While the New Museum prepares to honor the artists of 1970s and ’80s Bowery with its exhibit, “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969–1989” (the opening reception is tomorrow night), the Theater for the New City Gallery is presenting works by two artists, some of which draw on found images of pre-1940s East Village, according to a pitch that just came in via our Virtual Assignment Desk. You know the deal: If you’d like to cover the exhibit, please do so by volunteering at the Open Assignments page (remember to filter by pitch). Here’s the information you’ll find there.

“APP ART: Painted Paper” and The First Avenue Bearded Lady
There are over one hundred works by Peter J. Ketchum and Chris Georgalas at the scruffy alternative gallery TNC 155 First Avenue through October 25th including several using found images of pre-1940’s denizens of the East Village.

“APP ART: PAINTED PAPER” looks at human behavior as it is reflected and encapsulated in older comic books, advertisements, postcards, matchbooks, manuals and, particularly, black and white found or discarded photographs. For the appropriation and repurposing of these works, the artists have coined the phrase APP ART, or appropriated art.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines the made-up word sonder as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as our own—and those random lives are populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, beliefs, triumphs, failures, horrors, joy, and craziness. We are cast together in this epic human story that links us to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, or in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, or as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, or as a shadow in a lighted window at dusk. All sliding towards a common, irrefutable, singular ending to our individual stories.”

Ketchum and Georgalas are interested in imagining the way this uninterrupted flow of passersby thinks and behaves–the good and the evil. We want to comment on some of the wonders of being human and on the relentlessness of some of humanity’s less admirable traits.

“It is not likely,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.”

This exhibit is a portrait of our faces. And our spirits.

Want to shoot photos or write about the exhibit? Volunteer here.