Tom Sanford with friend, collaborator and fellow genius painter, Ryan Schneider have been working on the show “Big Picture” for about a year and are very proud and excited for it.

In simplest terms BIG PICTURE is just that, a show of big pictures. The pictures – all paintings – are big in terms of size, subject matter, energy, ambition and visual generosity. Many are aggressive or even garish in the color, they are often over worked, heavy layer upon layer of paint, combining dissonant styles and subject matter. These paintings are big in that there is a hell of a lot to look at. Some of the pictures are so big in scope that they seem unresolved, open ended, too big for the canvas they are on.

Schneider & Sanford organized this show to make a case for a young generation of New York picture-making painters who have emerged over the past decade. We asked each of 19 painters that we invited for one big picture that would serve as a strong argument for that artist’s position. Ostensibly, these paintings vary widely and wildly in style, subject matter, and point of view. However, when we look at the show, we like to view it in terms of the big picture.

These are all painters who make pictures of things, in that they all refer to the culture at large; their paintings are about painting, but they are about other things as well. The pictures deal with the biggest of universal themes, like Love, Sex and Death. The big subject matter is often juxtaposed with more idiosyncratic information about subculture or the extremely personal, political or emotional. These are painters of a generation to whom irony and collage-like juxtapositions are second nature, where high/low cultural distinctions are meaningless, to whom technology allows access to every image that has ever been seen or even imagined. These are painters who take advantage of the vastness of their surroundings, the open-endedness of their culture, and this Big Picture is reflected back in their work.

Featuring paintings by:

Kamrooz Aram, Colleen Asper, Paul Brainard, John Copeland, Holly Coulis, Justin Craun, Van Hanos, Dan Heidkamp, Aaron Johnson, Emily Noelle Lambert, Wes Lang, Liz Markus, Eddie Martinez, Brian Montuori, Lisa Sanditz, Tom Sanford, Ryan Schneider, Michael Williams, and Jeremy Willis
BIG PICTURE
JULY 8 – AUG 7 OPENING PARTY JULY 8 6-9PM
Priska C. Juschka Fine Art
547 W 27th street, 2nd floor.

Opening Reception 7/8/2010 6-9 pm

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“Commercial” Art: Video Call
Open call for video submissions with an opportunity to win $2,000.
Accepting submissions through October 31, 2010.

Commercials may or may not be the most creative thing on TV or the Internet, but we know you can make them better. Take any broadcast commercial, cut it, dub it, repeat it, or flip it and make it art for an upcoming apexart exhibition that will be on view from November 10 – December 22, 2010.
more info

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The Franchise Program: F 2011
Let us finance your exhibition anywhere in the world.
Accepting submissions from July 14 – October 1, 2010.

Mount your own group exhibition anywhere in the world. For the past two years, apexart has presented The Franchise exhibitions in Los Angeles (2009) and Thailand (2010). apexart will present two Franchise exhibitions anywhere in the world in 2011.
more info

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Unsolicited Proposal Program: UP 2011
Open call for apexart exhibitions.
Accepting submissions January 14 – February 14, 2011.

For the 14th year running, apexart accepts 600-word, idea-based proposals for exhibitions in New York City. Reviewed independently, anonymously and without support materials, submissions are evaluated solely on the strength of the idea. No mountain too high, no river too deep!
more info

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Director Thomas P Campbell who took over as Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York 18 months ago speaks out in an interesting interview on how he sees the new landscape of Art and the public’s relationship to it and how he is looking to position the Met to best fit in that world.

The Met has long had a distant relationship with Contemporary Art for half a centurty now almost and Campbell talks about that shifting possibly since  he feels there is more of an audience for it then before and there is enough context to properly align it with the 5000 years or more of collected art under the Met roof.

Most interestingly Campbell talks about Contemporary Art as being the first step in a “fundamental shift” in the Met’s operation and presentation of displays. The goal in making them more accessible and a less steep knowledge prerequisite to even simply engage shows. Saying such things as:

“We assume people know who Rembrandt is, for example. We have wonderful, thoughtful labels next to each Rembrandt painting, but there’s no overview of who he was and, frankly, considering our international audience, I doubt whether many of them do know who [he] was, or the significance of a particular period room, in a broader context.

“What I’m trying to do is to get the museum rethinking the visitor experience from the moment that people arrive at the museum: the signage they encounter, the bits of paper they pick up, all the way through to the way we deliver information in the galleries. And obviously that’s an enormous task. We’ve got a million square feet of gallery space and tens of thousands of objects on display, so nothing’s going to change overnight.”

Thomas Campbell who is not looking to do anything radical with the Met’s conversation and was largely apointed for that reason among others is also someone who sees the writing on the wall a bit it seems when after trying to describe a Titian bacchanal to a Italian teacher at Christie’s to no success with typical termiology shifted gears to saying:

“It is a drunken orgy and they are all having sex!”

To which the point hit home and Campbell said his lesson from that was:

“Academia at its best embraces and speaks to a broad audience”

It will be interesting to see where he takes the self described “inward-looking” culture that permiates the Met currently and many organizations in the Art world.

More can be read here

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Back in the beginning of June, Creative Time and artist Paul Ramírez Jonas set up a kiosk in New York City’s Times Square and gave away free keys to the city to groups of two. Keys that would enable the duos to see rarely visited or in some cases previously unacessable areas in all five boroughs.

Places such as:

• Brooklyn Museum
• Gracie Mansion
• Whitney Museum of American Art
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• The Louis Armstrong House Museum
• Among many others

The awarding of the keys has a small amount of built in pomp and circumstance requiring there to be two and that each oratorically awards the key to the other declaring why that person has earned this right.

None of the destinations are life altering or that exclusive (some are just dressed up marketing attempts) but it is a wonderful treasure hunt of sorts even if at times we do not like treasure hunts and an excellent artiface or conceit to excitingly get people to venture out into the city beyond the usual commercial destinations. To see the romantic corners & rooms of NYC so to speak.

The Art project was a kind of API but instead of allowing computers to share data or tools it empowered people with the theater, opportunity and open ended purpose to expand on it if they so desired, a Art Project Interface of sorts. Many have built other projects on top of it from bike routes, water gun assassinations to interestingly extending the romantic couple metaphor into literal dates.

Thats what Lauren Burke, a 26-year-old Manhattan lawyer, art reporter and photographer decided to do. Turning each of the locations into a date with the following statement:

Take one single girl, the most inspiring public art project yet, and summer in New York City and you have the idea for a perfect blog:

Key2thecity, key2my heart.

After being presented with the key to the city and now having the ability to unlock 24 secret sights around all five boroughs, 24 dates will be had throughout the summer, seeing if both love and intrigue can exist in the city where no one sleeps.

The rules:

1) Every first date this summer must somehow incorporate a key to the city site

2) Each sight can only be visited once before another sight is visited.

3) Men or women may be repeated before sites, meaning that a site may be visited on a second date if the man or woman warranted a second visit.

4) No ex-boyfriends allowed as sight visits unless they too are warranting a second visit.

5) As the key to the city project is to expand our city horizons, each site visit date must also incorporate a food or drink spot never before tried.

5) Whoever wins my heart also wins my second key to the city.

6) Have fun, love life, love NYC, love love.,

So with summer approaching, 4th of July celebrations this weekend and a economy/job market that just keeps going down like it was from Jersey and in The Situation‘s room (not you Blitzer) find that special someone and explore the little known hidden free gems of your city or town with them. I have every intention to.

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Louise Bourgeois passed away Monday in New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center at the age of 98 two days after a heart attack.

Her collection of work is widely known, diverse, fun and she will be missed.

Louise who was inducted into the U.S. National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2009 is survived by two sons, Alain & Jean Louis, as well as by two grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Her husband and a third son, Michel, predeceased her.

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