Make Art, Not War
A conversation with New York artist Dove Bradshaw
Exhibition at ARTe VallARTa Museo, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico | Zero Time, Zero Space, Infinite Heat
February 2nd – May 5th, 2024
Meet with Dove Bradshaw at ARTe VallARTa Museo on February 3rd, 2024
The first time I visited the apartment of conceptual and minimalist artist Dove Bradshaw, I barely let my eyes wander around the living room, busy with paintings and books everywhere, a piano in a corner, and an old chess table. Two friends had asked me to join them for an intimate dinner at Dove and her husband’s, artist William Anastasi (also known as Bill), Upper West Side home, blocks away from Morningside Heights and the Hudson River. I vividly recalled this evening when, years after, Dove invited me back, this time to show a few people some of the artwork soon to be exhibited in Puerto Vallarta at ARTe VallARTa Museo. “A first for this museum, which had presented only Mexican artists before,” and a premiere in Mexico for this artist, whose work is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum and MoMA in New York.
As I was riding the Broadway-Seventh Avenue 1 train to 103rd Street, I remembered how her husband—who passed away just a few weeks ago—had described his famous Subway Drawings. Every time Bill Anastasi would sit in a subway, he would balance a piece of paper on a board on his knees, close his eyes, and let a pencil or felt-tip pens draw lines as the train would vibrate, and lurch when it stopped at a station, and depart again until he reached his chosen destination. During my only dinner with him, his wife, and our shared friends, Bill told endless stories of his daily chess games with composer John Cage. Dove Bradshaw, Anastasi, Cage, and his companion, choreographer Merce Cunningham, formed a band of artistry and friendship for years, all dedicated to conceptual art, along with Carl André, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Ryman.
Category: Amazing Women
Art to the Rescue of the Planet
ART TO THE RESCUE OF THE PLANET
(Note: The art installation Be the Drop that Shapes the Wave was presented for the first time during a UN 2023 Water Conference special event hosted by Femsa Foundation – Scroll to the end of the post to watch the making Be the Drop that Shapes the Wave.The play LOVE authored and directed by Alexander Zeldin was performed at the Park Armory in New York in from in February and March 2023.)
Somewhere among the routine schedule of meetings, the policy papers, and tightly scripted speeches of besuited officials gathering at the 2023 UN Conference on Water, one presentation stands apart.
A vast dynamic piece of art proposes raising awareness about the urgent water situation in Latin America. Composed of 8,000 ceramic beads, each representing a drop of water, it is the imagined work of New York-based artist Inma Barrero and more than 100 entrepreneurs, leaders of corporations and governmental agencies, artists, activists, and children.
Its name is inspiring: Be the Drop that Shapes the Wave. Its reason for being, however, is frightening.
Over 2 billion people worldwide cannot access safe drinking water or sanitation. During the pandemic, many could not even wash their hands. Until and unless decision-makers act on the critical need to make safe water available for all, the situation will only worsen as the global population grows exponentially. This United Nations meeting in New York City was long overdue.
In Latin America alone, the water shortage affects seven out of ten people, according to the local not-for-profit Lazos de Agua program. That represents 160 million people—that is the populations of Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru combined!
To face this challenge, an artwork co-created by a well-known artist and dozens of people spread out in 15 countries, including children from public schools in Manhattan and the Lycée Français de New York, might seem, at best, decorative.
Or is it?
Biased? Certainly. But Working on It
Biased? Certainly. But I’m Working on It
A conversation with Dr. Violetta Zujovic, Neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institute
Talk at FIAF and meeting with Violetta Zujovic and Alyse Nelson
New York | March 15th | Decoding Gender Bias | Register Here
Everything that follows in this post is biased.
I would like to write you the opposite, to reassure you, even to convince you of the authenticity of my words. But in the interests of sincerest dishonesty, and according to Violetta Zujovic, a doctor in neuroscience and team leader at the Paris Brain Institute, I am biased.
I might as well accept it. Besides, I am not the only one. “We all are,” Violetta explains.
“Everything around us is a reproduction that our brain creates to simplify our lives,” Violetta tells me. “Our brain spends its time storing information and sometimes reconstructing a reality that is sometimes an illusion.”
By simplifying, taking shortcuts, analyzing, and judging the other as quickly as possible, our conclusions are not based on the reality of a person or a situation. Instead they are the result of a narrowed perception influenced by our experiences, our culture, and our education.
I believe that I should also share here the motivation and context of this paper.
Listen to the Women and Girls of Iran
Listen to the Women and Girls of Iran
It was gigantic and staring at me. Everyone around seemed as mesmerized by it as I was: an eye, wide open. It was staring at the sky, too, and it covered most of the steps of Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park at the far end of the oblong Roosevelt Island on the East River, an unlikely urban cable car stop away from Manhattan. In the background, lurking in the shadows, stood the 39-story United Nations building, proud and self-confident.
In that park, at the bottom of the steps that morning of November 28, 2022, every spoken word and every single stare were targeted at the United Nations, at the United Nations and Iran.
When Art Meets Wine, Champagne Loves It
When art meets wine, champagne loves it
(Post based on a conversation held at the Payne Whitney Mansion in New York City on October 26th, 2022 during a fund-raiser dinner presented by the American Friends of La Cité du Vin).
In 1973, Château Mouton Rothschild paid tribute to Pablo Picasso, who passed away on April 8th of that year, by decorating the Premier Cru Classé with an Atelier Mourlot printed label reproduction of the 1959 master’s painting, Bacchanale. A century before, in 1874, Louise Pommery created the first brut champagne and became famous for patronizing art and artists.
To celebrate the symbiotic relationship between art and wine, which was highlighted in the 2022 Cité du Vin exhibition ‘Picasso, the Effervescence of Shapes,’ the American Friends of the Cité du Vin invited Maïlys Vranken, President of Vranken Pommery America, and Éric Mourlot for an exclusive conversation. “There are serious dinners in New York,” said the co-host of the evening, France’s Cultural counselor in the United States and director of Villa Albertine Gaëtan Bruel, “and there are joyous ones; this one is a mix of both.”
So, while tasting a vertical of Pommery Champagne, including a Blanc de Blancs Apanage and a Cuvée Louise 2005 paired with a dinner prepared by Tastings NYC-SoFlo and Alain Ducasse veteran chef Laetitia Rouabah, Maïlys Vranken and Eric Mourlot told the tales of their artisanal companies’ own relationships with art and artists.