Guillermo Kuitca

Guillermo Kuitca is a contemporary artist whose work directly addresses both formal and poetic responses to the map as a dynamic force.  He is currently represented by the Sperone Westwater Gallery, which we will tour during our stay in New York.  The following is from Katherine Harmon's book The Map As Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography:

"The relationship between presence and absence is a major theme of Guillermo Kuitca's work.  People are visibly absent from his paintings and drawings - or are the invisibly present?  While human figures are never represented, the maps, diagrams, and objects in Kuitca's works suggest human activity, as if time has been momentarily suspended until someone arrives to impart meaning to these spaces.  Although Kuitca's artworks are often described as desolate or empty, the places and things that they depict - beds, theaters, prisons, hospitals, cities, intersecting roadways - suggest human use and social activity.  Kuitca removes the narrative of human presence to offer outlines and abstractions that are static, melancholy and also, often, beautiful."

New York Activities in the Summertime

You'll have lots of options if you're interested in exploring New York's non-art destinations; here are a few things to check out that are best experienced in the summertime:

1. Brooklyn Flea Markets
There are more locations than are listed here - a great place to scout for just about anything.

2. Shakespeare In The Park
Totally free, these productions often include very good casts.

3. Rooftop Films
An outdoor repertory cinema!

4. Coney Island
An NYC staple (be warned that it can get insanely crowded on weekends, but if you're amusement park-inclined, this is one of the best.  For a theoretical discussion on its significance, you can reference the first chapters of Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York.)

5. Marlow and Sons
One of the best places to eat in Brooklyn, (for after the flea markets).  If you eat meat, you can also pick up some amazing cuts at their partner butcher shop, Marlow and Daughters.  Not just a summertime restaurant, but like Cafe Habana, worth visiting if you have the chance.

The Brooklyn Rail

Since we'll be spending a lot of our time in Brooklyn, it would be good to get acquainted with The Brooklyn Rail, an independent publication that covers contemporary art among other topics.  It's a good, free resource for non-Manhattan events, openings, etc.  Here's a link to an article that was written on David Humphrey, another artist that we're going to visit with at his studio:

David Humphrey - The Brooklyn Rail

Angela Dufresne

Angela Dufresne is one of the artists we will visit in New York.  A link to an interview with her that was published in The Huffington Post is here.

The emphasis on geography and its relationship to history in their conversation is particularly apt considering our emphasis on different ways of mapping/annotating an experience.

Her website is here.

Cafe Habana

Cafe Habana offers some of the best Cuban food in New York City - including their specialty, Mexican grilled corn with cotija cheese.  That's not necessarily a Cuban dish (though they have amazing Cubano sandwiches and fish tacos as well).  This is a small,  busy place and you should expect to wait 20 minutes or more to get a table, but it's a place you should eat at before you die.

At the corner of Prince St. and Elizabeth St. in NoLita:

Cafe Habana

Christopher Wool's East Broadway Breakdown

Christopher Wool has made work that crosses several mediums and disciplines.  His project East Broadway Breakdown was released in book form and collected black and white photographs that he took in New York along Broadway.  From the amazon blurb on the book and project:

"Between 1994 and 1995, Christopher Wool shot a series of photographs in downtown New York City that he calls East Broadway Breakdown, after a street on the Lower East Side, the neighborhood where he lives and works. Taken at night using a 35 mm camera, the pictures feature the city's signature streets with their dilapidated storefronts and ramshackle staircases leading up to anonymous spaces. The high contrast images are often hard to read, producing, rather than coherent images, seemingly random forms that emerge from skewed camera angles. Like his paintings, Wool's photographs hover between abstraction and representation, forcing viewers to confront their desire for visual coherence while offering an alternative construct for picture-making today."

As a model, the work presents an interesting take on how the photograph can be just as useful a notational tool as directly drawing from the landscape, not to mention how choosing one section of the city you engage with every day allows the body of work to tell a larger story by maintaining a site-specific constant.

Mark Bradford

The artist Mark Bradford's work provides an interesting point of reference for how collage, found materials and painting and drawing techniques can be combined.  Like Anselm Kiefer, the mapped element of the work emerges not just from the way imagery is constructed (such as using forced perspectives and huge sizes), but also from the intensely sculptural relief of the surface.  Here's an interesting write-up on his practice, courtesy of Art 21:

Mark Bradford on Art 21