Grace-Yvette Gemmell

At the Guggenheim, painter-confectioner Will Cotton designs a brand-new 'Peter and the Wolf':

Artist Will Cotton was tapped to redesign the backdrop for the Guggenheim Museum's Peter and the Wolf, and the results help reinvigorate the annual show.

Bio: Grace-Yvette Gemmell is a cultural and art historian and writer living in New York City. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at Cornell University and is a curatorial researcher at The Museum of the City of New York.

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At the Guggenheim, painter-confectioner Will Cotton designs a brand-new 'Peter and the Wolf'

The museum has been mounting productions of Prokofiev’s 1936 Peter and the Wolf since 2007, with Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi providing a sassy, improvised narration. As he narrated the piece during last week's premiere, it was the delightful confection of a set behind him, for which the museum commissioned New York-based artist Will Cotton, that made the performance noteworthy. More

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on December 14th, 2012 10:42am

 
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An improbable conversation: new Met exhibition attempts to mix and match Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada

So we have two renegades, and admirable renegades at that, but their respective revolts are undertaken with more dissimilarity than the exhibition would have one believe. Harold Koda, one of the show’s curators, admitted in a press preview this week that the conversations produced in the exhibit come off more like two women talking at each other rather than to each other. More

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on May 11th, 2012 4:26pm

 
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Japan Society offers a window into how the Art Deco movement came to and radiated out from Japan

A new exhibition at the Japan Society, Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945, (on view now through June 10; a trailer can be seen here) offers a peek into the ephemera and artifacts of the golden age of Art Deco in Japan, a time during which the style dominated both popular and high-cultural aesthetics. The exhibition is the first of its kind in America. It includes a broad survey of some 200 objects (from the worlds of both high- and mass-culture) from the period. More

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on April 11th, 2012 2:56pm

 
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Dust might: For a new exhibition, artists work in a material that's synonymous with fleetingness

The art world appears to be having a memento mori moment: transience, collapse, erosion, and entropy are all themes that have recently been cropping up in shows across the city. Now we have Swept Away: Dust, Ashes and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design at the Museum of Art and Design (on through August 12), which takes detritus as a broad metaphor for ephemerality, effacement, memory, and mass consumption. More

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on March 29th, 2012 9:55am

 
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For German artist Michael Riedel, who had a star turn at the Armory Show, everything he sees has art potential

“My work tries to make sense out of postproduction,” the Frankfurt-based Michael Riedel, 39, told me when I spoke with him at his solo show in the David Zwirner Armory Show booth on Saturday. “Postproduction here is the action itself. All of my work is related to one idea. Each of my works draws on the notion of postproduction, but they do so through the use of different media.” Restaging, translation, repeated lists, and duplication are major themes that continually appear in Riedel’s work, which often, as in the Zwirner exhibit, takes the form of text and images taken from a variety of sources and composed into graphic, geometric images. More

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on March 14th, 2012 12:11pm

 
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With the help of Paddle8, the Armory Show goes online, and gives art fans a new point of entry

Paddle8 is attempting to offer a new point of entry to the art fair. Through March 18, Paddle8’s Armory Show website gives those who sign up access to works presented by 120 of the international exhibitors who participated in last week’s show—or whatever hasn't been sold yet—as well as a clutch of artworks presented exclusively online. The collaboration with Paddle8 marks the first time in the Armory's history that it has included an online component. More

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on March 13th, 2012 2:05pm

 
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At PPOW Gallery, duo Martin and Munoz create delightfully dark snow scenes in miniature

The snow globe as a cultural object is nostalgia itself, with scenes of wintry cliché that never change and where it’s always White Christmas. In the guise of a sentimental, sugar-coated terrain these landscapes disorient in their narratives of alienation and very dark humor. More

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on February 21st, 2012 9:01am