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Artists of Color Explore Home, Feathered Friends Get Glamour Shots, and More Exhibitions

(flyer via BRN GRL SPK / Facebook)

This Is My Home (Too)
Opening Monday, October 9 at Casa Mezcal, 7 pm to 11 pm. $10 suggested donation. On view through October 28.

Today, according to my iCal, is Columbus Day. But for years upon years, many have called into question how much a man who accidentally found some land and was unrelentingly cruel to its Indigenous inhabitants deserves an entire day named after him. This is why many cities, including Austin, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles, have elected to rename Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day.

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This Sculpture Is Williamsburg’s Newest Instagram Bait

Credit: Douglaston Development.

Move over, rainbow bagels.

Deborah Kass‘s iconic OY/YO sculpture made its triumphant return to Brooklyn two weeks ago, and it’s proving irresistible Insta bait.

The sculpture — which reads YO (“I am” in Spanish) or OY (as in the Yiddish “oy vey”) depending which way one faces it — was previously installed in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Now, a year later, it’s back — this time at the Williamsburg waterfront at the end of N. 5th Street.

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A ‘Fair’ Roger Ailes Memorial, The Secret Life of Plants, and More Art This Week

Rochelle Feinstein, The Week in Hate, 2017, oil on canvas, 40 by 38 inches (via yours mine & ours)

The Roger Ailes Memorial Show: Fair and Balanced
Opening Thursday, July 6 at yours mine & ours, 6 pm to 9 pm. On view through August 4.

When news surfaced that Roger Ailes of Fox News had departed this earthly plane, certain left-leaning pockets of the internet reacted similarly to the announcement that longtime Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia had kicked the bucket. That is, they were not mourning in the typical sense, unless your regular mourning routine includes Twitter jokes and dances of joy. Now, a little over a month since he passed, LES gallery yours mine & ours will be gathering an array of artists to memorialize the man. And remember, being memorialized may have a positive connotation, but it merely means that people are publicly remembering what you did.

A press release for the show has opted not to include a traditional exhibition description, instead reprinting in full an essay by Monica Lewinsky that ran in The New York Times on May 22, 2017. Entitled “Roger Ailes’s Dream Was My Nightmare,” Lewinsky articulates for many paragraphs how Ailes and Fox was one of the first to incessantly cover her sexual involvement with Bill Clinton in a way that she writes made her “[cease] being a three-dimensional person.” The fact that this exhibition elected to uplift a woman’s story instead of trumpet about its own prestige should give you a clue of what’s in store. More →

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What’s Up With the Giant Spikes Outside of Cooper Union?

Jan Palach Memorial at Cooper Union (Photo: Anaka Kaundinya)

Cube, meet spikes.

The Alamo returned in November and now another piece of monumental art is being installed outside of Cooper Union’s Foundation Building. The sculpture, a nine-foot-by-nine-foot cube with spikes mounted on top, is by John Hejduk, an artist, architect and former Dean Emeritus of Cooper Union.

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Notorious East Village Landlord Uses Street Art to Paint a Prettier Picture

(Photo: Nicole Disser)

(Photo: Nicole Disser)

Earlier this year, when the East Village’s beloved Stage Restaurant closed in the wake of a dispute with its landlord Icon Realty Management, Brooklyn-based artist Gilf! plastered the diner’s former home with caution tape reading “Gentrification in Progress.” It wasn’t the first time one of the company’s properties was the site of artistic protest: Karen Platt, a resident of an Icon-owned building on East 5th Street, has been known to chalk up the sidewalk with messages like “Enough Is Enough,” and over July 4th weekend, someone spray-painted a message on the sidewalk in front of the now for-rent Stage space that advised, “DO NOT RENT HERE. DO NOT BUY HERE. BOYCOTT IN EFFECT.”
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A By-the-Public, For-the-Public Art Project Takes Shape Under the FDR

Conceptual rendering of the installation (Photo: Courtesy of NY State Senate)

Conceptual rendering of the installation (Photo: Courtesy of NY State Senate)

The Department of Transportation’s newest pet project has been the DOT Art Initiative, which partners with artists and community organizations to bring some color into this concrete jungle. You might have caught last month’s “asphalt activation” at a Citi Bike docking station in Williamsburg. Now, the DOT has partnered up with New York State Senator Daniel Squadron and the non-profit Hester Street Collaborative to set up a temporary public art installation on the South Street median, starting at Rutgers Street.
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Billy Rohan’s Public Art Project Is About to Up the Game of LES Roll-Down Gates

(Courtesy 100 Gates)

(Courtesy 100 Gates)

While on sabbatical from the NYC winter in Puerto Rico and working on his latest “Illumignarly” video, NYC skateboarder and Samurai founder Billy Rohan received word that his 100 Gates Program had received a $30,000 grant from the Lower East Side Business Improvement District. A Chinatown resident and active neighborhood advocate, Rohan’s idea was to commission artists to decorate 100 roll-down gates connected to businesses in the LES.

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The Closing Ceremony of The Portals Involved Gypsy Centries, Tallbikes and the Goddesses of Death

“I’m a fire dancer,” said Susannah Pryce, who was lurking about the front stairs of the Sixth Street Community Center on Saturday night, dressed as the Goddess of Death. For her role as a macabre guide to the finale of the 13 Portals, she wore glowing face paint, a black cloak, and six-inch fingernails made of curling brown beans. After explaining how she regularly performs at bars with an on-fire instrument that looks like “the bones of a giant geisha fan,” Pryce told us: “Tonight’s portal is about rebirth. And that’s why I’m here. Because everybody has to die to be reborn.”
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Here It Is, the Mystical Interactive Public Art Game You’ve Been Waiting For

Detail of Portal 2, which will be unveiled on July 13th.

Detail of Portal 2, which will be unveiled on July 13th.

The East Village sure is feeling mystical these days.
Artists Nicolina Johnson and Pérola M. Bonfanti will soon unveil their “13 Portals” — murals based on various forms of astrology and ancient spirituality — on abandoned doorways around the neighborhood, with a kooky communal game to tie them all together.
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Olek Swaddled a Car in Yarn, and That Was Really Just the Beginning of Open Canvas

This past weekend, North 6th Street exploded with energy as more than 20 artists chosen by Absolut’s Open Canvas Initiative transformed a Williamsburg block of storefronts, construction fences and bare walls into colorful, stunning murals. Prompted to “Transform Today,” the artists, who were mostly from the Brooklyn area, worked with a wide variety of materials and mediums — starting with yarn.

Click through our slideshow to see how the event unspooled.