New York – Sunday, July 13, 2014

The Cripple of Inishmaan, at The Cort Theatre on Broadway (now in it’s final week, closes JULY 20), is performed by a very talented ensemble. The writing and production are brilliant, it might not give you what you want, but it gives you something incredible.

In the short attention span era of entertainment and media consumers, this play entertains. Irish playwright Martin McDonagh crafted hard hitting, funny, and roughly loving dialogue that keeps everything moving at an excited pace.

The twists aren’t predictable, the dark humor works well. The audience reacts with both uproarious and uncomfortable laughter, sighs, and gasps. It is a play that is especially suited for the quick paced, quick witted New York audience whom come to this Broadway show. Of course, we are the city that perfected the slam and the come back.

The play centers around the hopes and dreams of a boy who is only known for being the town cripple. He isn’t staring off among cows, as the towns people always say, in their loving slander. Billy spends time among the cattle, reading books to get away from his fussing aunts.

But in this town everyone sees what they want to see. They downplay Billy as a simpleton, even though there is nothing wrong with his mind, as the town doctor keeps trying to remind them of. The daily pass time is the ceaseless gossip of the towns people. However, Billy is a sharp witted young man, he makes it to the filming of a movie on a neighboring island, a journey that takes him to seek fame in Hollywood.

Daniel Radcliffe delivers a nuanced performance that is intense and heartfelt. Radcliffe proves to be a very devoted and versatile actor. You feel the strength of his masked sorrow during the most dramatic scenes. In a particular gut wrenching lonely episode, his body language conveys such pain, it’s ridiculous to realize he does this eight times a week. A revolving set keeps the dramatic pace going, with no interruption for curtain calls or scene changes.

There is a real connection that comes through all the actors portrayals. Even on a Tuesday matinee, everyone puts out their best. The gossiping Johnnypateenmike (played by Pat Shortt) who takes his payment in eggs for the long-winded “news” that he provides, turns out to be the most altruistic person at heart. The banter between the aunts amuses. The harsh-tongued, but protective adopted Aunts played by Ingrid Craigie and Gillian Hanna, come across as the people in life whom you know so well. The people with a wry sense of humor reserved for private company and close family, whom love you so much, that they kind of hate you if you don’t need them. There is so much well crafted timing and delivery of dialogue, it makes you think “Oh no, she didn’t”. Only someone whom loves you so much, could get away with such sneering remarks. This is great writing.

The Cripple of Inishmaan is a supporter of The Trevor Project, the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) young people. A portion of the proceeds from the question and answer talk back night goes toward The Trevor Project, whom Radcliffe has been a long time supporter.

Author pictured above.

Written and photographed by Betty T. Kao

The post The Cripple of Inishmaan, Daniel Radcliffe Delivers in the Talented Ensemble Broadway Show appeared first on Artiholics.

Harlem, New York City – Thursday, June 26, 2014

Harlem has had its ups and downs throughout its history, to say the least. One of its shining times was the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, in which African American culture was booming with Southern cuisine, music, art, excitement, and creativity. During the Harlem Renaissance, between 7th avenue and Lenox, there were over 125 entertainment places that operated, which varied from cellars, lounges, speakeasies, cafes, taverns, supper clubs, rib joints, theaters, dance halls, bars and grills. 133rd Street was known known as “Swing Street”, because it housed cabarets, a jazz scene during the Prohibition era, and was named “Jungle Alley” because of “inter-racial mingling” on the street. The area has also seen great sadness stemming from poverty, crime, disease, and ongoing gentrification. Harlem is a cultural epicenter that has given rise to major hip-hop artists such as A$AP Rocky, Immortal Technique, Tupac, P Diddy, and Azealia Banks, to name just a few. There is a strong spiritual component to Harlem, as there are over 400 churches and religious congregations. The area is constantly going through change, turmoil, and celebration. For the past two years, I have lived on 100 West, 141 street, right up the block from the mural of Big L, and the Harlem Hospital which houses a massive glass painting on 135th street and Lenox. I have been a guest of Harlem, but I am about to take part in a new change within it: The Harlem Arts Festival.

The Harlem Arts Festival, is happening in Marcus Garvey Park, a 20.17-acre park, surrounded by flat lawns and playing fields. The park is bounded by 120th Street and 124th Street and by Madison Avenue on its east side. The Festival is the culmination of an extraordinary amount of work  by J.J. El-Far, Neal Ludevig, and Chelsea Golding, three extremely ambitious entrepreneurs who see the potential in Harlem’s art scene as what it once was, and what it can become. This is the festival’s third year, and I have a strong feeling it is going to be bigger and better next year.

