Worried Dealers, Cross-Dressing Potter

Open Armory Art Fair
By Lindsay Pollock

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Collector Donald B. Marron noticed a less-frenzied pace at New York's Armory Show art fair yesterday as he strolled the aisles during the VIP opening.
``You can see people contemplating the art,'' said Marron, chairman of Lightyear Capital LLC, with his curator at his side. ``It's the way you ought to look at art.''
Following a seven-year jump in prices for contemporary art and a proliferation of international art fairs, the speculative boom may be losing some steam.
``I'm not sure, at the end of the day, how good business is,'' said Roland Augustine, head of the Art Dealers Association of America and co-founder of Chelsea gallery Luhring Augustine, which isn't exhibiting. ``I'm not sure if the market can absorb all this.''
The fair, a showplace for 160 international galleries selling from booths on Pier 94 on the west side of Manhattan, runs through Sunday. Last year attendance topped 52,000 and organizers reported sales of $85 million.

Marie-Josee Kravis, chairwoman of the Museum of Modern Art's board, and real estate developer Arthur Zeckendorf were among other VIPs. Europeans, particularly French and German, attracted by the weak dollar, were out in force.
Some dealers fretted over few or no sales, but business was brisk in some quarters. Chelsea gallery Friedrich Petzel sold works by Allan McCollum, Sarah Morris and a $120,000 sculpture by Cosima von Bonin, made from grungy stuffed animals dangling on clothespins.
Pendulous Breasts Greenberg Van Doren Gallery sold their priciest work, a $275,000 androgynous wooden sculpture by Katsura Funakoshi with an elongated neck and pendulous breasts.

Sales outperformed London dealer Victoria Miro's expectations. ``Everyone is quite nervous about the economy,'' she said, ``but it's been quite normal.'' Miro sold three vases by the Turner Prize-winning cross- dresser Grayson Perry, priced $30,000 to $90,000. She sold five paintings by Varda Caivano, a young artist whose subtle pastel- hued abstractions cost $12,000 to $18,000.

Renee and Robert Belfer, philanthropists and collectors who have a named gallery at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, raced over to a dealer to buy two photographs. ``They were already gone,'' he said. Die-hard collectors were oblivious to gloomy economic forecasts. Don and Mera Rubell, who own a private museum in Miami, charged around in black sneakers. They said they weren't inclined to buy less.
``After 40 years of collecting, are we pulling back? No! We are buying a ton of art,'' said the tanned, white-haired Don Rubell. ``But if everyone else pulls back, we'd be delighted.''

With over 2,000 artists on view, the art tended to blur, but one-person booths stood out. A one-woman show of Jenny Holzer paintings, marble footstools and LED installations based on declassified U.S. documents at Cheim & Read gallery seemed more museum-like than most.
Annette Lemieux's installation at Paul Kasmin Gallery, based on a country fair, featured gingham paintings, old barn wood, and free apple pie served with whole milk from the jar. A bumper sticker proclaiming ``No Bull'' cost $1.
Most of the art wasn't rebellious, but Joe Bradley's bland beige painting at the Lower East Side's Canada gallery poked fun at ``art as luxury goods,'' said Wallace Whitney, a dealer at the gallery. ``This is a tough piece.'' The ``Bread'' painting -- Whitney said the color reminded the artist of Wonder bread's crust -- was priced at $30,000. There were no takers.
(Lindsay Pollock writes on the art market for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

The Abu Ghraib Images of Daniel Heyman Beyond the Hoods:

Three years ago, Seymour Hersh wrote Torture at Abu Ghraib for The New Yorker which along with photos taken by servicemen and woman, burned an image of hooded, tortured and humiliated war detainees into my mind forever. While this iconic image of hooded figures has become an symbol for political cartoons and anti war t-shirts, it has become detached from the horrific story from which it originated.

Artist Daniel Heyman, began incorporating renderings of hooded figures into silkscreen prints and etchings following The New Yorker article in spring 2004. He came to realize the depersonalization and loss of relevance and impact.

