A Site to Behold

On Sunday, Socrates Sculpture Park opens it’s 2013 Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition. Fifteen new commissions on view respond specifically to the park’s unique waterfront and urban environment with conceptual and formal artworks that are visually compelling, subtly mysterious and, at times, provocative.

This exhibition features the collective works of the park’s 2013 Emerging Artists Fellows, each chosen through a rigorous application process; they are: Thordis Adalsteinsdottir; Diann Bauer; Michael DeLucia; Tamara Johnson; Anthony Heinz May; David McQueen; Kenneth Pietrobono; Aida Šehovi; Sandy Smith; Edouard Steinhauer; Christopher Taylor; Justin Randolph Thompson; Hong-An Truong; Gustabo Velazquez; and Myung Gyun You.

The opening runs from 2-6 pm, with performances at 5 and 6 pm by EFA artists Aida Šehovi and Justin Randolph Thompson, respectively. RSVP appreciated.

Socrates Sculpture Park, 32-01 Vernon Boulevard, at Broadway, Long Island City, NY. Information. Directions.
 Above: David McQueen, one of us may have been sleeping, so I'll try telling you again tonight, 2013. Wood, beacon, incoming text messages. Text 718.473.9985 with anything you've left unsaid. The beacon will flash your message at sunset. 

Archive Fever

The photographic library of The New York Times Company in London, courtesy the New York Times.

Anyone who has never had the dubious pleasure of riffling through file cabinets [remember those?] full of contact sheets, and even 4 x 5 negatives in glassine sleeves [huh?], in search of just the right image of a historic event [the march on Washington, perhaps?], has missed out. “On what?”, you might ask.

On the worst type of paper cuts imaginable, for one thing. But also on the strange type of mind travel that ensues after an hour or so of this activity, with its strange digressions away from the subject [never mind the fact you are on deadline] and the even stranger odor that emanates from ancient manila folders and hand-written pages of captions.

Much of the AP/Wide World archive, which used to be housed at the media giant’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza HQ, has been relocated to the Library of Congress. The usefulness of these images hinges on the calculated risk a picture researcher is willing to take regarding the widespread lack of credit information. If you're lucky, time might be on your side.

The New York Times photo archive, however, is alive and well, and has been given a second life in the paper’s online Tumblr site. David W. Dunlap notes in an introduction, "The morgue has at least 10 million frames in all. There are five million to six million prints and contact sheets, each sheet representing many discrete images. And then there are 300,000 sacks of negatives, ranging in format size from 35 millimeter to 5 by 7 inches. The picture archive also includes about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery on each of 13,500 DVDs." If you want to see what a pre-flight knuckleball looks like, check the latest offering.

September Book Prize Contest

Where in New York is Paul Buckley? There’s still time to enter, here.