interviewing actress Judy Davis playing Schiaparelli, reciting lines from her memoir, Shocking Life. The short movies, directed by Baz Luhrman, are sprinkled throughout the exhibition as a backdrop to the perfectly styled mannequins, and while clever, serve more as ambient noise than the eavesdropping they had intended, distracting viewers from the clothes on view.

A view of the show's attempt to compare and contrast the work of both designers (click to enlarge)

The first section of the exhibition situates the two designers’ strengths in terms of the parts of women they typically dressed. Schiaparelli’s designs tended to focus on the upper part of the body, most of her more creative constructions being jackets and chapeaux, whereas Prada centers her energies on laboring over skirts, shoes and other adornments for the lower half of the body. The curators juxtapose Schiaparelli’s hats alongside Prada’s shoes, and pair Prada skirts with Schiaparelli jackets. However, nothing matches, not in the strictest sense of styling nor the theoretical sense of curation. There’s an attempt to draw many of the pieces together through visual motifs, whether they clothes have similar geometric patterns, botanical embellishments or insectoid ornamentation (both designers seem to have a propensity for beetles), but the clothes have nearly nothing to do with each other outside of that initial visual cue, especially in terms of fabric, silhouette, color and construction.

The exhibition continues by exploring similar styles they experimented with in their oeuvre before fizzling out into the last gallery, which displays Prada outfits and digital projections of Schiaparelli designs behind them. The only iconic piece of Schiaparelli they can really boast exhibiting is her shoe hat, which is shoved up at the beginning until we’re left with very few (if any) bona fide Schiaparelli designs. Though clearly easier to receive, the numerous, flashy Prada pieces (some of which are from collections so recent I’ve seen them on eBay) overshadowed the small pool of Schiaparelli. It becomes apparent that the curators may have accepted one too many outfits courtesy of Prada, and the effort in combining these two minds gives way to opening a Prada outlet where nothing’s for sale.

Shoes, shoes, shoes (click to enlarge)

The interesting (and unfortunately unexplored) aspect of note in the pairing of Schiaparelli and Prada lies neither within their shared heritage (because, really, their Italian-ness is not enough to glue the two together) nor any juxtaposition in their styles. The shear camp glamour of Schiaparelli’s lobster dress or chest suit neither complements nor challenges Prada’s sleek sturdiness. It’s like curating the works of Salvador Dali and Damien Hirst in one show: provocative at first thought, but ultimately discordant in execution.

No, the truly fascinating thread between the two is their rich, strong connections with the art world. Coco Chanel herself once commented that Schiaparelli was that “artist who makes clothes,” as she spent most of her career commiserating and collaborating with the likes of Dali, Cocteau and Giacometti. Many of her designs skirted the typical mode of female dress in the 1930s and ’40s, incorporating surrealist subject matter in her designs, from tear dresses to lamb cutlet hats. Prada, alternatively, forged herself into a great patron of the arts, collecting works from the YBAs, setting up the contemporary art space Fondazione Prada and aiding artists Elmgreen and Dragset in their permanent interventionist installation Prada Marfa.

Impossible Conversations is the smallest show at the Costume Institute I’ve seen in a long while, and while it’s nice not to have an overload of garments to process, there appeared to be less care and thought put into the small selection. It seems strange to mount another retrospective after Savage Beauty, and a lot of the creative work often seen in the curatorial department was lost. The Met is very good at mounting provocative thematic exhibitions, like Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, where a large assemblage of high fashion as well as film costumes constructed an interesting and exhilarating show. Since McQueen had recently passed, and his garments had enough impact to stand on their own without much context, it made sense to give him a retrospective. But this show sits somewhere in between “wonderfully thematic” and “impressive retrospective.” It might have been interesting to explore “impossible” conversations angle across a breadth of different designers instead of limiting it to two, but as it is, it’s simply impossible to reckon with.

Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations continues at the Metropolitan Museum (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) until August 19.

Installation view of Brooklyn Utopias in the Old Stone House (photo by Rick Schwab)

This past weekend the renovations of Washington Park and the J.J. Byrne Playground outside the Old Stone House in Park Slope were unveiled to a cacophonous crowd of thrilled children and their parents. Fittingly, I was there to see Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space, an exhibit on the second level of the Old Stone House coinciding with the park’s reopening that invited artists to respond to the ideas of bringing play to public spaces while being conscious of community and urban development.

Washington Park viewed from the Old Stone House (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)

While I talked with curator Katherine Gressel and Old Stone House executive director Kimberly Maier about public play space in New York City, it was possible to see the results of the years of community planning that went into the now vibrant greenspace outside. Where once there was an asphalt field and scrubs of patchy grass, there is now a swath of green adorned with climbing toys and fountains. The 19 artists and organizations in Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space take the concept of community play spaces further in their exploration of how art can be a strategy for addressing public parks and recreation spaces, as well as examining the eminent domain and gentrification that sometimes drives these developments.

Katherine Gressel, curator of Brooklyn Utopias

Brooklyn Utopias, an ongoing series curated by Katherine Gressel in the Old Stone House, asks artists to envision an ideal city using Brooklyn as a lens. Gressel said that she first had the concept for Brooklyn Utopias back in 2008, when Brooklyn’s rising popularity and subsequent boom in housing construction resulted in overdevelopment and other consequences. Many grassroots groups have responded by taking an active role in improving neighborhoods and bringing community ideas together, and Brooklyn Utopias is a way to see how artists are addressing these same issues.

