Calder for Body and Soul

It was a night of dazzling jewels, with nary a precious stone in sight. Salon 94 is exhibiting 40 pieces of Alexander Calder’s crimped, coiled, hammered, and highly coveted creations of body adornment in “Show and Tell: Calder Jewelry and Mobiles.”

While the sculptor’s work is famously kinetic, the opening celebration had these masterpieces of craftsmanship and engineering bouncing around the room. It took quite a few dedicated pairs of watchful eyes to keep track, as pieces made their way around assorted necks, heads, ears, and wrists. When they were not being tried on and photographed, the pieces were displayed on the original faces and heads made by Calder for a 1940 show of the work. Additional “display” sculptures were created for the occasion by a number of contemporary artists invited by the gallery.

The exhibit, which is presented in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, remains on view through December 20th.

Family members, of course, were wearing amazing pieces of their own.

Andre J. looked fabulous next to one of the unwearable mobiles.

Dangling earrings taken to a a new level. You cannot truly understand a Calder mobile until you wear one. What a total thrill!

Elena Sisto @ Lori Bookstein Fine Arts

Buffalo Check, 2012

Elena Sisto’s paintings are portraits of young women artists. Figures appear in the picture frame fragment-like, as if they are being observed through a wandering camera lens, which stops when a telling gesture or a significant juncture of planes, objects, and patterns comes into view. While this results, occasionally, in traditional head-and-shoulders portraiture, most of the figures are cropped, often to the point of abstraction. These selective glimpses and well-chosen clues are what Sisto offers to skillfully both protect and reveal what she will about her subjects.

You still have a few more days to see “Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow” at Lori Bookstein Fine Arts, 138 Tenth Ave. in Chelsea. Sisto’s idiosyncratic and unconventional portraits are on view through May 25.

See the artist’s Guggenheim Fellow profile here.

Tear, 2012

Red Sweater, 2013                     Blue Shirt, 2013

Snafu, 2011

Hat, 2013                                    Ear, 2013

At Midnight, 2010

Tattersall, 2013

Bard Book Blowout

There is a fantastic book sale going on this weekend and next at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Catalogs for past exhibits at the gallery are being offered at a 70% discount. And if you buy three, the fourth book is free.

These books are all incredibly well researched, and gorgeously produced. Many of them are the only books on the given subject and for other subjects they serve as the definitive scholarly text. The ones pictured above are only a small sample of available catalogs.

And while you are there, you must see the wonderful show, Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones. There is a catalog for that show as well, but it is not part of the book sale.

The top-hat form, below, is in the show, and
there are, of course, many, many amazing hats.


The book sale is at the BGC Gallery, 189 West 86th Street,
near Central Park West, in NYC.
December 8-11 and 15-18, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.