Dana VarinskyArtists Nicolina Johnson and Perola Bonfanti at “Portal 0”

Two abandoned doorways got a touch up this week, thanks to artists Nicolina Johnson and Perola Bonfanti.

The artists told The Local that the new installations at Avenue C and Seventh Street, and Second Ave and Third Street, are the first of a series of thirteen interactive “portals” that will be completed this summer. The portals will be numbered starting from zero, with each painted according to the numerology symbols associated with its number.

A QR code painted on the bottom of every portal directs the participant to the project’s website, which requires answers to riddles in order to move on to the next portal. The link for “Portal One” asks, “the more you look at me, the less you see. Who am I?”

Dana Varinsky“Portal 0”

“When you get through the final portal, the 13th portal, the mystery will be revealed,” Ms. Johnson said. “We think it will be well worth the effort.” Those without a smart phone will also be able to participate via the project’s website, which will be incorporated into the art in each panel.

Ms. Johnson is the creator of The Bean’s window art, so she said the location of “Portal 0” over an abandoned elevator shaft outside the café was an easy choice. The three panel doorway is painted with Babylonian images, and the circular zero figure represents a particle accelerator. “It mixes the newest science and the oldest civilizations,” Ms. Bonfanti explained. Read more…

When Ellen Grossman met Jay-Z on the subway, the media paid attention. The Local visited the East Village artist to take a closer look at her art.

Ray Sumser, a Californian artist who recently moved to the East Village, has been working on a series of cartoon projects. His goal: to portray the “most recognizable characters” from popular cartoons. He’s been bringing his art to public spaces like Union Square too.

Susan Keyloun Victoria Roberts at Strand Books

“Have you ever dreamed of owning a unique, hand-drawn picture by a New Yorker cartoonist?” read the invite to the special event held last night at Strand Bookstore. The answer was yes, as swarms of fans lined up to watch Victoria Roberts, a popular cartoonist for The New Yorker since 1988, draw personalized cartoons just for them. At one point, people had to be turned away as the line snaked around the perimeter of Strand’s legendary Rare Book Room.

Susan Keyloun Drawn for the author by Victoria Roberts.

Ms. Roberts, who was born in New York and grew up in Mexico and Australia, effortlessly engaged each fan in conversation while she drew, gleaning tidbits about their lives to incorporate into each cartoon. She also signed copies of her illustrated novel, “After the Fall”.

“The Strand has been a fixture in New York for over 80 years and we hope to expand to do more events like this one,” said Lizzy Selzer who coordinated this event and helps maintain Strand’s calendar. “We’re thrilled that it was a huge success and we will be hosting more like it.” For a complete list, check out Strand’s Facebook event calendar.

Last Saturday, the event known as “Unsilent Night” took place in the East Village for its 20th year. This winter time annual event has garnered participation from cities around the world, including San Francisco, Chicago and Melbourne. But it all started in New York.

The Local embedded with creator, Phil Kline, in the days before his New York and Philadelphia Unsilent Night events, in order to get an inside look at how he prepares. The parade of devices playing Kline’s music started out at Washington Square Park. Participants carried boom boxes, iPhones or other portable audio equipment, cranking up the music in unison. The composition was timed by Kline to finish just as everyone arrived at Thompkins Square Park.

If you couldn’t make it on Saturday, enjoy this glimpse of the night, and just how Kline made it happen

Hannah ThonetmuMs is one of the poets scheduled to perform at Joe’s Pub, Thursday evening.

Hurricane Sandy wrecked the HVAC system at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, leaving the storied performance space without heat.

In an email to The Local, executive director Daniel Gallant said that while “relatively warm weather and the use of small space heaters have allowed us to continue running our programs for the past few weeks, it will be difficult for us to remain open as the weather gets colder unless our heating system is replaced.” There are also concerns about burst pipes when the freezing weather finally arrives.

The cost of replacing the system is estimated at $27,500. The Cafe, like other local businesses, also suffered loss of revenue due to the post-hurricane power outage and canceled events. This Thursday’s fund raiser at Joe’s Pub is just part of the recovery effort. Donations are also being taken at the website.

Anthony Pappalardo Hello Kitty book launch at Openhouse Gallery.

While Art Basel has officially reached it’s saturation point with corporate sponsored parties eclipsing the actual art fair, I was able to pick up on three major art trends during my week there. There were an abundance of sculptures featuring shiny spheres at the fair–and also decorating many hotel lobbies — rap lyrics recreated on canvases are trending, but the biggest buzz was the emergence of memes and animated gifs as art.

When I spotted Blake Boston–the person who accidentally became the popular meme Scumbag Steve–smoking a cigarette playing the door man at the Hole gallery his latest track, my trend spotting suspecions were confirmed. Scumbag Steve was accompanied by his friend Christopher Torres, the creator of the 2012 Meme of the Year, Nyan Cat. Nyan Cat began as an animated gif based on Torres’ own cat, and eventually spawned a YouTube video that’s garnered over almost 90 million views.

