Red Grooms' dazzling installation, was created as a working gift shop for the Hudson River Museum in 1979. After extensive conservation, this beloved Westchester landmark has been reinstalled in its own gallery. The Bookstore incorporates many of the themes that run through Grooms' best work: the marriage of art and commerce, the clash of high and low, colorful New York characters, and an inviting three-dimensional space that envelops and transports the viewer. The Bookstore deftly joins two favorite haunts of New York City booklover - the lively, oldest secondhand bookshop in NYC, the Isaac Mendoza Book Company, and the Pierpont Morgan Library - into a work of art. In terms of materials, The Bookstore was one of a limited number of pieces in which Grooms incorporated vinyl figures. The figures are painted from the inside, a technique inspired by medieval glass-painting techniques, and then are stuffed and sewn. Tens of thousands of visitors passed through The Bookstore, and, embraced by its environment, it inevitably began to suffer ravages caused by its popularity. Plans were developed to restore the work and Grooms enthusiastically approved the conservation efforts and changes, which include altering the position of the two entrances to fit new gallery space, the creation of a central island that incorporated the original vinyl patrons, and the design of a painted floor. Grooms remains cautious of making too many changes to a piece that reflects a vision of New York in the 1970s, already passing into history. "An artist can overwork a thing - you can ruin the delicacy of a past moment very easily ... I think it's better to keep it like it was - primitive in that way."

Red Grooms is a cross between Marcel Duchamp and P. T. Barnum. Working in a brash, freewheeling style, Grooms has explored the raucous spectacle of life around him since his career began in the 1950s. This catalogue, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Palmer Museum of Art, brings together forty of his works to demonstrate that even his most whimsical creations have serious implications. Many of the mixed-media constructions in Red Grooms and the Heroism of Modern Life reflect upon America's love affair with sports, business, and celebrity. The mixture of parody and homage in Grooms's portraits of such stars as Pablo Picasso and Fats Domino charges all his depictions of American popular culture, from bulky football players and haggard shoppers to a brightly colored Ferris wheel. In her essay for this catalogue, Joyce Henri Robinson contends that Grooms should be should be considered a contemporary counterpart to Charles Baudelaire's Parisian flaneur. Much like this famed character, she observes, Grooms approaches the world around him as a spectacle filled with novel forms of heroism. In this regard, the key work in the catalogue is an installation centered upon a full-scale version of a New York City bus. Grooms's Bus tempers revelation of the gritty realities of urban life with humor and flashes of poetry.

An illustrated biography of the famous Georgia-born, New York artist

May 6 - June 5, 2004

Winner of the Pulitizer Prize and National Book Critics Award Circle Award. An authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art, life, and world of an American master. Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true “painter’s painter” whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s. The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh, richly detailed, and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American, developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school—just as American art began to dominate the international scene. Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure—and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as he slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer’s, he created a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.

Essays by Calas and Bachmann, which originally appeared in the New Orleans Art Review, on the theme of art and artists from outside the New Orleans area.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

New York City is the undisputed center of the North American art world, and its public art is one of the most evident signs of its cultural wealth. For more than 30 years, Creative Time has been an avatar of public art in the city, working to engage art and the environment, artists and the public. Creative Time: The Book shows how a single organization made it possible for thousands of artists to present awe-inspiring works that engage, taunt, seduce, enliven, and transform a city. Creative Time artworks have been seen in spaces both lofty and modest. Light projections have appeared on the Beaux-Arts entrance to the New York Public Library and from Ground Zero in the now famous Tribute in Light Memorial to 9/11. Signage has popped up on Times Square's Astrovision screen and along the boardwalks of Coney Island. Music has blasted in Central Park as well as under tunnels in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Creative Time's community includes many of the world's most dynamic, emerging, and established artists, among them Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Laurie Anderson, Diller + Scofidio, David Byrne, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cai Guo-Qiang, Jenny Holzer, Ryan McGinness, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Sonic Youth, and William Wegman. In more than 300 imagesfrom the hilarious to the elegiacthis dazzling volume highlights the bestand most innovative work from the organization's 33 years. Contributors to the volume are among themost important voices in the field of public art. Their commentary collectively shapes this must-havebook for anyone interested in contemporary art or in the unapologetically diverse heartbeat of New York. In keeping with Creative Time's innovative spirit, the book itself is the result of a public art installation. Each cover is unique: a tip-on displays the colors, sound, and weather in New York recorded over a two-week period.