Per an alert reader... The De La Vega Museum, run by artist James De La Vega, appears to be closed... the store is all but empty.... (which may explain why he was giving away art recently....) We'll have more on this later...
Friday morning:
Swung by the shop/museum last evening and this morning... all closed up... Considering his penchant for signs in the window...
....I'm surprised there isn't one letting people know what happened...
Meanwhile, near the shop, an unattended mattress sits without a "become your dream" slogan.
Previously on EV Grieve:
De La Vega calling for a boycott on Cafe Mogador, for some reason
dream shattered by mogador?
ReplyDeleteWhuck??
ReplyDeletescroogey landlord probably
ReplyDeleteooo - i'm bummed by the concept but at the same time not sure he waznt an asshle...
ReplyDeleteGuess they needed to make room for another crepe place.
ReplyDeleteGood riddance to that anti-semitic overrated piece-of-shit. I bet you he had problems giving his overrated art away.
ReplyDeleteOr Fro-Yo.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dnainfo.com/20100813/lower-east-side-east-village/street-artist-james-de-la-vega-closes-east-village-museum-after-five-years
I MISS YOU EVEN WHEN WE’RE CLOSE — DE LA VEGA
ReplyDeleteI stopped by one day after seeing the "Jews Only" signs on the chairs outside the "museum". As a Jew, I felt ashamed because (not knowing the place) I had mistakenly and I guess foolishly thought that the guy who put them there was Jewish and that he was making an ass of himself for some unknown reason.
ReplyDeleteWell, after preparing myself to argue with some stupid bigoted fellow Jew, I asked what was up with those signs and the reply: "I don't know". / "What do you mean you don't know, didn't you put them there? What's that about?" / "I don't know." / "Well then who would know?" / "Ask at Mogador, the waitresses there know."
WTF. I walked over to Mogador, looked at the menu, realized it was probably a Jewish-owned restaurant, had a Eureka! moment and walked away glad that the asshole I had just spoken to was not a Jew and that his "museum" would soon be gone.
This guy is a complete bigot and a fraud. After marking up the LES with his tag line for years, he turned it into a bunch of tourist junk for sale. I was witness to the shockingly antisemitic 'art' he installed in his shop. Unbelievably there were a bunch of tourists eating it up like it was some kind of inspired bohemian vision. Not sure what kind of 'dreams' he is referring to, but I imagine they are not the kind of dreams progressive or decent people would be interested in becoming.
ReplyDeleteI believe that some of his paintings are of good quality. However, I believe he is an overrated artist and who wanted to exploit whatever fame he could achieve by selling very poor quality art in massive quantities. He displayed too much low quality art on his store; any good artist who respects hit own art would not dare to sell low quality art to the public.
ReplyDelete