The James, a sleekly designed hotel rising over Grand Street in SoHo, will open for business on Wednesday with all the support staff a guest could expect: a concierge, receptionists, bellhops, chambermaids, parking valets.

Fred R. Conrad/The [...]]]> The Hotel as Art Gallery

The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL
Published: August 29, 2010

The James, a sleekly designed hotel rising over Grand Street in SoHo, will open for business on Wednesday with all the support staff a guest could expect: a concierge, receptionists, bellhops, chambermaids, parking valets.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times - Matthew Jensen, the art curator of the James Hotel in SoHo, chose works from emerging artists for the hotel’s 14 floors of guest rooms.

“It was pretty exciting to me to see how many artists are working, just like I do, like obsessively hard, in their own studio tucked away, but nobody’s really paying attention to them yet,” he said. “There’s a lot more emerging than established in New York — once they’re established, then they all move upstate. So everyone who wants to do it is doing it here.”

Hotels have been hanging fine art on their walls for decades now. Ian Schrager commissioned a series of Robert Mapplethorpe prints for what is considered the original boutique hotel, the Morgans, in 1984; the Roger Smith, a small property in Midtown Manhattan, transformed its lobby into an art gallery and performance space as part of a 1991 renovation.

But few have gone so far as the James, which hired a young artist, Matthew Jensen, to select original artworks to adorn each of its 14 floors of guest rooms.

Mr. Jensen, 29, a photographer whose work was acquired this year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, may have an unusual job description, but he is also part of a growing breed. As business and building owners look to inject their properties with a little artistic personality, a new class of curators — some of them contractors like Mr. Jensen and some of them staff members — has arisen to help.

“There’s all these empty walls and there are thousands of artists out there who are living in the city and have never had their art seen by anyone,” said Leah McCloskey, who places works by students at the Art Students League in restaurants and apartment and office buildings. “It’s about connecting to that generation of artists and to what’s going on out there.”

Employees installing art in the hallways of the James.

All that, and one helping hand a guest might not expect: a hotel art curator.

That connection has been particularly important in the past few years for hotels, which are increasingly seeking novel ways to distinguish themselves from a flood of competition. Responding to guests’ desire to have their lodgings project an image of who they are or aspire to be, hotels are taking their artistic endeavors more seriously, industry analysts say, using art to build an identity rather than just to make it look good.

“Hoteliers are not only trying to come up with a theme or a style that attracts customers, but they are approaching it in a much more professional and involved way,” said Sean Hennessey, chief executive of Lodging Investment Advisors, a consulting firm in Valhalla, N.Y.

“It used to be that you could get away with just slapping something up in the lobby,” he added, “but more and more customers are looking and evaluating it much more closely.”

For the James, meeting that demand has meant trying to reflect the artistic microclimate of SoHo. Though many of the artists who once made the area a creative mecca have fled, an emerging art scene is still represented through nonprofit institutions there that support artists and show their work.

Denihan Hospitality Group, which is developing the hotel, operates another James Hotel in Chicago that is also dedicated to emerging art. At the Surrey, one of its New York hotels, work by established names like Jenny Holzer, Claes Oldenburg and William Kentridge nods to its location on East 76th Street, near major art showcases like the Whitney Museum of American Art.

An installation by Sarah Frost of typewriter keys glued to a wall in the lobby of the James.

Mr. Jensen’s relationship with the hotel grew from a chance meeting last year with Brad Wilson, the chief operating officer at Denihan, at an exhibition for Mr. Jensen’s project “Nowhere in Manhattan,” featuring billboard-size photos of the borough’s remaining wildernesses that are meant to spur people to visit those places.

“It’s a way to remind people in a subtle way, if they complain, ‘Oh, I never get out into the woods,’ well, you can just get on the A train to Inwood, or you can go in the other direction to the Rockaways,” Mr. Jensen said.

The pictures appealed to Mr. Wilson — who hung three of them on the building facade when it was under construction — and Mr. Jensen’s job evolved from there. Once hired, he settled on the idea of using New York-based landscape artists working in different media, one per floor.

Using an online database, he amassed a list of about 1,000 artists, which he whittled to the final 14 in three months, creating something that “kind of feels like 14 solo shows stacked on top of each other.”

Taken as a whole, the installation, called “Stand Here and Listen,” is meant to play off the idea of travel, inspired by signs at revered destinations like the Grand Canyon that urge visitors to look out from a particular spot, Mr. Jensen said.