The following are just a few of some of the over 40 artists behind the Harlem Arts Festival of 2014.

Artist, Lance Johnson, with collage merging with paint in stunning imagery.

Zest Collective, a group of movement artists – some from Julliard and others from the Alvin Ailey School. I will be combining the talent of Zest Collective dancers with Andrew Kaminski Art audiovisual projections enhancing their movement, the night of the Opening, at MIST, this Friday, June 27th from 7:30 – 8 pm. In this video, I combine their movement with my video projections. 

There are musical acts such as Isaac Katalay, who sees art as an outlet to promote positivity for humanity.

Paul Tabachneck, whose smooth voice exudes his love and passion for music and his life.

Tiffany Latrice, with her figurative representations juxtaposed with vibrant patterns.

Alice Mizrachi is a working artist in Harlem, and has been prolific with works on canvas and murals.

The schedule for the Festival is here, and it runs from June 27th (the opening night), Saturday, June 28th, and Sunday, June 29th. I hope to see you there!

Written by Andrew Kaminski 

The post The Harlem Renaissance is back in the 2014 Harlem Arts Festival appeared first on Artiholics.

One of the only Manhattan art collectives, Con Artist Collective, has currently on exhibit a trio of artists who’s work pushes the humble triangle to it’s extremes.

Brandon Wisecarver, Patrick Grzelewski, and Jamie Martinez, the three artists in the show.

These artists borrow the visual form of the triangle and its wealth of symbolic meaning. Their collaboration is in and of itself a triangle; a union of three creative points of reference focusing on the same symbolic center.

When invited to an art opening revolving around the triangle, the first place my mind jumped to was that scene in Art School Confidential where Malkovich talks about his evolution into triangle paintings.

Having already seen Jamie’s Tiger made from triangles at the Clio Art Fair, I had an idea that seeing an entire show of his work wouldn’t disappoint.

Like the Tiger, when seen though a camera view finder, or through a phone, these images are more easily distinguishable as paintings of ancient sculptures heads.  They are hand painted on hundreds of tiny squares broken into triangles, somewhat of a triangle pixelation, tricking your eye using the same principals of a Chuck Close portrait.  One of these two sold early on.

.

Jamie isn’t just a painter, he also works in 3D, with this orange liquid filled plexiglass triangle.

An x-ray with triangles stitched into it.

Jamie made this 3D printed missile.

Jamie and a bunch of the Artefuse contributors.

Artist Jamie Martinez.

Artist Joseph Grazi talking with Jamie about his work.  Joseph was gallery hopping with Yeah Yeah Yeah’s drummer Brian Chase.

Artist Patrick Grzelewski and his collages.

In the back of the room is a small wooden room installation by Brandon Wisecarver.  When you enter it and close the door you see a black light and laser light show of glowing triangles.

Andres Augusto Penaranda.

Brian Shevlin, founder of Con Artist Collective.

∆ will be on display from Tuesday, March 11th to Saturday, March 29th. It opened on March 12th at 8pm, had a gallery night March 19th at 8pm, and a closing party Wednesday,  March 26th at 7pm.

Con Artist Collective
119 Ludlow Street
New York, NY 10002
11:00 am – 11:00 pm

Written & photographed by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post Triangulism @ Con Artist Collective appeared first on Artiholics.

One of Bushwick, Brooklyn’s homegrown original underground art spots (and the only one named after the Kurt Vonnegut novel) may shut down if they can’t pay their various bills. The bohemian Goodbye Blue Monday is facing eviction by the end of the month if they don’t raise enough funds.

You can help save this legendary hot spot where once underground Brooklyn bands like Vampire Weekend played their first shows.

Matthew Silver

On Thursday, March 20th, performance artist and emcee Matthew Silver starts the weekend with a variety show comedy fundraiser, featuring poetry, music, and many of the eclectic underground acts that make New York City great.

Josh Berkowitz

Cheap drinks, interesting installations, a crazy outdoor space, if you’ve never been here it’s worth checking out. Goodbye Blue Monday has been a cultural staple of the Bushwick community for over ten years. It has the homey vibe, strange but not pretentious feel of what you’d imagine the East Village was like during the beatnik era.

Where else can you party for a good cause and enjoy culture from the home of all kinds of artists, film makers, poets, musicians, and performers?

Crimson Kitty

All weekend long from Thursday March 20th to Sunday the 23rd, there will be cheap fundraisers for the venue. All shows are only a $5 donation at the door. All proceeds go toward saving the space.

