Yoko Ono is Back in Plastic

By: Arsalan Mohammad for Interview

Over green tea, biscuits and strawberries at Reykjavik's Nordica Hotel, Yoko Ono took time out from promoting her Peace Tower project–the annual light sculpture that shoots up high into the Icelandic night each fall, between the dates of John Lennon's birthday (October 9) and the anniversary of his death (December 8)–to talk up her latest album, Between My Head And The Sky. Backed by a band directed by son Sean and featuring the best and brightest of Japanese avant-pop, the album sees 76-year-old Ono returning to the Plastic Ono Band, and sliding yet again ahead of the art-electro pack, for whom she remains the questioned godmother. http://www.interviewmagazine.com/blogs/music/2009-10-27/yoko-ono/

Next to MoMA, a Tower Will Reach for the Stars

By: NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building.

If New Yorkers once saw their skyline as the great citadel of capitalism, who could blame them? We had the best toys of all.

But for the last few decades or so, that honor has shifted to places like Singapore, Beijing and Dubai, while Manhattan settled for the predictable.

Perhaps that’s about to change.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/arts/design/15arch.html

Welcome to Neuva York

By: Alex Taylor for the New York Obverver

"Nexus New York: Latin / American Artists in the Modern Metropolis,” the inaugural exhibition at the recently refurbished El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, takes on a set of artists apart from the familiar high-modernist view of New York. (Imagine Broadway Boogie Woogie scored to the mambo.) That no such show has been attempted before tell us something, of course.

One sees about a dozen big names—the great Mexican muralists of the 1930s, Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros; the singular Frida Kahlo; and Yanquis modernists like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell—but twice as many unknowns. The best thing about this intensely enjoyable show is its reach into minor figures and archival material, giving a wide introduction to lesser-known chapters in the city’s complicated life as an art capital. http://www.observer.com/2009/culture/welcome-neuva-york

Joaquin Torres-Garcia 's 14th Street 1920

Shipping Container Health Clinics for Developing Countries

By Bridget Meinhold for Inhabitat
Good design has the potential to provide better education, access to safe water and improved health care. Take for instance our very own Emily Pilloton of Project H Design, whose design projects are bringing vast improvements to their surrounding communities. Along the same line, a new non-profit initiative called Containers 2 Clinics is creating modular health care clinics for developing countries. To do so, they are rescuing shipping containers and then outfitting them with all the necessary equipment to treat women and children. Not only is this company delving into the fascinating world of shipping container architecture, but they are developing a much needed service for humanitarian aid. http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/10/30/shipping-container-health-clinics-for-developing-countires/

Accumulation

By Marjorie Welish

The New York School has done more than provide the art world with blue-chip art; its gestural aesthetics continue to sustain considerations of what painting is and what it isn’t when, as now is the case, a few exhibitions revisit the era, or restage works, or react to its significant paradigm.


A test of Abstract Expressionism has been how an artist can sustain an authentic painting practice long after his reputation is secure. After all, productivity in art is not the same as fecundity, as it often yields a recycling of skill and taste to formulaic styling. It is an open secret that the productivity weighing against greatness in the career of Abstract Expressionist Sam Francis makes it imperative to judge his work on a painting-by-painting basis.

http://www.observer.com/2009/culture/accumulation

Wise Warriors, Artfully Attired

By Roberta Smith/New York Times

For the Japanese samurai, dying well was the best revenge. This elite warrior class began to play a central role in Japan’s history and culture around the eighth century and in time evolved into the country’s ruling caste. Highly cultivated in arts like poetry, monochrome ink painting and the tea ceremony, this class adhered to a strict code of honor built around loyalty, self-discipline, obligation and the shame of failure. Its most unbending principle was that a samurai’s death should bring honor to his family and descendants and to the emperor or clan he served.

Fighting heroically to the end while looking good was what it was all about...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/arts/design/23samurai.html?_r=1

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