The owners of the James, which is scheduled to open on Wednesday, tried to reflect the artistic microclimate of SoHo.

One of the artists, Jessica Cannon, said the installation offered guests — perhaps more open to seeing things differently because they are removed from their everyday routines — the chance to experience art in a new way.

“You can have this encounter with work that’s very intimate, almost like it’s in a home or an empty gallery, but you can have it on your own time,” said Ms. Cannon, a painter whose work imbues landscapes with a sense of an impending event. “If someone’s got insomnia at 3 in the morning, they can pace the halls and have a really intimate and personal encounter.”

In addition to curating the hotel art, Mr. Jensen manages the studio of John-Paul Philippe, a painter and designer who created several decorative elements for the hotel, including the room numbers. Mr. Jensen has also been overseeing the installation of the collection — the hotel bought the works — and the text that goes with it, along with a potential catalog.

Mr. Jensen said the curatorial foray, his first, took him to studios all over the city, exposing him to a whole community of artists.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 30, 2010, on page A13 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/nyregion/30hotelart.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion

The discerning mediavore’s take on the news of the day, from city hall to Power Ball

by Ashleigh Ryan August 23, 2010 at 11:50 am

A hacked sign at Queen Street East and Jarvis Street (Image: Gary Campbell)

Four months after Banksy’s [...]]]>

Guerrilla activists hack 85 Toronto billboards, replacing ads with art

by Ashleigh Ryan
August 23, 2010 at 11:50 am

A hacked sign at Queen Street East and Jarvis Street (Image: Gary Campbell)

Four months after Banksy’s stop in Toronto, another group of guerrilla art activists has taken to the streets—only this time, the evidence isn’t hard to find. A group of anti-establishment art pundits known as the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover (TOSAT) is on a mission to replace illegal billboards in Toronto with art they’ve collected from around the world. This past Sunday, the movement’s founder, Jordan Seiler, led 15 activists around the city to remove ads from 41 Pattison Outdoor pillars and replace them with 85 pieces of art.

The group claims Pattison has not complied with Toronto’s new billboard laws and is shirking its tax obligations. Last April, the city initiated a new billboard tax that would generate $10 million in revenue, at a cost of $850.68 to $24,000 for billboard companies. Rami Tabello, coordinator of illegalsigns.ca, told the Star he estimates there are 30 to 40 illegal Pattison billboards that were built “without permits mostly in the middle of the night.” Tabello insists he’s not part of TOSAT but concedes that his by-the-book method of filing Freedom of Information requests to track down illegal ads is an uphill battle. “Our motto is ‘We fight illegal billboards with the rule of law.’ The rule of law, unfortunately, is not quite working at the moment,” he said.

According to the Star, Adam Vaughan, city councillor for the Trinity-Spadina ward where seven Pattison pillars were targeted, says an enforcement team for illegal billboards is being assembled in response to the apparent frustration with the rogue signage. “It’s a big city, and we’re getting to it,” he said.

Who will get to them first? We’re banking on the rebels, if only because they’re so much more amusing.







Tuesday, August 24, 2010 | 4:55 PM ET

Members of a group of activists calling themselves Toronto Street Advertising Takeover papered over advertising with art throughout the city this weekend.

The group (TOSAT), which invited some media outlets to witness their activities, said they were taking back [...]]]> Toronto ads fall to guerrilla art

http://www.cbc.ca

Tuesday, August 24, 2010 | 4:55 PM ET

Members of a group of activists calling themselves Toronto Street Advertising Takeover papered over advertising with art throughout the city this weekend.

The group (TOSAT), which invited some media outlets to witness their activities, said they were taking back public space from illegal ads.

Members of the guerrilla group took covers off standing billboards and papered ads over with graphic art, paintings and anti free-market sketches.

The art attack affected 41 advertising pillars, and 20 to 25 larger billboards, many of them owned by Pattison Outdoor Advertising.

TOSAT organizers claimed they specifically targeted ads that were illegal.

On Monday, Jonathan Goldsbie, a member of the Toronto Public Space Committee, defended their actions.

Goldsbie’s non-profit group is unrelated to the art activists, but also has an interest in protecting the city’s shared common spaces and has been involved in Toronto’s efforts to change ad bylaws.

He told CBC News he believes many of the signs papered over with art may well have been illegal.

“Pattison and other companies have spent decades putting items in the public space, and doing so very frequently illegally. These are companies that have planted the items often without permission, often with deliberate disregard to the law, with contempt for council, with contempt for the citizens of the city,” he said in an interview Monday.

