Sorry, that's not actually a fishmonger going into the corner space at 5th and B

Photo by Stacie Joy 

In recent days, the space on the NW corner of Avenue B and Fifth Street has been undergoing renovations, and as several readers have noted, a fishmonger might be the new tenant.

The space is Gratin, the art gallery, and they're presenting work by CANEMORTO, a trio of anonymous masking-wearing Italian artists.

Tonight through Saturday, Gratin is hosting "Matta presents: Canemorto Fish Market," featuring "fried drawings, drawing tartare, drawings in oil, drawings in salt, frozen drawings, filleted drawings..." 

It's not quite a bagel shop where everything is made from felt, but...

 

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Ruby/Dakota opens on 2nd Street: Gallery is a tribute to family legacy and personal healing

Photos by Stacie Joy

Ruby/Dakota debuted late last month at 155 E. Second St., just east of Avenue A.

Hannah Studnick operates the gallery and performance space.

"It has been a lifelong dream of mine to open a gallery in Alphabet City, the neighborhood my maternal grandfather was born in, the same place where my first cousin returned many years later and founded C-Squat," Studnick told EVG. "After my twin sister Emma's untimely passing in 2018, my whole world broke open. I slowly started moving toward this physical and emotional space of 'Gallerist.'"

The retail space, whose tenants have included the previous home of School for the Dogs, was the lone storefront that Studnick saw on her EV retail tour.

"In the end, the gallery found me. It was the only space I looked at," she said. "I knew from the moment I walked in this was Ruby/Dakota, a name that manifested from a distant memory — the names my mother would have given us if she had chosen more wisely."

The gallery's first group show, "Home is You, Right Now," is up through Sept. 6. 

Here's a look at opening night back on July 25.

Featured works include "East Village Date Night" by Lee Smith...

Other artists in the show include Kate Awalt-Conley ...

... Sacha Alexandra ...

... and Julia Justo ...

Ruby/Dakota is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays and Mondays are by appointment. The gallery's website has contact information and details on other events in the space. (If you're on Instagram, you can find updates here.)

"I do this for my twin sister Emma, my family, myself, and most importantly, the living artists of New York City, who do deserve our support, who make this place alive, and the greatest city on earth, naturally," Studnick said. "Through this room of my own, I am able to tell the truth as I see it and allow so many wonderful artists to share theirs, too. It is an honor and a privilege. I am so grateful to be here. "

Total 'Recall' — new exhibit explores unsettled memories

East Village-based artist Jessica Frances Grégoire Lancaster is one-half of a new show (along with Pajtim Osmanaj) titled "Recall" that opens tomorrow (Saturday!) on the Lower East Side. 

Here's more via the gallery, Trotter & Sholer: 

"Recall" presents an exploration of unsettled memory through paintings based on photographs. Memories are notoriously unreliable, yet they are the very fabric of the narrative self. In this exhibition, both artists are exploring events captured in photographs. 

These photographs are used as source material, spliced and reconfigured to construct moments of time both fragmented and imagined. Using oil paint, these artists play with the idea of remembering and the act of making memories. 

"Recall" will be on view at 168 Suffolk St. between Houston and Stanton through Oct. 21. The opening reception tomorrow is from 4-8 p.m. 

Trotter & Sholer is open Tuesday through Saturday, 12 to 6 p.m.

Art that speaks the 'Language' of sanitation

All Street Gallery has an interesting-sounding new show starting tomorrow that features the work of interdisciplinary artist sTo Len, who was the 2021-2022 Public Artist in Residence for the NYC Department of Sanitation. (This CBS feature has more about his work with the DSNY.)

Here's what to expect at the show, titled "Sign Language" ...

During his residency, Len started the Office of In Visibility, an art project that bears witness to the unseen labor of sanitation and its extensive role in New Yorkers' lives. He has been using this as a platform to research and re-contextualize the department's archival material from film and video to printmaking and photography. 

For this exhibition, Len focuses on his work revitalizing an old sanitation screen printing shop in Woodside, Queens, that housed hand-printed street signs, trucks, and posters dating from the 1960s. 

Reusing the old equipment and leftover designs, Len has created a series of mono prints on paper, aluminum, and wood that remix old DSNY slogans and symbols with his own marbling techniques. The results are bold, messy, and psychedelic updates to the originals with messages that remain relevant and speak to on-going sanitation issues such as illegal dumping and littering. 