It was a serendipitous meeting with Susan Burke, lead attorney in a reparations lawsuit against civilian interrogators and translators at Abu Ghraib, which led him to an invitation to join Burke’s legal team on a trip to Amman, Jordan. Depositions from former prisoners were to be taken and Heyman would sit in on the interviews and create drypoint etchings. For nearly a full week in Amman he listened to dozens of men and women relive their most hideous physical and emotional abuse under humiliating interrogations. He also joined Burke’s legal team for a duplicate round of depositions in Istanbul following in August. Working quickly, Heyman captured words as well as images. His own perspective is embedded in the work: In drypoint etching the copper plates are scratched into with a stylus in reverse so when printed they become "right-reading". He began drawing their faces as the interviews commenced. He listened to the reporting of biographical information through the translator, their marital status, the number of children they had, where they lived, but mostly Heyman concentrated on getting a good start on the portrait. They were often in prison many months, and the nature of these interviews was a recitation of the entirety—as much as they could remember—of all that time. Heyman had to listen, and alternate between capturing their image with documenting

These men and woman, once hooded and faceless, had become personality less global icons. It was in this interview and portraiture process, these Iraqis one by one began to regain their humanity...their faces...their voices.

Vanish Pointe by Malcolm Bray
60 x 48 inches Represented by
Cheryl Hazan Gallery (212) 343-8964

Malcolm Bray is a painter and print maker born November 2, 1958 in Hull, England.
He emigrated to the United States in May 1984. He presently resides in Delaware Township, NJ and was the former owner of Old English Pine (antique furniture imports) in Lambertville, New Jersey. In March of 2004, Bray gave up his import business of 19 years to concentrate full-time on his art career. He can be found working from his second floor studio/gallery above his former company in Lambertville.

From this spacious loft, Bray has organized annual group art exhibitions since 1994, and the participating group is identified as New Eclectic. This group also displayed at MCS Gallery, Easton, Pennsylvania in 2003 and West Chester University, Pennsylvania in 2004. This particular exhibition has included many artists from the local community and others from the region. In the last two years these artists included Rachel Bliss, Luis Bujalance, Jacques Fabert, Harry Georgeson, James Groody, Michael Hale, Diane Levell, Bonnie Maclean, Pat Martin, Barry Snyder and Mitchell Yarmark and Bray. Bray hoped the viewer would consider these exhibitions as "one unit" while at the same time acknowledging each artist's distinctive style.
During the summer of 2004, Bray attracted the attention of Cheryl Hazan Gallery in New York and is also represented by Morpeth Gallery in Hopewell, New Jersey. His present abstraction is spontaneous but structured in a way that elements within the composition evoke the dimensional aspects of volume and space. There is a clear relationship between his work and that of the New York Abstract Expressionists.

Art and Technology Integrated in Julius Popp's
Bitfall installation at MOMA

Using technological wizardry, Julius Popp’s Bitfall reproduces the ‘flood’ of media information in the form of a real waterfall. Comprised of 128 nozzles, Popp’s curtain collects a continuous stream of water droplets. Directing their flow with a complex system of magnetic valves controlled by computer, text and graphics randomly selected from the internet appear in the drizzling liquid, creating a DIYplasma screen. As each message drips into a collection tank, its feeds back into the cycle, creating a metaphor for the impermanence and flux of the perception of ‘reality’. At MOMA February 24–May 12, 2008 at the Design and the Elastic Mind Exhibit.

A short documentary about Julius Popp’s BitFall project Julius Popp at UNION Gallery
How to reach Julius Popp Official site

The Graphical Waterfall ® was invented by Stephen Pevnick, a professor of computer art at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.

When Pevnick was a graduate student, he became interested in exploring nature at a very rare and beautiful moment as art. In 1973 (the year Popp was born) he began experimenting with sound and space using a computer to produce falling water droplets to make sound on a drum. Upon producing sound he noticed that with proper timing it was possible to build falling images in space!