Activist group TOSAT claimed members papered over ads that were illegal. (Susan Noakes/CBC)"

So actions like this one are partially an act of reclamation. It’s a matter of saying for whatever reason, the city has been thus far ineffective in enforcing its own bylaws, therefore we’re going to go out and be the change we want to see.”

Last December, the city created new ad policy and laws that provide for more effective enforcement. The bylaw includes a billboard tax.

Ad companies suing city

Goldsbie said he is concerned that the city, while it has improved enforcement since April when the bylaw came into effect, has yet to have an impact on illegal ads.

“In the meantime, advertisers continue to make millions of dollars with ads that they put up with knowing disregard for the law,” he said.

A group of ad companies is suing the city over the new bylaw, Goldsbie said, adding that ad companies probably hope they can force concessions from the city.

The TOSAT campaign was similar to an ad attack mounted in New York last year and involved art donated from Spain, Berlin, California and throughout Canada.









http://torontoist.com/

Yesterday and last night, a group of artists and activists working throughout downtown removed ad posters from street-level advertising pillars, and painted billboards with whitewash. In place of the ads, they posted artwork.

The project, [...]]]> Artists and Activists Perform Large-Scale Guerrilla Street Advertising Hack

By Steve Kupferman on August 23, 2010 7:30 AM

http://torontoist.com/

Yesterday and last night, a group of artists and activists working throughout downtown removed ad posters from street-level advertising pillars, and painted billboards with whitewash. In place of the ads, they posted artwork.

The project, known to participants as the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover, or TOSAT, had been months in the making, and was highly organized. All involved were operating under strict secrecy.

The group planned to hit forty-one advertising pillars, and twenty to twenty-five 10′ x 20′ billboards. Most of the ads chosen for this treatment were property of Pattison Outdoor Advertising, an ad company that maintains many advertising signs of various types in Toronto. Billboards owned by CBS and Astral Media were also hit. TOSAT organizers claim that they specifically targeted ads that were illegal. Torontoist cannot say with certainty that any of them were.

How TOSAT Took Over Toronto’s Street Ad Space

By Steve Kupferman on August 23, 2010 2:25 PM

http://torontoist.com/

A few days before the action, some of the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover’s participants met in the living room of an apartment in a home in the west end. Posterchild, the pseudonymous Toronto street artist (and Torontoist contributor), and Sean Martindale, another Toronto street artist (whose work we’ve seen before) were playing host, as we all waited for Jordan Seiler, a New York City–based street artist who was going to lead the project, to arrive.

Posterchild is something of a renaissance man, with slightly geeky tendencies. He offered us home-brewed beer out of a two-litre plastic soda bottle, and then lectured us on the chemistry of DIY alcohol production (it’s complicated). Martindale has a more contemplative personality, and when he spoke it was always after deliberation. But Seiler, when he arrived (an hour late), came on like a tornado of febrile mannerisms, messy hair, and rapid-fire ideology.

“Instead of this being a destruction of private property, it’s an intervention,” said Seiler, halfway through an explanation of his attitude toward street advertising, a pet peeve of such long standing that it’s not even really a “pet” for him anymore; it’s a monster.

Seiler has been performing his own street advertising hacks for nearly a decade. Nine people were arrested over the course of the two street advertising takeovers he organized and led in New York City in 2009, but all charges were dropped after ninety days. Was he concerned about the legal ramifications of interfering with private property in a foreign country, without the protection of a false name? “I haven’t thought too hard about the international issues, but in regards to using my real name, this is not a joke,” he said.

“They know we have a bizarre sense of duty to this,” said Martindale, “and that this is not something where we would fold under a legal threat.”

For its organizers and many of its participants, the Toronto Street Advertising Takeover, or TOSAT, represented an opportunity to reclaim Toronto’s streets from what they saw (and continue to see) as the deadening effect of corporate art on the public realm.

“When you walk through the city and you know you have no control over that space, it’s like walking through a mall,” said Posterchild. “It’s more about feeling at home. And it’s impossible for me to feel at home in my city if I don’t feel I’m a part of it.”

“They’ve already reaped quite a bit of profit off the city illegally, with impunity,” said Seiler, referring to the fact that street advertisements are sometimes erected in violation of municipal law, both in New York and Toronto. For TOSAT’s organizers and many of its participants, this was the original impetus for the project.