Last Thursday night, New York Art Department launched four days of programming, headquartered at The Hole gallery, based on Torres’ gif titled #NYANCATCITY. #NYANCATCITY wasn’t just a celebration of Torres’ creation. The events ranged from panel discussions on cats and the internet, a zine fair, and actual kitten adoptions. The opening party featured a Nyan Cat pop-up shop as well as an interactive station featuring the latest Nyan Cat game, Space Party. Projected onto a white gallery wall, attendees were encouraged to play the game–an app available through iTunes and Google Play–by steering the character with Sphero, a glowing ball. As people sipped vodka and navigated Nyan Cat through space, another cat themed event was opening on Broome street.

Suzanne Rozdeba Sucklord at Hello Kitty book launch, Openhouse Gallery.

Several artists and designers including Betsey Johnson and Paul Frank teamed up with the Openhouse Gallery for the “Hello Kitty, Hello Art!” book launch. Compiled by Roger Gastman, the book features reinterpretations of the iconic Sanrio characters, with contributions by RISK, POSE, Adam Wallacavage, Paul Frank, and several other popular artists. Read more…

James Gray

At the Marrakech International Film Festival, one thing was clear: Parisians love James Gray.

Asked if it’s because he has European sensibilities, the Queens-born director disagreed. “I’m a very American director,” he said. “But I should have been making films in 1976. Coppola, Kubrick, Scorsese, Altman — American film was the best in the world then. But we lost that.”

As a child of the ’70s, Mr. Gray became obsessed with the era’s cinema. Like the works of that time, his movies show an “obsession with social class” (or so his wife says). And that obsession will be on full display next year, when he releases his fifth feature, tentatively titled “Lowlife.”

The film, set on the Lower East Side and Ellis Island in the 1930s, was filmed in part in the East Village last February as well as on a Bronx street that resembled the Lower East Side during its grittier days. But the work has nothing to do with Luc Sante’s Bowery-focused history, “Low Life.”

“‘Moron,’ ‘cretin,’ ‘lowlife’ were actual Ellis Island designations. You didn’t want to be a lowlife,” Mr. Gray explained.
Read more…

The minds behind “Richard 3,” a Shakespeare-meets-punk standout of the Fringe Festival, have now tackled “A Streetcar Named Desire,” mixing a modern, party-fueled interpretation of the Tennessee Williams play with the stories around its conception.

Some fans might be familiar with the theory that Blanche was modeled after the playwright’s sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and lobotomized. That backstory is essential to the Less Than Rent production “Desire! (A Varsouviana),” in which selections from “Streetcar” proper are bookended by scenes of Williams in the process of imagining it, and struggling to separate fact from fiction.

The real story here is the playwright’s guilt over failing both his sister and his lover. The first connection is clear enough, as Rachel Buethe’s manic and melodramatic Blanche easily slips into the role of Rose at the end. But Natalie Kropf’s double stint as Williams’s lover and a young reporter is more confused than clarifying. Luckily, her brief appearance as his mother is an absolute showstopper.
Read more…

Above a nondescript clothing store on at 652 Broadway, between Bond and Bleecker Streets, you’ll find Alexandre Gertsman’s apartment. The loft doubles as an art gallery where for five years the former architect has exhibited works of contemporary Russian art.

“If I want, my gallery becomes my very large living room,” he told The Local during a recent visit.
Read more…

Photos: Tim Schreier Cram of Cram Concepts

On Friday we showed you the latest cycle of the Centre-Fuge Public Art Project as it kicked off on East First Street. Saturday we headed back as the epic collaboration came together. See our shots below, and check back later for more.
See the photos…

Artist Baez.

Yup, it’s the latest cycle of Centre-Fuge on East First Street: for the sixth time since 2011, artists like Adam Kidder, Lexi Bella, and a host of others spent yesterday and today reimagining the construction trailer between First and Second Avenue, this time with help from the kids at Cre8tive YouTH*ink.

We’ll bring you more photos after they’ve finished their work tomorrow; in the meantime, enjoy the makings of this last bimonthly installment of the year. And don’t worry: the project’s creators, Pebbles Russell and Jonathan Neville, have announced it will be back for six more cycles in 2013.
Read more…

Kat Yen Ming Peiffer in “The ABC’s Guide to Getting Famous”

Ming Peiffer — her face powdered white, to contrast her suggestive red kimono — leaps onto the stage at the Red Room, promising to teach Asians how to get famous. It’s easy to incite pity, she assures: just play up your immigrant background and describe how your family lived in poverty before coming to America. It’s because of this tragic past that you are entitled to make art — regardless of quality!

The farce should be obvious by now. An exposé of systematized racism against Asians in the theater industry, “The ABC’s Guide to Getting Famous” is part of a well-established tradition in American literature. It’s no “Invisible Man,” but this ingenious solo show cum documentary doesn’t claim to be. Instead, it uses projections of Ms Peiffer’s interviews with contemporary Asian actors and actresses to form a sociological foil to her blaring embodiment of the Asian stereotype.

These two viewpoints are particularly well-suited to disentangling the paradoxes and difficulties of fitting into a larger culture. Ms Peiffer, or ABC, says immerse yourself in Asian clubs, societies, meeting groups, while the interviewees say this is just as alienating as being the only Asian around; ABC says accentuate your eyes and audition for the kung fu master, the ninja, or the prostitute, while the actors on screen testify that they feel like caricatures daily, yet have a hard time finding work. Ms Peiffer, of half-Asian descent, offers herself as a demonstration in the end, since her other half is routinely neglected at auditions searching for stock characters.
Read more…

Carrie Leonard Clyde Fitch and Elsie de Wolfe, played by Jody Flader

At Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon, a glass flute and tulip-adorned sugarcube is placed before each guest. An amuse bouche is served, along with tea. The Gilded Age farce begins. Elsie and Bessy enter, chittering aphoristic secrets of success with a telling grace. Elsie performs a headstand, her poofy knickers signaling the Mad Hatter-like atmosphere that enlivens the rest of “The Bachelors’ Tea Party.”

These are, it should be noted, the representations of real-life early-20th-century New York socialites Elsie de Wolfe, an actress turned trailblazing interior designer who counted the Duke and Dutchess of Windsor as clients, and Elisabeth Marbury, the pioneering play broker who represented Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. They are theatrical, to say the least (Ms. de Wolfe, a.k.a. Lady Mendl, actually did perform headstands, at times to scandalous effect) and Jody Flader and Liz Eckert caricature them expertly: they’re every bit as charmed by their competitive, backhanded compliments as the audience is.

Good thing, because they carry the show de facto. Although the other characters are equally charming, they are silent — being puppets. The humor derived from this ingenious set-up is hard to describe: no analysis of narcissism will feel as outrageously perfect as seeing Elsie asking a question of a red-cheeked, smiling porcelain doll, waiting a couple seconds, and then exclaiming, “I knew you’d say so!” In another scene one of the dolls, representing the then-popular playwright Clyde Fitch, “tells” a droll story that has the two ladies all but cracking up. Read more…

Missing Billy Leroy’s Houston Street tent? You’ll have a chance to catch up with him (assuming your cable is back) when the second season of “Baggage Battles” premieres tonight at 8 p.m.

Till then, check out this Travel Channel video in which the eccentric antiques dealer takes us through his morning routine. At his Greenpoint, Brooklyn home, he shows off quirky collectibles including a stuffed, moving deer head, a bear with its mouth wide open, and a “Jim Morrison Blvd” sign. “I like things that have an edge, and things that are slightly dangerous,” he says.

Of course, we knew that already.

Leigha Mason

At 23, Leigha Mason doesn’t lack for confidence: “I know I’m young but I know I’m right,” she says.

The painter and filmmaker is one of four artists in their twenties who run 1:1, a gallery and events space at 121 Essex Street. The second-floor nook is meant to be a “nucleus for contemporary activity,” said Ms. Mason (it’s also her sometime home: there’s a shower in the pink-lit bathroom).

What kind of activity is she talking about? “Before 1:1, I was doing a lot of aggressive performances with anti-capitalist sentiment,” she said. Now she’s focused more on the “social possibilities of bodies navigating each other, space, and diverse practices.” Her latest work was “Sketches for Baal,” with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the gender-bending performance artist and leader of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. And this Thursday at 8 p.m., one of her partners in the gallery, Whitney Vangrin, will perform the second installment of a “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” trilogy.

We caught up with Ms. Mason before the opening of 1:1’s current show, Nathile Provosty’s first solo exhibition of abstract paintings, “Book of Hours.”

What’s the current state of downtown art?

Most of it sucks, some of it is relevant. A lot of what is relevant isn’t necessarily visible. Most of the art scene is market-driven, which is very boring to me. It seems that for a lot of people, the “downtown” moniker just adds a sort of cultural capital to an already dispassionate and insular world. But there are people who are doing interesting and important things, either because we are committed to ideas or beauty or whatever (we are compelled to do it) and/or because we get pleasure from it. Read more…

A film festival at Theatre 80 next week aims to highlight imaginative films by undiscovered and emerging filmmakers, and one of the featured shorts stars local topless activist Moira Johnston.

From Nov. 2 to 4, Take Two will feature 56 independent films – a diverse range of shorts, full-length features, and documentaries – from 14 countries. “Killing the Dog” is about a streetwise werewolf from Brooklyn; “Bi the Way” follows five people ushering in a sexual revolution; “Better This World” explores the current nature of political activism.

The festival’s organizer, Salon Ciel, an exhibitor of photographers and visual artists, staged its first film festival last year at Gallery Bar. Only five films were shown but the number of submissions and enthusiasm from the audience convinced Salon Ciel’s producer, Asher Bar Lev, of the need for a bigger event. Read more…