Hitting the Streets!

In collaboration with several artists including Nick Cave and Pipilotti Rist and tech-giant Apple, the New Museum produces new augmented reality projects across the world.

As the lines between technology and art blur, the preconceived notions to which we understand what art is and can be is being transformed. In a statement, New Museum director Lisa Phillips said, “The New Museum has always led at the intersection of art and tech, and we could not have asked for a better partner in Apple to support the fantastic visions of these pioneering artists. Augmented reality is a medium ripe for dynamic and visual storytelling that can extend an artist’s practice beyond the studio or the gallery and into the urban fabric.”

How it works: starting August 10th, walk into the Apple store and use the [AR]T Viewer app to explore the works. In New York, London, Paris, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, there will be free tours offered to the public to go on augmented reality walks co-curated by the New Museum. The groundbreaking aspect of this art that the companies are experimenting with is its uniqueness. Every experience is slightly different each tour as the background of what’s real is continuously changing.

For those who are interested, the experience doesn’t end here. Sarah Rothberg, an artist and programmer, partnered with Apple to create a 90 minute [AR]T Lab that will be available at all Apple stores, teaching the basics of creating AR using the programmer language, Swift. Whether you’re entering Holler’s Through portal or chasing the bubble-like form of Rist’s International Liquid Finger Prayer, you’ll be intrigued by the endless possibilities of this new medium.

A Message of Hope Crosses the Border

In the most heated moments, there is a glimmer of hope.

Earlier this month, artist Rael San Fratello installed a seesaw connecting those separated on the US-Mexico border. Children have been seen playing on these Fratello’s Teeter-Totter Wall that straddle the wall that occupies the Anapra zone in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico.

“The border is a literal fulcrum for US-Mexico Relations, and building walls severs those relationships,” wrote San Fratello in an email to Artnet News. “The wall, and the unfortunate politics of the wall, not only separate countries, but regions, cities, neighborhoods, families, and more recently, separation of children from their parents.”

The inspiration behind having seesaws connect the two sides is based on the Secure Fence Act of 2006 — an act that features three seesaws installed within the border fence to allow people to interact and see one another. This isn’t the first work of art that has made a political statement. “Art is such a powerful vehicle for change,” wrote Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) on Twitter, calling the project “a beautiful installation at our southern border.” Other artworks responding to the proposed $2.5 billion border wall have included a golden fence surrounding Trump’s Mar-a-Lago hotel and a wall of cheese.

That’s So Fetch!

The series of films, We Can’t Even: Millennials on Film, challenge the narrative that characterizes the generation.

Millennials often get the reputation for being lazy, petulant, naive (those are usually the mildest of criticisms). This film is determined to change that perception. The series is both created by and for millennials. It details the social, political, and economic factors thrust upon the most contentious generation up to date.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) details all aspects the generation has to offer from increased racial representation to the conception of the word “fetch.” The film showcases many of the movies that shaped the millennial experience, iPhone footage of police brutality, and an overwhelming sense of how pop culture conceptualized millennials. A large portion of the film does devote its time to queer communities. The stories told are tactile, but revolves around the detail of love as a possibility in all circumstances.

We Can’t Even: Millennials on Film continues at BAM through August 6, 2019.

A Note to Thrifters: Hidden Treasures Scattered in New York City

1918 Egon Schiele pencil drawing found at a Queens Habitat for Humanity.

The buyer and part-time art handler stumbled upon a black charcoal drawing by Egon Schiele. In order to authenticate the drawing, he contacted Jane Kallir, a world-renowned expert on Egon Schiele and author of the first complete catalog of Schiele’s works. “We get hundreds of photographs a year, and most of them are fakes or copies or just misidentified as Schiele’s work. We asked for better photos, and he took a year to get back to us,” she said.

After receiving the photos, Kallir said that she had little doubt that the sketch was fake. “In over 30 years of authenticating Schiele’s work, I have only once before encountered a drawing with such an unlikely provenance,” Kallir said in the press statement.

According to Art Newspaper, the drawing is estimated to rack in between $100,000 and $200,000. The sketch belongs to a series of 20 pencil drawings of a reclining nude girl Schiele made the year he died of the Spanish flu — the rest exhibited in The Met and The Leopold Museum. The drawing is now part of the exhibition, The Art Dealer as Scholar. The buyer says if it sells, proceeds from the sale will be donated to Habitat for Humanity.

Another Reminder on the Transformative Effect of Love

The Ford Foundation’s Art Gallery debuts “Radical Love,” an exhibition that explores empathy and self-care.

Through exhibitions curated by Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker, the Ford Foundation explores the theme of “utopian imagination.” The first exhibition, “Perilous Bodies,” deals with the obstacles involved in achieving justice across xenophobia, racism, class, and gender. “Radical Love” is the second exhibition, and it illustrates the power love and self-care have on the population. The message that is echoed throughout the space is that love is more than a feeling, but rather a motivation in which we gather collectively to face our society’s lovelessness.

With its decades-long commitment to celebrating difference, the true dynamism of the feat spurts from its collective power. An impact so monumental that can only be produced from the work of many.

“In our relationship to artists, we learn so much about ourselves as curators, understanding that, like art, the curatorial is engaged in knowledge production and intervention in culture,” co-curator Becker explains, giving a sense of the highly collaborative nature of this exhibition.

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