But Seiler, and Seiler alone, takes a hard-line stance: “As far as I’m concerned, I could give a fuck if they’re legal or not,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned as an artist and an activist, outdoor advertising has no place in public space.”

TOSAT was hatched in October, after the successful completion of the second of Seiler’s New York Street Advertising Takeovers, or NYSATs. Some Toronto artists, including Martindale, participated, and became interested in doing something similar closer to home. Over a period of months, Seiler, Martindale, Posterchild, and a woman named Vanessa (who didn’t want her last name printed) slowly brought other participants into the fold, secretly enlisting volunteers to scout locations and later install the artwork, which had been solicited not only from Toronto, but from places as far away as New York, Madrid, and Moscow.

TOSAT also needed a target. Pattison Outdoor Advertising was selected, both because of the ubiquity of their street ads, and because, TOSAT organizers allege, Pattison’s ads frequently violate municipal billboard laws. (We don’t actually know for certain whether or not the targeted ads were illegal, for reasons we’ll get into shortly.)

The action would focus on twenty to twenty-five 10’ x 20’ Pattison billboards (and also an assortment of billboards belonging to other companies), and forty-one street-level Pattison “pillar” ad columns, which are those four-sided illuminated columns that sprout from parking lots and other street-side locales all across the city. The pillars, in particular, have been a bone of contention for activists.

“The Pattison pillars were identified as illegal by the City after my organization filed complaints against them. They were built without permits mostly in the middle of the night,” Rami Tabello, the public space activist behind IllegalSigns.ca, told us. Tabello says he had no involvement in TOSAT, though the project’s organizers used Tabello’s site to determine which Pattison signs were in violation of Toronto law. Randy Otto, president of Pattison, declined to comment for this article.

(At publication time, IllegalSigns.ca’s homepage had been taken over by hackers, so we’re not linking it here. Tabello is in the process of bringing the site back online.)

The City has had billboard regulations on the books since long before amalgamation, but enforcement has historically been lax. Post-amalgamation, enforcement problems were exacerbated by the fact that each former municipality had its own regulations. Anyone interested in policing sign placement in Toronto had to be conversant with six bylaws, instead of one.

Earlier this year, City Council passed a harmonized bylaw that finally established a single set of rules for billboards and signage in Toronto. Any ads that were legal under the former set of laws but illegal under the new regime were grandfathered, and some of the pillars could fall into this category, which would make them legal to maintain, but illegal to replace. Signs that are completely illegal can be that way for any number of reasons, including having too many display faces, being too big, or even being too close to other ads. The rules are different depending upon how the ad’s installation site is zoned.

In part because of those complexities, we are as yet unable to confirm that all of the ads targeted by TOSAT were illegal. What’s certain, though, is that Pattison and several other advertising companies have erected illegal ads in the past. Before the new bylaw came into force, these companies flooded the City with variance applications in an attempt to grandfather their ads (a “variance” is a form of official permission from the City to violate a bylaw in a minor way), mostly to no avail. These same companies, including Pattison, also promptly sued the City over the “billboard tax” established along with the new bylaw, part of the purpose of which was (and is) to fund enforcement.

When the bylaw passed, the City pledged to create a dedicated enforcement unit for signage infractions, but the unit isn’t yet fully in place, and many illegal ads remain on the streets.

On Saturday, we arrive on the second floor of a downtown bar, where an assortment of fifteen or so artists and activists sits in a circle of chairs around an LCD projector, waiting for the briefing to begin. Posterchild arrives, and we ask how participants will go about defeating the locks on the Pattison pillars.

“It’s actually rather poetic,” he says. “You use a doorknob.”

Seiler calls the room to attention and loads up a slideshow. He begins to impart his expert knowledge. It’s like a university lecture: Special Topics in How to Fuck With Street Advertisements.

As it turns out, there are only four items one needs in order to hack a Pattison pillar: the doorknob, naturally, but also duct tape, a step ladder, and a Phillips head screwdriver. Participants, Seiler said, would meet at a house somewhere downtown and pick up all these items, along with a phony letter of permission, which would say: “Pattison Outdoor has graciously donated over 20 Core Media Pillars to the Municipal Landscape Control Committee public arts program division,” among other completely fictional things.

Seiler said participants would split into teams of two or three and pile into cars—some borrowed, some rented—and do the deed throughout downtown, over the course of about two hours on Sunday afternoon.

At midnight, a second team, led by Vanessa, would go out into the city under cover of darkness and hit twenty to twenty-five 10’ x 20’ Pattison billboards.

