Buffalo on the Bowery Auction Tonight!

I'm the curator for an auction benefitting PUSH Buffalo (People United for Sustainable Housing) and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center that takes place at Charles Bank gallery (196 Bowery) tonight at 6. The auction features (with a few exceptions) artists that are from Buffalo or live in Buffalo. I think it is a good group of work, and if you are an art buying type in the NYC area you should come. I will be auctioning off four of my faux books. You can see the auction lots and get more information here: buffalobowery.org. (I designed the identity and website for the auction.)

The Business of Art

I had a good week in New York working the Pulse Contemporary Art Fair with Black & White Gallery. There was a lot of interest in the books, I sold quite a few. Usually artists don't hang around their work as much as I do, but I find that it helps to be there, I end up meeting a lot of interesting people, and seeing old friends. It helps make up for not living in NYC. But the best part of being there this time was that I met David Byrne! I saw this guy taking a picture of one of my books, so I asked him if he had any questions, then, as I started to talk about my project I realized who he was. He seemed genuinely amused by the covers. It was pretty weird to be talking about what I do with such an icon.

Black and White Gallery's booth at Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, featuring Isidro Blasco, Alicia Ross, Shimon Okshteyn and myself.

Pulse party at Le Bain@ The Standard Hotel, amazing views of the city in all directions.

Flemish Masters, That's Life at Andrea Rosen Gallery

Jen's bunny

Slow but pleasant train ride home. On the way down I saw a coyote standing alone in a snowy field. On the way back I saw a beaver swimming parallel to the tracks in a flooded field.

Montague Projects at the Pulse NYC Art Fair

I won't be doing too much book blogging this week as I am in New York for the Pulse Art Fair. I was hoping to scan enough books for the week before I left, but I ran out of time. In any case, I'll be showing at set of sixteen of my faux books at Black & White Gallery's booth at Pulse. The first two below are the most recent and have not been shown anywhere yet. Pulse info here. Books in context here.

Back from NYC

The Met

My friend Josh with my prints at One Every Day at the EFA Project Space

Monkey Skeleton

I was in New York from Saturday to Tuesday. I went down for the opening of One Every Day. The show was really cool, and the curators and organizers couldn't have been nicer. It's up until December 19th. This was my last trip out of town for a while. I have been in four shows in six weeks, in three different cities, it's been fun but now I need to stay home, get Frazer/Montague Design going and prepare for the next round of shows.

Lately I have been using my iPhone a lot more, it is a great way to take visual notes. I have a Flickr set from this Fall's travels here.

Some iphone Pictures

View from the Highline

Fox News crawl

Midtown

Country Living

Daily Book Graphics #6 / Travel Tips... New York

Colette gave me this little (4.25"x5.75") Trans World Airlines guide to New York City several years ago. I think she bought it in an antique store. There aren't many illustrations on the inside. I couldn't find a design credit.

The guide was published in 1962, the same year that TWA opened the Eero Saarinen designed Terminal 5.

This illustration is not in the book.

iPhone Travel

I'm really starting to like the camera in my iPhone. It is just a bit unpredictable which makes it nice for casual travel documentation. Below are some shots from trip to NYC for the Armand Bartos opening.

By the way, I have nothing to do with those carts, they are by the sculpture Arman (1928-2005)

The World's Least Inspiring Coloring Book

I forgot where I acquired this coloring book, probably at a garage sale or thrift store. I love the way it captures exactly how dull the legislative process appears to children.

New York and New Haven

View of Ellis Island from the Battery Park Ritz Carlton

Fancy shoes

I was in NYC (and New Haven) Saturday through Tuesday. I went down to see my friend (and fellow Buffalo resident) Neil Wechsler accept the Yale Drama Award for his play Grenadine. Edward Albee was the sole judge for the competition and he presented Neil with the award. It was a big deal. The award ceremony was at the Ritz Carlton in Battery Park which has a fantastic view of the statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. When a friend and I took a cab downtown, we were puzzled by how much traffic there was for a Sunday evening. We later found out that everyone had been called into to work on Sunday to deal with the Lehman Bros. collapse. There was a reading of the play presented by the Yale Rep the next day in New Haven. The reading was great, this was the second time I had seen Grenadine read, I look forward to eventually seeing a full production.

I managed to see most of what was up in the ground floor Chelsea Galleries, as usual there was only a tiny percentage of work that interested me. I was most excited to see a show Jean Luc-Mylayne at Gladstone Gallery. I will have more to say about him in another post.

Jean Luc-Mylayne

A very Japanese looking building in Chelsea

The IAC building by Frank Gehry

Meredith Sparks' show at Elizabeth Dee was pretty cool, but I don't know what I would think if I didn't already have a deep affection for Kraftwerk, David Bowie and Joy Division.

Flight home

My City

There is a fantastic article about New Yorkers moving to Buffalo in the latest New York Magazine. The writer really gets why some of us live here. I urge you to read the whole article, here is one of the best bits (the two concluding paragraphs):

...I found it appealing for a different reason: not for how similar it is to New York (which is not very), but for how different. New York will always offer you the singular opportunity of testing yourself against the best, of sharpening yourself against the city’s fabled grindstone. Hopeful people will always scrape together their savings to come here, to split a one-bedroom apartment with five other people, whether that’s in Greenwich Village (then) or Bushwick (now). But New York, for all its mythology, is no longer a frontier. Buffalo is a frontier. And when you think of the actual frontier, you’ll recall that no one ever packed up and moved West to a gold-rush town because they heard it had really good local theater. They moved looking for opportunities. They moved for the chance to build a new life for themselves.

This, ironically, has always been the siren song of New York City: the chance to turn yourself into someone new, to live the life you’ve always imagined. But what a city like Buffalo offers is a very different promise of what could be. It offers the chance to live on the cheap and start a nonprofit organization, or rent an abandoned church for $1,000 a month, or finish your album without having to hold down two temp jobs at the same time, or simply have more space and a better view and enough money left over each month to buy yourself a painting once in awhile. A city like Buffalo reminds you that, beyond New York, there are still frontiers.

A Navy Destroyer in Union Square 1917

I visit Shorpy: The 100 Year-Old Photography Blog almost everyday, they post a wonderfully random selection of old photography (click on the image to enlarge) I find the above image amazing, it's explained on the blog this way:

New York, 1917. "Landship Recruit on Union Square." The U.S.S. Recruit, a wooden battleship erected by the Navy, served as a World War I recruiting station at Union Square from 1917 to 1920, when it "set sail" for Coney Island. This is the first in a series of photographs depicting life around and aboard the landlocked boat. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection.

Misc photos

from the last 2 days

In New York

View of the Empire State Building from Black & White Gallery on West 28th Street.

Waiting for a Sunday night C train that will never come.

Partial installation view of To Know the Spiders