Previous Brooklyn Utopias exhibits have focused on overdevelopment, community preservation and urban agriculture, and Park Space, Play Space, in bringing play into this urban development dialogue, has organizations like the Groundswell Mural Project presenting a video of their “Dreams (Infinite Dreams)” mural created in a partnership with the Trust for Public Land as part of a greater project to transform PS 164 in Borough Park’s blacktop schoolyard into a green play space, and artists like Bettina Johae investigating how eminent domain has been used for forming parks in Brooklyn.

Bettina Johae, "Eminent domain nyc - Brooklyn parks" (detail)

The Old Stone House is an appropriate venue for exhibits on idealized urban planning, as the house itself is the result of a 1930 Robert Moses project to create an idealized replica of a 1699 Dutch farmhouse that was a site in the Battle of Brooklyn. Katherine Gressel is a painter herself and has explored the development of Brooklyn in her work, including a painting that places the Battle of Brooklyn in the contemporary Brooklyn streets, which is held in the Old Stone House’s permanent exhibit downstairs. Modern battles over public space also inspired Park Space, Play Space, including Occupy Wall Street, represented through the art of Karen Kaapcke who did plein air paintings in Zuccotti Park. (She was featured on Hyperallergic in December 2011.)

Cheryl Molnar, "Kent Ave. 2005-2011" (2012), ink-jet prints

The fact that one person’s utopia can be another’s loss is an undercurrent throughout the exhibit, as well as the impact of development on the natural and existing urban terrain of Brooklyn. Cheryl Molnar concentrated on the rapid transformation of Kent Avenue after the rezoning of the Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfront, and the sprouting of apartment buildings, along with the opening of public space and parks, shows how in only a few years this dramatic construction project has brought both new economic and community activity, as well as major changes in the area’s character.

Marina Zamalin, "Brooklyn Canals" (2009-2011), video (photo by Rick Schwab)

Much of the art definitely has its strength in the ideas behind it over exuberant visuals, but Marina Zamalin’s transfixing video, “Canals of Brooklyn,” is a beautiful journey over the waters of the borough to find surprising corners of nature that look more like untouched wetlands than waterways in a city populated with millions. Brooklyn’s nature was captured in more accessible, yet just as easily overlooked, places in Lynn Cazabon’s “Uncultivated” works, where the artist photographed uncultivated plants found in the perimeter of Washington Park at the Old Stone House. Both demonstrated that nature isn’t just corralled in fences and that landscaped park spaces are only one aspect of greenspace to be preserved in Brooklyn.

Husk, "T.U.B. Park (The Utopian Bath Park)," watercolor, graphite and ink on paper (detail)

Of the artists that propose park projects that could be realized in Brooklyn, Husk’s is the most whimsical, yet still appealingly possible. Their proposal for “T.U.B. Park (The Utopian Bath Park)” would have hot tubs made from repurposed water towers filled with rainwater and powered by the kinetic energy of children’s play as well as gravity, water and compost, the utopia coming from the adults getting their relaxation while the children play frenetically below.

Stephanie Beck, "Circle Park, From the Park Space Series" (2012), graphite, cut paper and glue on paper

Two artists have utopian maps proposed for urban parks, with Christine Gedeon’s “OSH, Brooklyn (Plot Re-visualized)” comprised of a fiber topography of an idealized revitalization of the Old Stone House park spaces, and Stephanie Beck’s “Park Space” series of relief-maps presenting an ideal layout of parks within the city streets. Both are direct takes on the theme of artists shaping community, and the artists’ potential to propose change.

Washington Park and Old Stone House

Public programming that involves the community is an essential part of Brooklyn Utopias, and this coming Saturday, May 19, is a whole day of events at the Old Stone House and in Washington Park. At noon, Bettina Johae will lead a bike tour in conjunction with her “eminent domain, nyc” project to selected park sites of eminent domain in Brooklyn, including Prospect Park and Calvert Vaux Park, ending at Coney Island. (Email b [at] ettinajohae [dot] com to register for the bike tour.) Will Pappenheimer is hosting an Augemented Reality workshop where he will demonstrate how to use smartphones to make the windmills of his app, Sky Mills, appear in the park and invite participants to add to the skywriting of the virtual plane that layers over the sky. Game-designers Gigantic Mechanic are bringing interactive games, including the Rubber Ball Battle of Brooklyn, which mixes dodgeball with capture the flag to replicate the Revolutionary War engagement, and Shadowplay, a live-action arcade game where players play with their shadows. Other upcoming events can be found on the Brooklyn Utopias blog.

After spending time in the tranquility of Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space in the Old Stone House and stepping out into the swirls of people drawn to the park in the spring sun, it was possible to imagine that although art can be much more romanticized than what usually ends up in city planning, it is possible to bring some of its spirit into Brooklyn, and that artists are an essential voice in imagining an exuberant, yet intelligently developed, future for the borough.

Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space shows through June 24 at the Old Stone House (336 3rd Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn).