Join DC in the release of legendary skate photographer Mike Blabac's first book "Blabac Photo: The Art of Skateboard Photography," on July 2nd. 

If you miss the little stonehendge pillars and witty bantry of David St Hubbins, Derek Smalls and Nigel Tufnell, nows your chance to revisit the classic. "This is Spinal Tap".   Even after the glam and glitz of the 80's heavy metal scene died down, Spinal Tap remained a must see film and an infamous name. Now, two decades later, they're at it again. The band has reunited and released a follow-up album titled "Back From the Dead". The album includes some classic tunes plus some new ones, an hour long dvd, and a rockin' diorama that you can assemble and put on display on your mantle! The album is available on Amazon and Itunes, as well as hmv and play.com. 

When you were a kid, it was all about what lunchbox you carried with you to summer camp. In these modern times, the lunchbox has gotten a makeover and it makes me want one all over again. Available at Plastica, the Bento Box comes in many shapes, sizes, and colors so that you can pick the best one for you and/or your little one. The best part about them is that they are comprised of stacking trays that can keep the jelly off the cheezits, and the grapes from the brie. Pick one up for your summer trips to the park, the beach, or even your own backyard.

 

Bento Box Jr. 
This smaller stacking lunch box is great for kids snacks! 
Or use it as a helpful storage box for office or sewing supplies. 
Dishwasher safe, not microwave safe. 
5" tall - 2 levels: each level is 2" x 4.75" diameter. 
Melamine. 

In May of 1999, I joined Rizzoli as Assistant to the Director of Sales and Marketing, a glorified secretary assigned to prime assignments as organizing the basement stockroom and filing dozens of cartons of documents piled along the windowsills and along the floors of that third floor office. Still, the position had its perks, like meeting the pert and perky Marta Hallett, then publisher of Rizzoli, who seemed unusually accessible for someone in her position.
 
In 2002, Hallett called me to see if my new employer, powerHouse Books, would be interested in distributing her newest incarnation, Glitterati Incorporated. After years at the helm of houses including HarperCollins, Smithmark Publishers, with an imprint at Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, Marta had decided to leave the confines of the corporate lifestyle for the uncharted waters of independent publishing.
 
Smartly, she partnered with organizations and corporations including Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy's, The Studio Museum of Harlem, and the International Center of Photography on high-end illustrated titles dedicated to elevating the discourse in art, culture, fashion, design, travel, food, and lifestyle, Glitterati titles spotlight work from Coco Chanel, Natori, Villa d'Este, Ralph Pucci, and the kitchen of Mrs. Charles Darwin. With over 30 years experience, Hallett has built Glitterati's reputation as publisher of modern beauty and iconography with fashion and beauty, architecture and design, photography and film, food and lifestyle, travel, and children's books.
 
I reconnected with Hallett earlier this Spring to work on the global campaign for Fall 2009 release of Untouched, a collection of classic 80s celebrity portraiture by Johnny Rozsa featuring everyone from Dolly Parton to Tina Turner, Muhammad Ali to Sade, Rick James to Joan Collins, John Malkovich to Natasha Richardson, with a special section dedicated the gay legends including Leigh Bowery, Quentin Crisp, and Divine.
 
Working from her sprawling Central Park West home, Hallett's close knit collective combines the opulent with the organic, offering a sophisticated mix of stylish titles that enjoy a life outside the crumbling book industry. http://glitteratiincorporated.com/home.html

I have always had a penchant for the criminal element, and despite my mother's persistent lament, I seem to have found them in the form of men. Mmm yes. Almost a fetish it's been, moving over the years from drug dealers (convenient) to graffiti writers (talented). In fact, it was one such writer who gave me a copy of Nov York, a twisted stream-of-consciousness "written by a slave"--or so it says on the cover (while on the spine, it says Dumar Brown). I couldn't finish the book due to an interminable case of motion sickness and yet I kept it, which says a lot for a woman who prides herself in purging her bookshelves every six months.
 
A few years later, I received the call: Mr. Brown was looking for a publisher for his third book, The World Screaming Nov, and was I interested in meeting this elusive cat. Undoubtedly yes, and I wore my finest Led Zeppelin t-shirt. We met, got on, but my heavy handed editing of his work turned him off and the book was later released by alife and Newkirk Editeur. I received a signed copy, one of the limited edition hand-gilded by the hand of a man preaching rebellion in our prisons. By a man who taught inmates on Rikers Island before becoming a novelist. Oh yea, and somewhere in there, bombed a couple of spots.
 
Since then, I've read the shooting script for the first screenplay Mr. Brown, Running Through the Forest at Night, an unforgiving study of juvenile crime and punishment. Examining the industrial and intimate mechanizations of the criminal mind. In Mr. Brown's world no one is immune from the call for vengeance. Whether a gangsta or the common man rescripting the system to meet their own ends, there's no escape. Mr. Brown is the Sartre of Spofford, and I am collecting first editions.

If you've ever seen the work of the amazing Sol LeWitt, then you know his use of color and shape are very dynamic and interesting. The new work "A Wall Drawing Retrospective" is on display at the Massachusettes Museum of Modern Contemporary Art; it took 6 months to finish and will be on display until 2033.

Press Release Courtesy of Mass MoCA

After nearly six months of intensive drafting and painting by a team of some sixty-five artists and art students, Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective is fully installed. The historic exhibition opens to the public at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), in North Adams, Massachusetts, on November 16, 2008, and will remain on view for twenty-five years. Conceived by the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, in collaboration with the artist before his death in April 2007, the project has been undertaken by the Gallery, MASS MoCA, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective comprises 105 of LeWitt's large-scale wall drawings, spanning the artist's career from 1969 to 2007. These occupy nearly an acre of specially built interior walls that have been installed--per LeWitt's own specifications--over three stories of a historic mill building situated at the heart of MASS MoCA's campus. The 27,000-square-foot structure, known as Building #7, has been fully restored for the exhibition by Bruner/Cott & Associates architects, which has closely integrated the building into the museum's main circulation plan through a series of elevated walkways, a dramatic new vertical lightwell, and new stairways.

The works in the exhibition are on loan from numerous private and public collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Gallery, to which LeWitt designated the gift of a major representation of his wall drawings, as well as his wall-drawing archive.

Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, states, "Watching this grand installation of Sol LeWitt's wall drawings progress over the past six months has been nothing short of thrilling. In addition to providing an enduring exhibition of great beauty, this retrospective will enable visitors to behold for the first time the full trajectory of a major aspect of Sol's artistic career. Until today, the only way to view multiple LeWitt wall drawings has been to travel far and wide, pursuing them individually in situ or in temporary museum exhibitions. Now, visitors will be able to return to MASS MoCA again and again to experience this visual feast of Sol's wall drawings in a single location, doing so at their leisure over the next twenty-five years."

LeWitt--who stressed the idea behind his work over its execution--is widely regarded as one of the leading exponents of Minimalism and Conceptual art, and is known primarily for his deceptively simple geometric structures and architecturally scaled wall drawings. His experiments with the latter commenced in 1968 and were considered radical, in part because this new form of drawing was purposely temporal and often executed not just by LeWitt but also by other artists and students whom he invited to assist him in the installation of his artworks.

Each wall drawing begins as a set of instructions or simple diagram to be followed in executing the work. As the exhibition makes clear, these straightforward instructions yield an astonishing--and stunningly beautiful--variety of work that is at once simple and highly complex, rigorous and sensual. The drawings in the exhibition range from layers of straight lines meticulously drawn in black graphite pencil lead, to rows of delicately rendered wavy lines in colored pencil; from bold black-and-white geometric forms, to bright planes in acrylic paint arranged like the panels of a folding screen; from sensuous drawings created by dozens of layers of transparent washes, to a tangle of vibratory orange lines on a green wall, and much more. Forms may appear to be flat, to recede in space, or to project into the viewer's space, while others meld to the structure of the wall itself.

MASS MoCA Director Joseph C. Thompson comments, "With this exhibition, Sol LeWitt has left an amazing gift for us all. Great art draws upon previous artists, but also contradicts and contravenes. And the most essential art argues for new ways of seeing, even as it is almost immediately absorbed into the work that surrounds and supersedes it. As I believe will be evident in this landmark exhibition, LeWitt's wall drawings rise to those highest of standards. We look forward to having this amazing collection of works on long-term view as a sort of proton at the center of our museum around which our program of changing exhibitions and performances will orbit with even more energy.

Definitely check out the new release of Kehinde Wiley's "Black Light", (published by powerHouse Books). Wiley's portraits are very graphic and interesting, pulling from his inspiration in both the urban world and the art history realm. The stunning quality and the thought that goes into his work makes this body of work a must see. Below is a photograph of the cover of the book, and some more information on the body of work. Enjoy!

Credit: from BLACK LIGHT, Photographs by Kehinde Wiley, published by powerHouse Books


Here is the press release:
Black Light
Photographs by: Kehinde Wiley
Essay by: Brian Keith Jackson, Krista A. Thompson

"For most of Kehinde Wiley's very successful career, he has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Western art. Pictorially, Wiley gives the authority of those historical sitters to his twenty-first-century subjects."
--National Portrait Gallery

"My intention is to craft a world picture that isn't involved in political correctives or visions of utopia. It's more of a perpetual play with the language of desire and power."
--Kehinde Wiley

"Wiley inserts black males into a painting tradition that has typically omitted them or relegated them to peripheral positions. At the same time, he critiques contemporary portrayals of black masculinity itself.... He systematically takes a 'pedestrian' encounter with African-American men, elevates it to heroic scale, and reveals--through subtle formal alterations--that postures of power can sometimes be seen as just that, a pose."
--Art in America

Los Angeles native and New York-based visual artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history's portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists--including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, and others--Wiley engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic, and sublime in his representation of urban black and brown men found throughout the world. By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, wealth, prestige, and history to subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, Wiley makes his subjects and their stylistic references juxtaposed inversions of each other, imbuing his images with ambiguity and provocative perplexity.

In Black Light, his first monograph, Wiley's larger-than-life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown young men. The models are dressed in their everyday clothing, most of which is based on far-reaching Western ideals of style, and are asked to assume poses found in paintings or sculptures representative of the history of their surroundings. This juxtaposition of the "old" inherited by the "new"--who often have no visual inheritance of which to speak--immediately provides a discourse that is at once visceral and cerebral in scope.

Without shying away from the socio-political histories relevant to the subjects, Wiley's heroic images exhibit a unique modern style that awakens complex issues which many would prefer remain mute.

Kehinde Wiley received his MFA from Yale University in 2001. Shortly after, he became an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He is represented by Deitch Projects, New York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Miami Art Museum, Miami, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.

Press Release Courtesy of powerHouse Books

Additional Work Not From "Black Light"
Larger Scale Oil Paintings By Kehinde Wiley

The Arts Go GREEN

On Friday, June 26th from 6:30 p.m. until 8:00 p.m., artists of any discipline and Santa Monica
arts organizations of every type are invited to attend this launch event in order to learn more about AEP at a free event hosted at the Santa Monica Museum of Art at Bergamot Station (2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, 90404).

If you didn't see it live, I'm sure that you've heard by now about Sacha Cohen's air "attack" on Eminem at the MTV Movie Awards as his alter ego Bruno. At the time, the stunt seemed reminiscent of Howard Stern's Fart Man, but much more intrusive. Needless to say it seemed that Eminem was not a happy camper when he stormed out, but later it was released that it was all in good fun...and planned! Here's to another great moment in MTV Awards History.


"After admitting that last week's stunt in which Sacha Baron Cohen's film character Bruno landed on Eminem's lap the MTV Movie Awards was staged, the rap star has added that he was thrilled it went off with out a hitch.

Speaking to RapRadar.com, Eminem admitted that the butt-revealing stunt as well as his reaction of storming out of the theatre were completely rehearsed, and they had planned it months ago.

"Sacha called me when we were in Europe and he had an idea to do something outrageous at the Movie Awards. I'm a big fan of his work so I agreed to get involved with the gag," he said.

"I'm thrilled that we pulled this off better than we rehearsed it. It had so many people going nuts, so to speak. Everyone was blowing me up about it."

Eminem admitted that after he stormed out of the ceremony he returned to his hotel and 'laughed uncontrollably for about three hours. Especially after I saw it on air'."

Article courtesy of nme.com

Post By: Ashley Schaffner

Based out of Venice and their online store, aplusrstore.com, co-founders Andy and Rose have created a place where you can find all sorts of odds and ends to make your home feel more unique. At A+R you can find anything from an herb trio pot where you can keep your cooking herbs fresh, to a quirky C-shaped decanter for your dinner parties. They even have a cute little alarm clock that will run away if you hit snooze, (it literally rolls away and keeps beeping...where was that when I was in college?!). 

There is a great show up at Taylor De Cordoba right now.     Please check out the lovely, ethereal paintings by artist Jeana Sohn.     Lipsticktracez loves!



PRESS RELEASE - For Immediate Release

Jeana Sohn:  Sleep Sleep

May 16 - June 27, 2009

Opening Reception: Saturday May 16, 6-8PM

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Sleep Sleep, a new series of paintings on panel and an installation by Los Angeles-based artist Jeana Sohn. The exhibition will run from May 16 through June 27, 2009.  The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, May 16 from 6-8PM.

 
Drawing upon mythologies and the vastness of nature, Jeana Sohn paints peaceful scenes that are filled with anxiety. While aiming to express her connection to nature in these paintings, she widens the conversation to the relationship between humans and the natural world in general. Her images are undeniably gorgeous - a pretty, fashionable young girl (resembling a well dressed paper doll) floating amidst vividly colored roses is a recurring image and an appealing one. Yet, the characters Sohn imagines seem more lost than found, more frightened and overwhelmed than peaceful. A girl trying to untangle herself from a seemingly never-ending pile of rope exemplifies this.  

It is exactly this tension that makes takes Sohn's work from the level of appealing to utterly fascinating. And here, the little girl lost theme will be more disarming than ever as Sohn moves away from her traditional 2-D style and creates a life-size paper mache sculpture of a six-year-old girl. 

Jeana Sohn graduated from Cal Arts in 2004. Her artwork has been shown in various exhibitions around the country and included in numerous publications. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

For additional information and images, please contact Heather Taylor at 310-559-9156 or heather@taylordecordoba.com.  Taylor De Cordoba is located at 2660 South La Cienega Blvd in Los Angeles, CA.  The gallery is open from Tuesday - Saturday, 11AM - 6PM.

Press Release Courtesy of Taylor De Cordoba

LOUISE BOURGEOIS: THE SPIDER, THE MISTRESS AND THE TANGERINE, a film by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach. 



For the past six decades, modern art legend and feminist icon Louise Bourgeois has been at the forefront of successive new developments, but always on her own powerfully inventive and disquieting terms. In 1982, at the age of 71, she became the first woman honored with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She has since gone on, in her 80s and 90s, to create her most powerful and persuasive work, including her massive spider sculptures that have appeared all over the world.

As a screen presence, Bourgeois is magnetic, mercurial and emotionally raw. Filmed with unparalleled access between 1993 and 2007, this documentary delicately sheds light on the methods by which her childhood traumas and memories become embodied in objects and installations. An intimate and human engagement with an artist's world, LOUISE BOURGEOIS... is a comprehensive and dramatic work of creativity and revelation.

Zeitgeist's DVD release features 45 minutes of deleted sequences, including additional rare footage of Bourgeois at work, as well as video interviews with co-director Amei Wallach and cinematographer/editor Ken Kobland, and more!


LOUISE BOURGEOIS: THE SPIDER, THE MISTRESS AND THE TANGERINE is available on June 23, 2009.