tagged with: GalleryBeat Media

Art by J. Fiber, close up, ink on paper. Cloud Nine is open until May 13

Anyway, I was at this opening (I'll have to borrow someone's snap since I didn't take any of the opening) and this show is called CLOUD NINE and it's at this Billyburg gallery, The Front Room, and it's crowded as shit, hot, the beers gone and I get introduced to this artist, Disney Nasa Borg, (?), and he's a surfer but he looks like he's from Road Warrior. So we're gabbin' about cold water when this angry little thing in glasses places herself in the middle of us, like a ref, looks up and says "excuse me but can I see the art?" and bulldozes her way to the big life size collage of a naked fat dude in a room encrusted with fast food wrappers. (by Cham Giobbi) She was a pisser that one. Why at an opening that is so damn crowded in a small room? It's not like I haven't seen it before but there is that simmering aggression of the desperate under appreciated artist that flowers in unlikely places. I appreciate her segway - so I went to the show the next day when the gallery was relatively quiet.

Photograph by Jung Nam Lee

I rarely attend these museum parties anymore but I wanted to see this show, "150 Diverse Black Males", and be in a crowd where I really didn't know anyone. Turns out I knew about two, and met more, but I was an observer to another part of art culture that was a complex video/doc driven black male experience mash. I really wanted to see what, and who, were a part of producing this ambitious project of identity.

The GalleryBeat live talk show, COOKING WITH GALLERYBEAT, avoided the skillet again by not cooking with strange fruit. We performed at the Brooklyn Museum's architectural futurama, the Rubin Pavilion on October 6th, 2011 as part of the museum's Thursday Night Series. Guests for this show were Mercer St. Medical's Dr. Daryl Isaacs, ArtNews Chief Editor Robin Cembalest, Upright Citizens Brigade's Ann Carr, World artist man/wife team Spencer and Kristin Bowler Tunick, and BM's main event artist, Sanford Biggers.

ARTIST BRIAN ALFRED - Interview 1 > 5 mins

A few years back, he started to do well as an artist, first with New york art dealer Max Protetch, then Mary Boone, and then to London's mega gallery, Haunch of Venison. You can see his work on his website paintchanger.com. His work is a very distinctively skillful blend of painting, collage, and digital images that early on, focused on landscape but I first know him for his portraits that I saw in Mercer St. Medical, and worked back through his output to the work he is best known for. He was admired by his peers, known for extreme focus on his subject, a relentless work ethic and was approached by New York art dealers before he graduated. He'd encountered real interest for his work real fast, and deservedly so. The influences on his work run from Hokusai and Japanese woodblock print art to Warhol and Ruscha but of course there's more. (he grew up in Pittsburg PA) His work is clear, precise, and had gone though a palpable change since 9/11. It has, in many ways become neo-Orwellian.  more »

Here's the card. The line-up. The locator map. Curated by Henry Sanchez and including Phil (Brainpan) Beuhler, Carla (RunningDear) Gannis, Eve Andrea Laramee, Eto Otitigbe, then around the block to Curator Sanchez. Mash that landscape, boys and girls! Now if the L rain is running on Saturday the 5th... The equivalent of a good review is 'preview', and I say do the preview, so do it.

While many in the hoch-kunst elite and it's hopefuls would rather turn a blind eye (the other is tone deaf) to the union-busting attempts at the lower wage scale employees of Sotheby's - the online art zine HYPERALLERGIC seems pretty busy looking at the not pretty picture of big ticket art, and producing content on it's discontents. I'm liking it. I recommend it, even if one of it's sponsors is part of the problem.