WORLD'S TOUGHEST JOB

I don't want to spoil the secret reveal of this video . . . let's just say that I love the Director of Operations in my life and I bet you do too. Thanks for always being 'on call' and keeping the chaos of our lives in perfect working order. You are the best!


p.s. Don't forget to enter this big giveaway! In the next few weeks I will be adding several exciting things to the Etsy shop, including vintage stamps, personalized stationery and more!

BIG NEWS! NEW ETSY SHOP AND MAJOR GIVEAWAY!

Guys, guys! Big news! I have been keeping this little side project under wraps for a while now and am delighted to finally be able to share it with you. Are you ready?

I am opening another Etsy store! Long time readers may remember my old stationery store on Etsy and I have decided to revamp my love all of things paper with a new shop focused on my handwritten typography. Namely, the shop—entitled 'The Wright Hand'—is based on my obsessive interest in hand addressing envelopes with all sorts of pretty styles and fonts. Have a wedding, party, or holiday coming up and need to send out invites or a mailing? I am your gal! Prices start at just $2.00 an envelope and I will do as many or as few as you like. Do me a favor and check out the goodness and get all the details about making a purchase here.

To celebrate the launch of this fabulously fun new venture, I am doing a big giveaway! You could win $50 of envelope addressing services (enough to do 25 envelopes!) simply by following these easy as pie steps:

one | head over to The Wright Hand shop and pick out your favorite style of envelope

two | leave a comment here with your choice

bonus | for a bonus entry (your name will be entered in the drawing twice) tweet about the giveaway with the hashtag #thewrighthand and mention my account @katiejosephson 

bonus x 2 | for a second bonus entry (your name will be entered in the drawing three times) head over to facebook and like 'The Wright Hand' post on the obsessive imagist fan page


That's it! One winner will be choosen at random next Friday, May 16! Good luck!

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS: NYC SPRING AND SUMMER 2014

On Tuesday I gave you a quick rundown of the public art projects I am most excited about this summer. Today I want to share some of the museum exhibitions happening in New York in the next couple months that are highlighted on my calendar. Here's what I am looking forward to:

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective Exhibition, The Whitney Museum | June 27 - October 19 | "This exhibition will be the artist's first major museum presentation in New York, and the first to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney's Marcel Breuer building with a single artist's work. It will also be the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new building in the Meatpacking District in 2015."

Ai Weiwei: According to What?, The Brooklyn Museum | April 18 - August 10 | "Ai Weiwei is one of China's most prolific and provocative contemporary artists. Featuring over forty works spanning more than twenty years, Ai Weiwei: According to What? explores universal topics of culture, history, politics, and tradition, showcasing the artist's remarkably interdisciplinary career as a photographer, sculptor, architect, and activist." (image from here)

Mel Bochner: Strong Language, Jewish Museum | May 2 - September 21 | "Across a selection of more than 70 works, Mel Bochner: Strong Language focuses on the artist's career-long fascination with the cerebral and visual associations of words. In his spectacular recent paintings, Bochner juxtaposes the vernacular and the proper, the formal and the vulgar, and the high versus low, using terms often appropriated from Roget's Thesaurus." (image from here)

Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988, Museum of Modern Art | May 10 - August 24 | "The Museum of Modern Art presents a major retrospective devoted to the art of Lygia Clark (Brazilian, 1920-1988), the first comprehensive exhibition in North America of her work. Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988 comprises nearly 300 works made between the late 1940s and her death in 1988. Drawn from public and private collections, including MoMA's own, this survey is organized around three key themes: abstraction, Neo-Concretism, and the 'abandonment' of art. Each of these axes anchors a significant concept or constellation of works that mark a definitive step in Clark's career. While Clark's legacy in Brazil is profound, this exhibition draws international attention to her work. By bringing together all parts of her radical production, the exhibition seeks to reintroduce her into current discourses of abstraction, participation, and a therapeutic art practice."

13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World's Fair, Queens Museum | April 27 - September 7 | "50 years have passed since an up-and-coming Pop provocateur named Andy Warhol sparked a minor scandal at the 1964 New York World's Fair. As part of a prominent set of public commissions for the Philip Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion's exterior, Warhol chose to enlarge mug shots from a NYPD booklet featuring the 13 most wanted criminals of 1962 . . . . Later in the summer of 1964, Warhol produced another set of the Most Wanted Men paintings with the screens he had used to make the mural and nine of these are assembled in New York for the first time since their creation, forming the core of the 175 or so objects in the exhibition."

The Roof Garden Commission: Dan Graham and Günther Vogt, The Metropolitan Museum of Art | April 29 - November 2 | "This installation by Dan Graham is the second in a new series of site-specific commissions for the Museum's Roof Garden. Comprising curves of steel and two-way mirrored glass set between ivy hedgerows, Graham's structure is part garden maze, part modernist skyscraper facade. Viewers who enter the work are transformed into performers; in glimpsing their own reflections, they are also made acutely aware of the act of looking."

Which shows are you looking forward to? Anything I missed?

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ IS AMAZING

Last night I went to a lecture at the 92nd Street Y featuring Annie Leibovitz and Adam Gopnik. I fell in love with Leibovitz's photography all over again. I think you will too. That is all.


(all photos from my random Leibovitz inspiration folder; sorry no sources!)

PUBLIC ART PROJECTS: NYC SPRING AND SUMMER 2014

Being an art nerd and proud resident of New York City, I love a good public art project that interacts with its urban surroundings. Luckily  there are many such works in New York to get excited about in the next few months—here are some of my favorites below.