In 1974 Pevnick received a grant from the University of South Florida to explore the idea of forming graphics in free falling water droplet images. In 1977 he produced the first three dimensional computer controlled waterfall image, a falling diamond, on a machine which would evolve into today’s Graphical Waterfall®. The valve system was a horizontal square, 4 feet by 4 feet and had an 8 nozzle by 8 nozzle grid totaling 64 nozzles. At the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, where Pevnick began teaching in 1978, he was able to develop the first one foot square graphic producing waterfall with the help of a National Endowment for the Arts, Design Arts, Project Fellowship. In 1982 he developed the technology to spell with letters in English and Western languages using free falling water droplets and in 1983 he won one of 10 Design Excellence Awards from the Industrial Designer’s Society of America at their National Conference in Chicago.
The Graphical Waterfall(r) was first exhibited with the Klein Gallery in 1988 at the International Art Exhibition at Navy Pier in Chicago. The waterfalls were called the “Rainfall Project” until the 1990’s when the name was changed to Graphical Waterfall®. Early ideas about nature at a very rare and beautiful moment as art evolved into the idea of “painting” graphics and words with water. The resulting Graphical Waterfalls® make kinetic graphics like lines, shapes and multiple dancing ribbons which are a synthesis of art and nature. When a Graphical Waterfall® is programmed, there are always kinetic graphics interspersed among the words and logos to keep an element of surprise or mystery which keeps viewers watching and waiting to see what will come next. Pevnick’s current research centers around real-time multimedia and computer controlled kinetic sculpture and water. As the artist and designer, Pevnick oversees the graphical content so that the waterfall maintains a unique aesthetic. The Graphical Waterfall®, when installed in a large public venue, blurs the boundaries between Art, Design and Theater and provides viewers with a unique unforgettable experience.

Truman Marquez, Severed Voting Fingers Cast a Shadow over Doubt

Utilizing symbol and shadow, the artist alludes to one potential outcome of the Iraq war. The purple tipped fingers are a clear reference to Iraqi voting practices yet, in this piece the woman dressed in a black burka is using a pair of scissors to auto-amputate her own finger, implying that the Iraqi people are responsible for their own chances for implementing a democracy. Again, the artist employs the technique of placing floating objects (severed fingers) in a gravity-less world. He is also hiding loaded iconic imagery within shadows. The floating fingers cast a shadow on the blood red floor. In these shadows the viewer will find the dead body of a U.S. service man along with his rifle and helmet.

Robert Dash, Sagg Main (The Road) Number 12 , 2006
Oil on paper 34 1/2 x 26 1/2 inches
Mark Borghi Fine Art

Bridgehampton: 631-537-7245

One of the best ways to get close to the psyche of Robert Dash is to walk through his intriguing garden and share a cocktail in his home overflowing with books! Since that might not be possible, I refer you to his book of gardening essays he has authored. In an excerpt from the book of essays, Dash refers to writer, Koethe which explains the name of the painting recently acquired by The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO. "The painting "Koethe" is a black rose. It is my "portrait of the poetry"of renown poet and philosopher, John Koethe" said Dash in a recent conversation.

John Koethe (pronounce: kay-tee) (b. 1945 -) has published several award-winning volumes of poetry. Many critics place him in the tradition of Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, or, as Robert Huddleston noted in the Chicago Review, "poets who used landscape as a figure or setpiece through which to address an array of concerns from the personal to the social." Koethe is also a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, and his works include Domes, The Late Wisconsin Spring, Falling Water, and North Point North. He has also authored a collection of essays about poetry, Poetry at One Remove, as well as the academically-oriented The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought.

The writings are about “Madoo” which is artist and author, Robert Dash's residence and whimsical garden in Sagaponack on the outskirts of Bridgehampton. Described in the New York Times as "Robert Dash's ever-changing masterpiece," it has been pictured in many books and magazines and visited by garden lovers and artists from around the world. Dash, author/artist/gardener, describes his making of Madoo in the book from which I have included an excerpt below. It is a delightful read and will open the door to Dash’s soul. Dash as a painter as well as a writer is influenced by the movement of air and the effects of light and color. Any artist or gardener would be moved by his prose.

INTRODUCTION English Bones-American Flesh

My garden is at the far eastern end of Long Island, in New York State, in a town settled in 1656. It is set amidst fields continually farmed since that time, and one would need a maul to separate it from its profoundly English influences. Yet it might take a wedge struck with equal force to pry it from its continuous involvement with the patterns of abstract expressionism, a largely American form of painting.Within that pattern much else went toward the making of my garden: a love of Indian paths, rather like the secret walks small children make (which counts a lot for how one moves through my garden); an admiration of the roan beauties of abandoned farmland pierced by red cedars laced and tied by dog roses, honeysuckle, and brown, dry grass; the memory of a meadow of a single species of short, gray-leaved, flat-topped, open-flowered goldenrod, whose October display was feathered by hundreds of monarch butterflies. I have a stubborn Calvinist belief in utility, which causes me to plant vegetables among flowers, use herbs as borders and berry bushes as ornamentals. The brutish littoral climate leads me to choose only such plants as have infinite stamina. There are recollections of an ancestor who planted hollyhocks at the gate and lilacs out back-but all gardens are a form of autobiography. Moreover, as a painter, I am predelicted toward shape, mass, and form and have learned that the predominant color of all gardens is green and all the rest is secondary bedeckment. Finally, there is something else-a fierce addiction to privacy, which is why my windbreak is thicker than it need be. Madoo, which in an old Scots dialect means "My Dove," is the name of my garden of 1.98 acres, and I have been at it now since 1967. I have gone about it as I would a painting, searching for form rather than prefiguring it, putting it through a process more intuitive than intellectual. The blunders are there to learn from; the successes, more often than not, are the result of bold throws. I started from the house and went out toward the edges, often revising solid achievements until they seemed made of finer matter, like marks and erasures of work on paper, which sometimes may be torn and fitted again in collage.Although I like white on white (the 'Duchess of Edinburgh' clematis on a white fence over Rosa 'Blanc Double de Coubert'), and I like to whiten white by throwing autumn clematis (C. terniflora) over yew, 'Huldine' over holly, the major push is for green on green. I have never cared much for all-gray gardens or all-blue gardens; indeed, I am not certain that they are ever successful, color being too quixotic to control in that fashion, full of lurking betrayals, so that sky blue becomes sea blue or slate blue and then not blue at all. The air over my garden, from whose several points I can see the Atlantic surf, is full of a most peculiar double light, rising and falling, and is itself one of the heroes of my landscape, kinder to foliage and bark than to flowers. Wild air will always do the painting. I have increased the atmosphere's multiple shimmer by putting in three small ponds, above whose surfaces small mists sometimes gather. In contrast I have made darkness with a copse of twisted, pruned arctic willows and another of a spinney of fastigiate ginkgoes, the former underplanted with a mix of epimedium, woodruff, Japanese wood anemones, and ferns, and both washed with the littlest of spring bulbs. Paths are of brick, pebbles, or setts, or disks of telephone pole, or grass. Curves alternate with strict, straight geometries, the better to bound, heighten, and confine the predominantly relaxed, semiwild, superabundant atmosphere I like.A meadow garden has been quite successful. Formerly, it was lawn giving a rather dull view from the dining table, made duller by summer heat and inevitable drought. America is no climate for lawns. I did not starve the soil to make the meadow but plunged robust, thrusty perennials through the grass into pits carefully nourished with well-rotted manure and much peat moss. It is roughly oval with a backing of Nootka cypress, cryptomeria, and rhododendron, whose darks perfectly outline the brighter foil of foliage.To my way of seeing, a garden is not a succession of small rooms or little effects but one large tableau, whose elements are inextricably linked to the accomplishment of the entire garden, just as in painting all passages conduce to the effect of the whole. Lack of keyed strength in any one of them may lower the pitch and thrust of the finished canvas.A muting of a too-perfect area is often in order, no matter how lovely it might be. Just so I have found 'Silver Moon' clematises are too huge a cynosure to be acceptable to the general garden, and I have taken them out. One can very definitely have too much of a good thing, unless it be some grand groundcover like Lamium 'Nancy', whose very modest performance excludes it from the egregious. Subtlety is always more alluring. The quieter painting enters the heart and stays, when one of tremendous impact has long since faded away.I do not paint in the way that I garden or garden as I would employ the brush, although the process is often the same-both are arts of the wrist, the broadest, largest sort of signature, if you will, highly idiosyncratic, the result of much doing, much stumbling, and highly intuited turns and twists before everything fits and adheres to the scale of one's intention. A good tree must often be moved to a more reticent spot when it begins to dominate and thus ruin the total orchestration. Beautiful tunes don't end up as symphonies, nor do witticisms write books. Certain flowers may emblazon a room but be abusive to a fine garden. For that reason and that of stamina and the ability to take the brunt of the climate (I am in Zone 7a, whose average lowest temperature is five to zero degrees Fahrenheit), I choose older varieties of the plant kingdom, whose foliage and blossom are, more often than not, circumspect and discreet.I am now becoming more geometric. In front of the winter house and winter studio I have just installed a brick path I call a view-swiper. It is 120 feet long (flying out to the potato fields and to the ocean, bringing all that fine view inside the purview of the garden as if it were mine), 8 feet wide at the near end, 6 at the far, with 80 roses ('Fru Dagmar Hastrup') on the sides. The far border will have other, taller rugosa roses and daylilies mixed with teasels. The site is but a narrow spur attached to my property, surrounded by changing crops whose patterns of growth and tilling are overwhelmingly seductive, requiring only the simplest sort of anchor to moor the peninsula.My canvases now have changed, too, and are rather like foliant form held very close to the eye. Both gestures, then, are new for me, and the feeling from both is a bit scary, akin to that of someone in the middle of a new high-wire act performing over a slowly withdrawing net. The air of gardens and paintings now seems to me to be filled with a wild, deliciously cold oxygen through which I can still see the first plain view of the working barns I converted three decades ago, gray above a blowing field of grass. That verdure, it seems to me, was the very soul of the place "working backwards, year by year," as John Koethe wrote in "The Near Future," until it "reached the center of a landscape."The English bones with which I began now seem entirely covered by what I have done, but that is the way of flesh. Copyright (c) 2000 by Robert Dash. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Robert Dash was born in downtown Manhattan in 1934 Robert Dash was home schooled for most of his young life due to ongoing illnesses. Never formally studying painting, he developed a strong interest in the abstract expressionists, particularly De Kooning, in college. He attended the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, in part to escape the city.After college he spent a year in Italy and upon returning to New York City worked for Arts and then Art News, while painting at night. He had his first show in 1960. Since then, he has painted, written and gardened near Sagg Pond on eastern Long Island, at residence among the changeable celebration of plantings, paths, views and architectural expressions of Madoo, a much-admired garden conservatory of his own making. A longtime Hamptons resident, Dash’s works have been exhibited in one-man exhibitions in Holland, England, and Germany as well as numerous major American art galleries. He also participated in many group exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art, Yale University and the Fine Arts Gallery University of Missouri. His works are also featured in museum collections including the Modern Art Museum, Munich; Guggenheim Museum; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts; and the Corcoran Gallery.

BAGDAD

Baghdad was once called Dar es Salam, meaning “City of Peace.” Inspired by that fact and by the city’s extraordinary history, the painting features layers of the map that chase more than five thousand years of splendid, then destroyed grandeur of what was once the greatest city on earth.

Included in this work are the cuneiform creation myth found in Iraq on a clay tablet dating to 3000 B.C.E. and an aerial photograph of Baghdad from 1925 C.E. The painting honors Baghdad as emerging from the cradle of civilization, the Round City (762 C.E.), center of a great cultural and intellectual renaissance, and site of Islamic architectural achievement.

Baghdad: City of Peace, Truly takes its border pattern from the Al-Kadhimain Mosque (1515 C.E.), the great Shi’ite shrine there. The painting’s center, the Round City with its radiating gates and waterways, encloses a mirrored muqarnas, referencing the medieval Zumurrud Khatan Tomb, whose dramatic, lobed exterior models its interior form. Two large-scale figures bow to the outer world, as we bow to the people of Iraq, in honor of them and their great city.
The cuneiform text in the painting reads: “When heaven above was not yet named, nor earth below pronounced by name, Apsu, the first one, their begetter and maker Tiamat, who bore them all, had mixed their waters together, but had not formed pastures, nor discovered reed-beds. When yet no gods were manifest, nor names pronounced, nor destinies decreed, then gods were born within them.” (translator, Stephanie Dalley)

This work is one in a series of "The Cities of Peace. Click here for information about the Ellen Frank Illumination Arts Foundation.

GREGORY COATES

Coates' abstract mixed media paintings utilize urban cast offs such as tape, rope and electrical wrapping. Over the past decade the work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibits in New York (Threadwaxing Space, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Atmosphere Gallery, Cynthia Broan Gallery, Christiane Nienbager Contemporary Art, Wilmer Jennings Gallery, Cinque Gallery and others), London (Gas Works Gallery), Berlin (Kunsthuse Tacheles), Munich (Kunsthandel Leidel) and has been included in major corporate and public collections in the US and abroad.

He has received significant awards including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Edward Mitchell Bannister Society’s Artistic Achievement Award. He has been an Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the International Artist-Workshop in Capetown South Africa. He teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union. Click here: Gregory Coates for Gregory Coates images, video interview and resume. Then to see his post on anaba blog: New work and resume here: Gregory Coates

"Art Attack"

Solo Exhibition of Works by Travis King
March 22, 2008 (This Saturday)

Reception 6-9pm at Travis King Studio

11 Washington Ave #1 East Hampton NY
631.680.7766
info@traviskingstudio.com

Bernd Haussmann

mixed media on paper 23 x 30.5 inches

See more Haussmann work at
C H A S E G A L L E R Y
129 Newbury Street Boston MA 02116 617-859-7222

Bernd Haussmann begins a work with no preliminary plan whatsoever. He faces the nothingness that is blank canvas, wood, metal, or other surfaces, ponders his thoughts and a direction appears in his mind. He picks up his brush, and a conversation begins between his mind and hand “As people get to know each other by talking,” he says, “I get to know the painting by painting it.” At a certain point, the dialog resolves itself and a work of art is revealed as a record of that process. Haussmann builds up layers that hint at something beneath the surface. That something may be psychological, or may go even deeper and allude to eternal verities. Various forms appear, some positioned as color fields that organize the composition and some looped organically like recurring memories. Staccato blips underscore the electric chirr and crackle of contemporary consciousness that brings the work alive. As Haussmann proceeds, the dialog is widened to include the eventual viewer. The painting becomes accessible in the sense that it furnishes suggestions and invites participation. “There is always an underlying principle that I want to share with you,” he says. “What you make of it depends on what information I put into the painting. This is important for the way I look at art or life in general. It doesn’t necessarily mean I know the truth, but I make my doubts and questions and my very strong opinions visible – almost surgically bare, if one looks closely. The more information and energy I put into the painting, the more it will resonate with the viewer. Painting, to me, is an energy exchange as well as a communication. A lot of people feel some connection when they look at my art.” Haussmann makes no distinction between his life and his art. “I am who I am,” he says, “and that is what I paint. I live my art. Art is a lifestyle – it is what I believe, and it defines me even as I create it. What is important to me is sharing my thoughts and beliefs, and keeping an eye on the cultural and political and social environment as our earth progresses.” The physical environment is a matter of intense concern as well. Haussmann divides his time between the Boston area and rural Maine, where he contributes to the building of a nature preserve and creates environmental sculptures. His paintings, though rigorously abstract, reflect that same dedication. They are saturated with the atmosphere of the natural world. “I want to show you the fragile environment, the intensity of connection that you experience when you go outdoors,” says Haussmann. “I hope to make people more sensitive, more aware, more critical of the world that surrounds us.” His paintings shimmer in silence while the conversation that produced them continues, communicating many shades and nuances of information to each person who pauses to interact with them.
edited and experted from Suzanne Deats, Maine, Spring 2006

AMERICA...Home of the Brave and Land of the F---.

Yet Another US Politician We Can Be Proud Of!

New York Magazine's best cover I've seen in a long while (kudos to the creative team!). This truly sums up American politics. Robert Mills, designer of the Washington Monument was clearly ahead of his time.

A bit o f history in case you've forgotten: Spitzer joined the staff of Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, where he became chief of the labor-racketeering unit, spending six years pursuing organized crime. His biggest case came in 1992, when Spitzer led the investigation that ended the Gambino organized crime family's control of Manhattan's trucking and garment industries.

Spitzer devised a plan to set up his own sweatshop in the city's garment district, turning out shirts, pants and sweaters, and hiring 30 laborers. The shop manager eventually got close to the Gambinos, and officials were able to plant a bug in their office. The Gambinos, rather than being charged with extortion, which was hard to prove, were charged with antitrust violations. Thomas and Joseph Gambino and two other defendants took the deal and avoided jail by pleading guilty, paying $12 million in fines and agreeing to stay out of the business.

Who's laughing now?

Part of the "Private Roads,Prophetic Turns"
series, 2007-8 inspired by landscape of crossroads of Norfolk,Conn. and Southfield, MA

near Buttermilk Falls and Bridge. mixed medium 8 x 6 inches

Amy Cohen Banker

The artists works in a variety of mediums: acrylic, oil, pastels, aquarelle, oil sticks, varnishes, glazes, finishing and surface techniques. SHe explores the basics of opacity, color, form, depth, obfuscation and revelation in life, language and in art. "I cannot help but be influenced by philosophy, poetry, literature, psychological symbolism, fairy tales, music, myths, conceits, and metaphors, especially of strong feminist models: women’s conflicting roles in a changing time throughout the centuries" says Cohen Banker.

She has a background in design, writing, and psychology. Her early childhood and life experiences evolving as a woman and mother combined with international study of these issues has contributed to her growth as an artist. Her primary themes are inner restoration and survival, challenging reality vs. myth.