• Thursday, March 20th: Comedy Open Mic 9-11pm hosted by performance artist and emcee Matthew Silver.
• Friday, the 21st: Rock Show featuring Kung Fu Crimewave, Abby Rock, Space Meow, more surprise artists.
• Saturday the 22nd: Undiscovered Countries all day theater series. And a rave fundraiser party at night.
• Sunday the 23rd: A rave party fundraiser .

You can donate at the event page, think of it as the pocket change tips you’d give to a busker.

Save Goodbye Blue Monday:

https://www.gofundme.com/7kb6vw
https://www.facebook.com/events/348973351901503/?ref=23

Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway
Brooklyn, New York 11221

Written and Photographed by Betty T. Kao
Header Artwork by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The post Party Hard & Save ‘Goodbye Blue Monday’ From It’s Last Sad Farewell appeared first on Artiholics.

If you are a street art fan, or even more accurately stated “a fan of graffiti” the tagging duo of Mint&Serf have shed their street vandalism tagging ways for one show to collaborate indoors, tagging canvases.  Because you can sell that.

The show titled Support, Therapy, and Instability just ended it’s run at Bleeker Street Arts Club.  If you are a Mint&Serf fanatic and missed their social media alerts that this show was on, enjoy these pictures.

If you aren’t a fan of graffiti, this show will take an open mind.  If you can blur your eyes beyond the words, abstract artwork might begin to form.  You know you are in for an interesting show when in their own press release they have to mention:

“Layered with paint, markers, and paper, the canvas is a never-ending sea of abstractly expressed thoughts and gestures. The dizzying result, described as anguished, dark, and criminal, can evoke conflicted reactions in the viewer.”

Multicolored tags on the traditional square / rectangle shape canvases, hanging in a gallery, in New York City.  That is how you know it’s art, not graffiti.

See, it’s fine art now.  Because, why not?

According to their press release:

“Working within the parameters of contemporary painting, the duo has used their history with street art and graffiti-writing to build a new portal of painting, a new surface, space and vision, that has not yet been explored,” says Laura Bloom, Director of Sandra Gering, Inc.”

It is mostly themselves getting wasted with their friends and tagging the words “Serf” and “Mint” in various colors, thicknesses, and mediums, and overlapping them, as well as some other words.

It is interesting to see how abstract words can become when they are overlapped to the point of illegibility.  It just becomes colors and shapes.

Which does make for an interesting thing to look at.  So who is to say this isn’t another way of making an abstract painting.  Words are just colored lines after all.

And now for the technical art-speak explanation of what they did:

For their show at Bleecker Street Arts Club, Mint&Serf have taken their graffiti practice inside the studio and applied the same gestural expression that they wildly employ out in the streets directly to canvases.  The result is a lush and crude composition, chaotic and thrilling.  Cat Marnell wrote, “What Mint&Serf … have accomplished with these pieces…so layered after months and months of tag upon tag upon tag…is to confine the unconfined: the spirit of vandalism, the energy and electricity of New York City graffiti.”

Mint&Serf have been featured in The New York Post, Interview Magazine, Huffington Post, Dossier Journal, Daily Mail, VICE, Paper, Gothamist and Blackbook.  Their book “Support, Therapy, and Instability” was published in 2013 with essays by Carlo McCormick and Cat Marnell.

Support, Therapy, and Instability by Mint&Serf ran from January 16 –  February 22, 2014 at Bleeker Street Arts Club 305 Bleecker St. NYC 10014

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post Mint & Serf Indoor Graffiti @ Bleeker Street Arts Club appeared first on Artiholics.

The solo exhibition of artist Emil Lukas at Sperone Westwater in the Lower East Side closes on Saturday, February 22nd.  This is your last chance to take a look at his two major bodies of works being presented: Thread Paintings and Larvae Paintings.

The thread paintings aren’t actually paintings at all, but the perfect use of thread to create the illusion of minimalist gradients and color fields on canvas.

Upon closer view.

Lukas calls these type of thread painting “hums.”

The illusion of gradational color is created by the overlying strands of various colored threads which create a density of tone.

Much like overlying simple black strokes when hatching or crosshatching can build up to solid black.

These are “of unsurpassed beauty and formal complexity informed by a rigorous process of discovery and experimentation.  As an artist, Lukas is unique in his ability to harness the physical attributes of materials and organic processes” to quote Harry Philbrick, Director of the Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, who interviewed the artist for the accompanying catalogue.