Olaf Breuning, Clouds, for The Public Art Fund | Central Park South and 59th Street | March 4 - August 24 | The latest installment in the Central Park 'plaza', Clouds is 35' tall aluminum and wood sculpture is meant to resemble the childlike imagination and naiveté of school play backdrops.

Zilvinas Kempinas, Scarecrow, for Socrates Sculpture Park | Long Island City, Queens | May 11 - August 3 | This will be the largest installation in Socrates Sculpture Park history (250' long and 13' high) and Kempinas's first major outdoor work in the United States. Site-specific and made from stainless steel poles strung with mylar ribbon, it will respond to the expansive horizontality of the surrounding land while echoing the shimmering movement of the nearby East River.

Ed Ruscha, Honey I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic Today for High Line Art | Next to the High Line at West 22nd Street | May 2014 - May 2015 | Ed Ruscha is one of my favorite artists (and a major part of my dissertation) and this work, incredibly!, represents Ruscha's first public commission in New York! It's a perfect combination of the artist's interest in advertising sloganeering, cheeky humor, text as visual form, and the realities of modern, urban life. Plus, isn't it much more interesting to look at than another boring billboard?

Matt Felsen, Lost Landmarks, for Parsons Design + Technology Masters Program | West 42nd Street, Between 5th & 6th Avenues | May 10 only! | A very cool project by grad student Matt Felson, Lost Landmarks introduces modern technology into historic Tower Optical viewers to literally help you see into the past. Looking through the viewer lets you see iconic landmarks that are no longer there; previous landmarks featured for one day only have included the 9th Regiment Armory (April 26) and the old Grand Central terminals (May 3). Check out the view from West 42nd Street this Saturday, May 10 for the project's last installment. (More details @LostLandmarks on Twitter).

CDR Studio, Governor's Cup, for the Figment Arts Festival | Governor's Island* | June 7-8 (but maybe longer?) | Made from 30,000 recycled cups culled from venues all across New York, this crazy pavilion will house the very cool and interactive Figment Arts Festival this summer. The thousands of cups will be attached through thousands of zip ties (NYCers love using those for art!) to craft a wild serpentine pattern that will wrap around trees, move with the wind, and all around respond to the environment. (The concept reminds me a lot of the fabulous Tara Donovan's work; if it's half as good as her stuff, the piece should be incredible.)

Kara Walker, A Subtlety or The Marvelous Sugar Baby for Creative Time | Domino Sugar Factory, Williamsburg, Brooklyn | May 10 - July 6 | Probably one of the most anticipated art events of the summer, famed political artist Kara Walker is working with Creative Time to call forth the powerful (and exploitative) history of the workers at the old Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. Details as to the actual physical nature of the installation have been kept hush hush, but knowing Walker's work it promises to be expansive, thought-provoking and visually arresting.

UPDATE: Creative Time just released a newsletter with this preview photo of the Walker work and a link to this recent New York Times review of the show by Blake Gopnik. The work looks to be a colossal 'negress' sphinx coated in sugar; incredible!

UPDATE x 2: Reading Gopnik's article called forth the underlying comments about blue collar labor and manufacturing history in the US; on that level, this work is remarkably similar to Ann Hamilton's incredible indigo blue installation for the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC in 1991, a touchstone for the first wave of American installation art.

*There will be a ton of new public art on Governor's Island this summer; read about some other projects here.

EITHER OR WISH LIST: I CAN'T DECIDE!

Hi friends! How was your weekend? I spent it with my parents doing some serious clean up/home improvement projects at my grandmother's house and I have to say, I am wiped! 

So, since I will almost certainly be total couch potato while I let my aching muscles heal today, I thought it only fitting to shin two variations which I am having major trouble deciding between. Care to help me choose? Here are the either/or pairings in my online shopping cart right now . . . which should I pick?

from top to bottom . . . . 

nixon small kensington in gold ($175) or 

nixon kensington leather in natural/silver ($125)*

make it happen gold foil notepad by laracaseyshop ($20) or 

jumbo writing pad by poppin ($8)

kate spade saturday sneakers by pf flyers ($65) or 

converse chuck taylor all stars fancy ox ($55)

black trim correa sandals by toms ($59) or 

yosi samra cambelle flat sandals ($130)

dots iphone case by priscilla peress ($35) or 

emily rickard color study no. 7 iphone case ($35)

So hard to choose! I may just have to buy them all . . . kidding!

*Do any of you married ladies have trouble finding a watch that works with your wedding and engagement ring? Either I find the watch too casual in comparison to my ring's setting or the watch-ring combo just looks overwhelmingly shiny. I look the way watches look, though, and miss wearing one so I am hoping one of these works out!

DRAWING ON AIR: LIX 3D PEN

This week I read about some crazy and deliriously exciting new technology: 3D pens. What does that mean? Well, these fabulous instruments are pens that dispense a synthetic polymer (aka a specialty plastic) literally in the air as you write. With them you can draw in three dimensions. Is your mind blown yet?

Apparently MoMA Store already has one in stock (how did I not know this, given my obsession with that shop?), but this prototype by Lix on Kickstarter looks even more amazing. The pen seems so sleek, cool and easy to use that my mind is having trouble computing all the crazy technology it must hold to be able to effortlessly 'print' your drawings in real time as the video above shows.

No wonder the project has received over ten times its funding goal—this thing looks like magic.

Anyway, if any of my nearest and dearest happen to be reading this and happen to put in an order in anticipation of a future gift-giving event I would be ecstatic. (Hint, hint!) And should you want to grab one yourself, you can head over to the Lix Kickstarter page here. As Tina, the lovely 'swiss miss' said, imagine the possibilities!

(My only beef: I wish the people in the Kickstarter video would look at the camera! Reminds me of this  2011 debacle.)