On the Road with Grant Haffner

In the summer of 2005 Grant Haffner, his twin sister Carly and her boyfriend, Don Porcella, rented Ashawagh Hall in Springs, East Hampton to exhibit their work in show they titled, Bonac Tonic.

Haffner exhibited eight prismacolor pencil drawings, marker and oil pastels, and three paintings. He sold four drawings and all of his paintings. Following the positive reaction to his paintings he began concentrating on painting. It is at that point he began the road/landscape series solidifying his aesthetic voice. Just when I think he can't come up with another image, he does. Grant continues to explore the same genre but is contemplating larger works.

The time is ripe to pick from this tree so don't wait too long before adding a Grant Haffner to your art collection.

(above) Henley Regatta © 1994, Giancarlo Impiglia

Acrylic on Canvas 36" x 99"

Commission for the Ocean Liner

Queen Elizabeth II by Cunard

(below) The Sins of Eve, Giancarlo Impiglia

Oil on honeycomb cut-out aluminum 70" x 72"

"The fancies and foibles of American life in the fast lane are fair game to the penetrating eye of Impiglia. Based in New York since the mid-1970’s, the Italian-born artist has developed into an acute observer and critic of this up-scale scene. Recalling such celebrated “painters of modern life” as Constantin Guys, Toulouse-Lautrec, Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini and German Expressionists Ernst Kirchner and George Gorsz, he seems drawn to archetypes and archetypal situations. The interpenetrating planar structures of Futurism in combination with the reductive directness of Pop and an uncannily sure sense of design and proportion serve as his means of achieving a sophisticated synthetic realism. The approach…. Is at once impassioned and distant."
Excerpted from ARTNEWS, “New York Reviews” – Alex Rosenberg Gallery – 1984
Written by Ronny Cohen

Local artist, Darlene Charneco at

Locate/Navigate: exercises in mapping (part 2)La Esquina,

1000 West 25th St, Kansas City, MO

thru March 22

In 2008, we are in the midst of a mapping revolution. Thanks to the personal computer, the Internet, space satellites for data collection, and an expansive array of related technological tools, the scope of information available for mapping has exploded; we simply choose how we would like to select, filter, manipulate, magnify. Tracked by GPS, our physical locations and motions may be mapped in real time (never to be lost again), while at the same time we navigate through a vast virtual network, locating and relocating ourselves perpetually. Using Google Earth to view one's own neighborhood or childhood home; routinely linking Mapquest directions to e-mailed party invites, building networks of Myspace friends: we have become habitual mapmakers as well as blips on a vast array of other people's maps. ...With thick, slick, clear resin surfaces coating colorful, glittery, minutely detailed aerial maps of imaginary interlocking architectures and lawns, Darlene Charneco's sculptural paintings have a terrific physical presence. Yet her appealingly homespun approach is in fact significantly inspired by aspects of cyberspace, particularly its potential for empowering "social, interactive and collaboratively built spaces." Like aerial views, which provide an instant glimpse of patterns and connections not so easily discerned from the ground, so do virtual worlds collectively constructed through games like SimCity and Second Life reveal, more rapidly than in "real life" a vivid picture of societal tendencies and desires." Rather than overly discouraged by what these virtual worlds currently suggest, Charneco is "inspired by the thought that with the continued progress and eventual integration of mapping tools such as geographic information systems with computer gaming technologies, we just may be able to evolve the needed feedback to recover from what seems to be a dangerous myopia." Her work communicates this hopeful sense of a humanitarian re-mapping.Charneco's Sitemap generates specifically from the concept of a memory palace: "a mentally constructed architecture or location which has been used since ancient times as a mnemonic device for the recollection of intentionally embedded information," she explains; and from that of a sitemap: "typically used in web-based information architecture to enable a more thorough exploration of a website's content by search engines." Seeing potential for merging the two types of structures, her Sitemap, with its interlocking parts, meandering passageways, and mushroom-like nodes projecting from various chambers functions as a sort of imagined prototypical structure for storing information to be later accessed/recalled..." and armature for a theoretically infinite number of different exercises. (a catalogue excerpt)

Artists: Corrie Baldauf, Darlene Charneco, Brian Collier, Matt Dehaemers Andrea Flamini, Jorge Garcia, Adriane Herman, Mike Hill, Wopo Holup, Timothy Hutchings, Anne Lindberg, Justin Newhall, Garry Noland, Anne Pearce, Dana Sperry, VxPxC, James Woodfill, and Matt Wycoff. Curator: Kate Hackman