“I don’t necessarily want to say exactly what we’re doing. But I can say that we’ve strategically planned how to get up there and how to effectively beautify billboards,” Vanessa told us.

“The tactics that we use are creative and they’re peaceful. And who can fuck with that?”

Sunday is the day. We get into a car with Steve C. and Alex, two TOSAT participants, and ride deep into Cabbagetown, where a pair of Pattison pillars stand in a Beer Store parking lot.

Steve and Alex go to work. An ad for Amsterdam beer is replaced by a painting of a silhouetted woman leaping through space. A Koodo ad is subbed out for an enormous stylized bird creature, done up in dazzling bright colours. TOSAT stickers are placed over Pattison logos. Most people pass right by, seemingly oblivious. But Richard Bingham and his young son, Liam, stop to look.

“Is this guerilla?” Bingham asks Steve, and Steve shows him the letter. Bingham nods. He has no reason to disbelieve the cover story.

“I love it. Absolutely love it,” he tells us. “Public visual space is a little too owned by companies like Viacom and CBS, so it’s refreshing to see this.”

Liam, who is perhaps eight years old, spends some time looking over the artwork with his dad. Then, after everything has had time to sink in, he points at a side of one of the pillars that Steve and Alex haven’t gotten around to, yet. “That’s an advertisement,” he says, matter-of-factly, as though the idea of a distinction between art and salesmanship has occurred to him in concrete form for the very first time in his life.

Photos by D.A. Cooper/Torontoist.

More photos of the new pieces are collected in our report from earlier today.

Video: Swapping ads for art

Is it vandalism? Vigilantism? Watch, as activists take down ads and replace them with art. (Aug. 22, 2010)

A lanky, 6-foot-tall New Yorker [...]]]> Guerilla action aims to turn advertising space into public space

BOERUM HILL – The rich cultural heritage of recent immigrants who came to Brooklyn fills the spacious de Castellane Gallery in a remarkable, timely exhibition titled “Non-Native New York.”

Also, a little article on the NY1 website:

By: Shazia Khan

exhibition dates: August 7 – 30, 2009 Opening: Friday August 7th, 7-10pm

Philadelphia Weekly ARTS AND CULTURE

Weather Reports : A new exhibit at AHN/VHS focuses on meteorological data.


"The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said emissions of [...]]]>
Running on Empty: the fossil fuel addiction
curated by Bart King
opening reception: Saturday January 31, 7-9 pm.
January 31 – March 22 2009
Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA)
160 Tracy Street, Unit 4
Athens, GA 30601
http://www.athica.org/

"The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said emissions of greenhouse gases–released when fossil fuels are burned–must peak and begin to decline within ten years if the planet is to avoid the worst effects of global climate change. The American public finally seems to be waking up to this global threat, as evidenced by the popularity of recent films such as An Inconvenient Truth and Wall-E.

This exhibit–our 30th–is designed to to raise awareness of this critical issue. From apocalyptic images of a drowned planet to the promise of future energy sources, these 17 artists address this pressing issue with passion, humor and urgency."

Media Coverage:
http://www.redandblack.com/2009/01/29/fossil-fuel-addiction-subject-of-new-exhibit/
http://flagpole.com/Weekly/Features/NotYourTypicalOilPaintings.3Mar09
 

Why I Ride: The Art of Bicycling in New York May 3–June 3, 2007 Opening Reception: May 3rd, 5– 8pm

Several locations: Lower Eastside Girls Club gallery/cafe 56 E. 1st St. Bicycle Habitat 244 Lafayette St. NYC Velo 64 Second Ave. Trackstar 231B Eldridge St. http://www.whyiridenyc.org/

This independently organized, multivenue exhibition showcased [...]]]>

Why I Ride: The Art of Bicycling in New York
May 3–June 3, 2007
Opening Reception: May 3rd, 5– 8pm

Several locations:
Lower Eastside Girls Club gallery/cafe 56 E. 1st St.
Bicycle Habitat 244 Lafayette St.
NYC Velo 64 Second Ave.
Trackstar 231B Eldridge St.
http://www.whyiridenyc.org/

This independently organized, multivenue exhibition showcased New York artists who are inspired by the freedom and mobility that the bicycle makes possible in a congested metropolis. These artists view interactions with neighbors and strangers — both friendly and otherwise — as preferable to the isolation that grows out of our sprawling, auto-dependent environment.
 

The Bicycle in New York, From an Artistic Standpoint
By Colin Moynihan, 5/9/07 New York Times