NY Arts: How did Esopus start, and how has it grown since? Tod Lippy: I started Esopus—named after a creek that runs through the Catskills—in 2003. The essential idea was to create a magazine with no "commercial interference": no ads, publicity, or calendar-driven material, and for which I would never rely on handlers (publicists, gallerists, […]

Hanne Mugaas: How did Willy Wonka Inc. start and develop? Willy Wonka Inc.: In 2005, we curated the exhibition With Us Against Reality or Against Us! (the title referring to Bush`s With Us or Against Us politics). A lot of people came to see the show—the opening was literally a riot. Our goal was to […]

If you put Fred Sandback, Modrian, Rites of Spring, Woody Guthrie, Born Against, the ladies of Gee’s Bend, Sol Lewitt, Noam Chomsky, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Blender, Henry Darger, Raymond Pettibon, Lightning Bolt, Joni Mitchell, Edward Abbey, Evergreen, The Hated, anything Dan Higgs has done, Public Enemy, James Turrell, Hokusai, The Damned, Animal Collective, Leonard Cohen, […]

Circles were everywhere—red, blue, black, yellow, green—across the floor, on the walls, near the ceiling. Hung from the roof were five bicycle wheels painted the same colors through which a yellow dragon was flying. Below the dragon on the floor was a huge piece of white canvas splashed with similar circles. Another long piece of […]

Trees are not people and people are not flowers and flowers are not straw hats and straw hats are not the smell of freshly picked sorrel and the smell of freshly picked sorrel is not nonoperational lighters. Nonoperational lighters are not belly-revealing pants. Belly-revealing pants are not cigarettes inserted in the mouth back to front. […]

Craig Willse: Because your work has these very clean, minimal, formal aspects, people have connected what you’re doing to Modernism. What was Modernism trying to do that you’re not trying to do? Jonah Groeneboer: Modernism has, among its goals, a sort of absolute idealism that it tries to achieve. Absolutism often is so entrenched in […]

There are no great gestures, no posing, no breaching of taboos, no reference to current topics. His images of alienation from reality exist outside of time. They portray mortality and losing one’s grip on reality in pictures that are unspectacular. Pictures in which what the beam of a pocket flashlight makes fleetingly visible only that […]

Astria Suparak: You have a serious history in academia: You hold a Masters in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and are finishing your PhD in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, have written for various institutions and magazines, and teach a course on the evolution of technology at NYU. You also actively exhibit and […]

We are permanently standing at the intersection of Forever and Now, witness to the moment at which the two liquefy to become one path, only to separate again. The paths are lined and flowing with every last thing the perceptual apparatus is equipped to encounter, and it is our task to interpret each facet, sorting […]

New York-based artist Nadiyah Jinnah was brought up in Africa and is of South Asian descent. She draws on the depths of a long cultural history and from the inspirational surroundings in which she finds herself during her travels across the globe for bold-hued “lifescapes.” More specifically however, in her recent show at Broadway Gallery […]