What to Know

Google Awards a Photography Prize and an Exhibition at Saatchi Gallery
Tiffany Jow |
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The first one hundred days of Google+ saw more than 3.4 billion photographs uploaded onto the platform. This prompted Google to take its Art Project clout and launch its own student photo competition with a Google-sized grand prize: an exhibition at London’s Saatchi Gallery and an all-expenses-paid trip to anywhere in the world to shoot under the watchful eye of a professional photography coach.

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Step Inside Ernesto Neto's Playful Sculptures
Nicci Yin |
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Ernesto Neto’s sculpture is reminiscent of a childhood ball pit, requiring you to cling, for balance, to crocheted nets suggestive of jungle gyms.

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A Nomadic Exhibition Travels on a Hard Drive
Nicci Yin |
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Creative Time’s Living as Form exhibition in New York opened up a dialogue that is now being taken to a global scale. Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) is co-organized by Creative Time, Independent Curators International, and art venues around the world. Its first stop is curated by Christina Linden at the San Francisco branch of Kadist, an art foundation that is also based in Paris.

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Summer Projects from Public Art Fund
Kelly Hill |
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In 1977 Doris C. Freedman merged public art programs City Walls and the Public Arts Council to form Public Art Fund, which has produced more then five hundred projects all over New York City, bringing work by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Anish Kapoor, Sol Lewitt, and Sarah Sze to the public. This summer Public Art Fund is presenting three new projects in Manhattan and Brooklyn with the first going up May 24th at City Hall Park.

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Kenny Scharf: A Hodgepodge of Cartoons, Cadillacs, and Cosmic Caverns
Kelly Hill |
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Kenny Scharf’s newest show, Hodgepodge at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, incorporates everything from a fluorescent Cosmic Cavern installation to The New and Improved Ultima Suprema Deluxa, a modified Cadillac covered in paintings.

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Exquisite Photography and OCD Mystics
Azhar Chougle |
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Perfectly paired exhibitions by Ken Rosenthal and Vojtech V. Slama reinvigorate the craft of photography with contemporary vigor and a timeless aesthetic. The premise of Mystics: A Blessed Rage for Order is pleasing to begin with—one can’t go wrong indulging an artist’s obsessive-compulsive nature.

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Miami's Spring Standouts
Jenifer Mangione Vogt |
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Miami’s fushcia-smudged sky provides the perfect backdrop for the Wynwood Art Walk, which pops up on the second Saturday of every month and draws swarms of viewers and arty events.

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Internet Pranks and Art World Disruptions: 0100101110101101.ORG
Tiffany Jow |
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Hoax or not, Eva and Franco Mattes put their mastery of deception to good use. Having disrupted the secure conventions of the art gallery, they’ve got viewers spellbound and critics riled up. Now, the Carroll/Fletcher gallery in London presents the team’s finest stunts in a retrospective titled Anonymous, untitled, dimensions variable.

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This Side of Paradise: A Bronx Art and Culture Hub
Christine Licata |
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Through June 1, the once insular and exclusive Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx has been transformed by site-specific exhibition facilitators No Longer Empty into This Side of Paradise, a progressive arts and culture tour de force of thirty-two emerging and established artists, local cultural institutions, and community collaborations.

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Yayoi Kusama Challenges Hirst's Spots at the Tate Modern
Nathaniel Lee |
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Damien Hirst may have begun 2012 by becoming the art-world’s favorite spot painter with his globe-spanning series of exhibitions at Gagosian, but the British superstar must now contend for the title on his home turf. In February, the Tate Modern opened its retrospective exhibition of 150 works by renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, which now stands alongside the museum’s recently unveiled Hirst survey.

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An Artist Reinterprets the Broadway Musical Audition
Tiffany Jow |

The cut-throat Broadway audition and rehearsal process is something that’s long been an object of curiosity, making way for A Chorus Line, Smash, MTV’s search for the next Elle Woods, et al. Video artist Kara Hearn decided to quench her fascination with the system in her new work, Unnamed Broadway Musical: The Musical!

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Between Painting and Text
Serena Qiu |
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Last Thursday the French New York-based artist Anne-Lise Coste visited toomer labzda to give a talk about m, l, e, her latest body of work on display at the young Lower East Side gallery. For the exhibition, forty-eight small and medium-sized canvases filled two walls of the gallery space from floor to ceiling. Each canvas presented a loose portrait of one of the three letters in black spray paint on a white ground, in a balance of severity and airiness. Taken together, the paintings developed a meditative rhythm, resembling a tapestry of interlocking loops and curves, or perhaps a body of text.

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