Lukas’ distinctive use of everyday organic materials, such as thread, silk, or larvae, and his innovative techniques create intricate works which engage the viewer in an intimate and contemplative way. The accumulation of lines characterizes Lukas’ works — materials do not exist independently, but are layered and stratified.  His process is one in which creation and composition occur simultaneously.

Thread Paintings, such as the four part work Artillery or Poppy Red, 2013, engage with color, opacity, density as well as reflection of light, creating radiant three-dimensional objects which the artist describes as “atmospheres”.

Larvae Paintings, such as Cloud, 2013, emphasize the surfaces on which sinuous lines meander in a random composition, the result of larvae traveling across the canvas drawing traces of ink and paint.

The lines are so delicate and spontaneous, because the ink covered larvae don’t understand they are creating artwork

Emil Lukas photographed by Cojo at the opening reception.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1964, Emil Lukas has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including the solo exhibition “Emil Lukas: Connection to the Curious” at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, in 2005. His work is in important private and public collections, such as the Panza Collection, Italy; The Dakis Joannou Collection, Greece; and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.

Written and Photographed by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”
[video by Blouin Artinfo]

The post Last Chance To See Emil Lukas @ Sperone Westwater in the L.E.S. appeared first on Artiholics.

New York – Thursday, February 20, 2014

If you haven’t made it down to Artist Michael Alan ‘Alien’s most recent solo exhibition The Energy Reader at Gasser Grunert Gallery on 38 Orchard Street, you have just a few days left. The closing reception is this Sunday, February 23rd from 3-8pm. All are invited to come meet the artist, who will drawing live at the closing.  Alan will draw the crowd and talk about his work.

Although Michael Alan and I are nearly the same age (he graduated a year behind me at SVA) we never actually met in college.  We were only introduced through mutual artist friends a few years ago, and we’ve since become friends, which makes it tough to see what kind of pain the guy is in.

Contrary to how he might appear when he’s in his element during his “Living Installation” performances (surrounded by nude flesh, paint, yarn and fabric, amongst melodic chaos) 2013 was a hard year for Michael Alan and 2014 doesn’t look like it’s getting much easier health wise.  He’s an artist with a creative mind and vision, who has developed (by necessity) the uncanny ability to trudge forward mentally and artistically, while his physical body continues to deal him a progressively shittier hand.

Michael Alan with New Yorker art critic Jerry Saltz, photo at the opening taken by Joseph Meloy.

He actually suffered a mild heart attack the night before the opening for this show (the photo I took of him at the top of this article was at the opening).  He didn’t go to the hospital till after the show because he didn’t “want to get locked in” and miss it.

As reported last month in an article in Huff Post about this show:

Toward the end of last year, Alan was diagnosed with a blood clot disease known as deep venous thrombosis (DVT), a condition that alone has the potential for catastrophic outcomes. But wait, there’s more. His DVT comes as an addition to a laundry list of health complications that includes a broken lower spine, nerve rerouting, and a minor heart attack.

“This show is mostly composed of work I made in bed while healing, either in the hospital or my bed at home recovering from surgeries and my new lovely DVT,” said Alan. “Before I was investigating the human race and praising our frailness and our ability to live through. Now the story for me has turned and the work became a place for me to grow and begin really looking inward on my own fragile time and self-reflection.” – via. The Huffington Post.

I have personally attended his “Living Installation” performances four times. Two of which I’ve documented online  (Michael Alan – The Living Installation – ArtSucks and The Adoration Of Women: The Return of The Living Installation- Artiholics).

He’s done hundreds of them over past ten years, in which he paints-on, dresses, and interacts with nude modes over a performance art endurance level- period of time, set to music, his own music which he creates in collaboration with other artists such as Tommy Ramone, Japanther, Jello Biafra, and The Boredums.

The current show at Gasser Grunert Gallery in the Lower East Side is less live performance, more aftermath.  It’s the culmination of a lifetime of drawing and painting scratched and lined into paper and canvas, cut up and reconnected in beautiful white frames.  Here are some photos from the opening reception.

Michael Alan was born in New York in 1977. His work has been featured in 7 New York solo shows and over 200 group shows. His work has been discussed in over 200 publications, books and media sources, including the New York Times, The Huffington Post, Bomb Magazine, Art 21, Marie Claire Italia, Art+Auction, The New York Post, Fox Channel 5, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, and Hyperallergic.  Read more about The Energy Reader on Artefuse, and on The Huffington Post

The closing reception for The Energy Reader is this Sunday from 3-8pm at Gasser Grunert (Facebook Invite Page)
33 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post The Silver Linings of Artistic Survival Michael Alan Rages On in the L.E.S. appeared first on Artiholics.