Recently, I've come to appreciate the otherworldly powerline pruning of Historic Tremont in Cleveland, Ohio. "Training" trees to avoid overhead electrical lines isn't uncommon across America, but the wide swaths of space given to them in Tremont is quite something to behold.
A while ago now, driving through the outskirts of Las Vegas NM, I came across this artifact in a large, empty field...
Driving across America, it actually isn't unusual to end up passing through several towns with the same name. (For example, there are at least 25 Springfields alone, one reason Matt Groening chose it as the hometown of the Simpsons.)
Tucked away in a rural corner of America just at the edge of the woods sits a small, unassuming red house. It is a house like any other, decorated tastefully and well kept--with one very unusual feature. The ceiling, from wall to wall throughout, is plastered with stunning World War 2 era posters.
Dan Mills is, in addition to being a very talented painter, a wealth of piercing information: 31 states are named after indigenous words, one in 113 people worldwide are displaced from their homes, one in five Syrians are refugees, Maine is the state with the smallest number of incarcerated people per capita in America yet is only the median for this statistic among countries worldwide, and New Hampshire is considered the “most free” state.
Lewis Wickes Hine, A construction worker at the Empire State Building, 1931. (Photo courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Gallery) Books Worth Reading Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings By Judith Dupré. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 176 pages [...]
Janet Cardiff's sound installation The Forty Part Motet, currently on view at the Cloisters in New York City through December 8th, is a rarity---a revelatory work of art that can inspire busy museum-goers to stop, listen deeply, and even bring them to tears. I sat through five cycles of [...]
Donald Judd, 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (detail), 1982–86. Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (Photo by Louis Vest, 2011 via Flickr Commons) Frank Lloyd Wright in his study at Taliesin in Wisconsin. According to the WMF, "the forces of nature...have put the complex at risk." The World Monuments [...]
A still from the film Minka (Image courtesy Davina Pardo & Birdlings LLC) It is rare to find a film that is pitch-perfect in its cinematography, story, pacing, and length, but Davina Pardo's short film Minka is such a gem. (I owe writer Craig Mod a thank you for turning [...]
James TurrellAten Reign, 2013Daylight and LED light, dimensions variable© James TurrellPhoto: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York "My art deals with light itself," says 70-year-old artist James Turrell. "It's not the bearer of the revelation---it is the revelation." While frequently lumped together with minimalist artists Robert Irwin [...]
Barry Underwood, Archimedes. This installation was created at the construction site for the new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. (Photo © Barry Underwood. Click to Enlarge) As New York artists search for the next affordable, urban frontier in Bushwick and Queens, a renaissance of sorts is taking [...]
The Tank in Rangely, Colorado, is considered one of the sonic marvels of the world within a certain circle of composers and sound artists. (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank) Is there a connection between noise and money? Which sounds are healing to us as [...]
The wreckage of Rockaway Boardwalk after Sandy (Image via CNN.com) A few months ago I shared Eve Mosher's piece, High Water Line, a public art project in Manhattan and Brooklyn that brought the topic of climate change directly to the city’s residents. Mosher's inventive project showed what [...]
Tatzu Nishi's public art installation, Discovering Columbus, opened in Manhattan on Thursday. Here Nishi is pictured with Gaetano Russo's 1892 sculpture. (Photo by Tom Powel courtesy the Public Art Fund, NY) Last week I featured Tatzu Nishi's Discovering Columbus on my Don't Miss List for September. Two [...]
A Nancy Drew collection at Hello Hello Books in Rockland, Maine (Photo by Lacy Simons) I do quite a bit of traveling for Gwarlingo these days and one of the best things about being on the road is discovering out-of-the way, independent bookshops. For me, walking into a [...]
Left to Right: Writer Ayelet Waldman, photographer Nan Goldin, and Pulitzer-Prize-Winner Michael Chabon (Photo © Joanna Eldredge Morrissey 2012. All rights reserved) Two weeks ago, artists and art lovers converged on the quiet town of Peterborough, New Hampshire, for a chance to meet some of the most talented [...]
Note: This is a guest post by Riley MacPhee, a regular contributor to the Johnston Architects Blog. Johnston Architects PLLC is a small architectural firm focusing on creative, innovative, and sustainable design throughout the West. You can see their designs and learn more about [...]
Artist Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne studies "Capturing Resonance," a piece made of chain-link fencing on view at the deCordova Museum. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge) On my recent visit to the deCordova Museum, one of the artworks I found most compelling was "Capturing Resonance" by sculptor [...]
In the West, Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known as the avant-garde director of the 1964 film Woman in the Dunes--an erotic, surreal film that was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Teshigahara's haunting shots of sand, skin, [...]
Kim Uchiyama's studio is located on a quiet, tree-lined side-street in Lower Manhattan. On a crisp fall day in mid-November over tea and brunch, I visited Kim in her Tribeca apartment. We spent the day looking at art and discussing her new painting series, her artistic development and [...]
It's the New Year, which means it's time for lofty resolutions and the annual onslaught of "best of" lists. Here at Gwarlingo, I thought I'd provide readers with a new twist on the traditional "Best of 2011" list. I asked an array of artists, composers, filmmakers, writers, musicians, and performers [...]
If you're fed up with partisan bickering and political dysfunction in Washington, the gratifying, lavishly-illustrated book High Line: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, might temper your burgeoning cynicism. The book is a lesson in what can [...]
Robin MacArthur and Tyler Gibbons are Red Heart the Ticker (Photo by Doron Gild) Two weeks after Hurricane Irene I'm wandering the back-roads of Marlboro, Vermont, making my way to Robin MacArthur and Tyler Gibbons, also known as the music duo Red Heart the Ticker. Route 9--the main thoroughfare [...]
Inhabitat has just published a short piece on Rockefeller Center's hidden rooftop gardens. The Center has been maintaining these gardens for the past 75 years, but public access to the gardens is a rare event. According to Inhabitat, the building's developer John R. Todd and architect Raymond Hood originally envisioned a [...]
One of the benefits of living in a rural place like New Hampshire is that interactions with wild animals occur on a daily basis. I see birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects when I'm hiking, commuting to work, or simply strolling around the yard. Wild turkeys, bears, grouse, moose, [...]