The opening reception is tomorrow (Saturday!) evening from 6-9 at the gallery, 77 E. Third St. between First Avenue and Second Avenue (in the former HA HQ). 

A pop-up gallery for the summer at 42 Avenue B

Photos by Stacie Joy

A pop-up gallery, Life, The Universe & Everything, will be holding forth this summer at 42 Avenue B between Third Street and Fourth Street.

The first show, "Queen of Mars" by Rebecca Leveille Guayabera, opens tonight from 5-9.

This month, the gallery is open Tuesdays-Saturdays from 2-6 p.m. or by appointment. For more info on upcoming events here.

Thursday's parting shot

Here's one of the paintings by Bill Rice featured in the exhibit, "Around the Corner" at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth St. between Houston and Stanton. (Previously mentioned here.)

Here's a snippet of a review of the show via Hyperallergic today...

Bill Rice's paintings ... are glimpses of East Village life — the old East Village of crime, abandonment, and cruising, of obscure figures with good muscle tone, surreptitious oral favors in the parks and alleys, stoop-front sales, and hanging out. His surfaces are slowly built up from thin layers of oil paint with an occasional putty-like vector or a colored stripe or, at times, a skeletal architecture or diamond-shaped fence pattern. Looking at his works we are moving constantly, roving, scanning the neighborhood where he had lived since 1953, when rent controls were still in place and you could get by on a few welfare checks and some decent luck.

Rice lived on East Third Street for more than 50 years and opened a gallery there in the 1980s. 

The show runs through May 13. Hours: Wednesday to Saturday, noon-6 p.m. or by appointment.

A new home on an avenue for East Village gallery-bookstore Ed. Varie

Ed. Varie (short for Edition Varie), a creative space that has hosted exhibits, book openings and other special events for the past nearly 15 years, is moving into a new home at 95 Avenue B.

The larger space is right around the corner from their previous home at 184 E. Seventh St. (Artist-curator Karen Schaupeter launched Ed. Varie in 2009.)

Per a recent Instagram post...

Our new home will allow us to revive and regenerate past programs that had been squeezed into such small spaces, they began bordering on non-existence.

Our new home will allow us to embrace and embark on all of the projects we put on the illusive back burner for the past 7 years.

Our new home will allow us to conjure and collaborate with our broad and growing community of artists, aligning with our mission to nurture the exploration of new concepts in artistic practice.

Ed. Varie will debut No. 95 on Thursday (4/20) with the ninth annual Pot Shop and Potluck from 6-9 p.m. here between Sixth Street and Seventh Street. 

And coming to Ed. Varie on weekends in May...

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'Around the Corner' with Bill Rice at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

Bill Rice (1931-2006) "was one of the central figures in the various bohemian enclaves that gathered and overlapped in the Lower East Side of the 1960s," per Brooklyn Rail. 

Rice lived on East Third Street for more than 50 years and opened a gallery there in the 1980s.

Starting this evening, you'll have the opportunity to see the work of the artist, actor, and scholar at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth St. between Houston and Stanton. 

Here's more about the exhibit, "Around the Corner" ... 

Bill's depiction of New York with his Proustian attention to detail creates a kind of visual mythology of the city. He gives equal attention to the bodies and lives of men he loved as to the landscape of taxis, automobiles and storefronts which inhabit his paintings, drawings and notes, interacting with the city through a distinctly erotic gaze. In centering the tangible and the visual Rice creates an ode to the city like a more "out" version of Whitman, using his memory and experience to construct a narrative of his surroundings.

I am interested in what happens around the corner of the surface. My paintings are not designed to be viewed only from the front. The edges are important, I like the feel of paint and canvas and paper. Ideally, I would like to invest the rectangle — the basic unit in any cityscape — with the sensuality, color, texture I find in the streets. — Bill Rice 

The opening reception tonight is from 6-8. The show runs through May 13. Hours: Wednesday to Saturday, noon-6 p.m. or by appointment

A look at 'Vital Impetus' at Azure Arts

Photos by Stacie Joy

Azure Arts is now showing "Vital Impetus," a group exhibition of photographic and mixed media works by local artists via curator Elizabeth Chatham. 

From left to right: Alice Garik ... Gina Kropf ... Elizabeth Chatham ... and jdx...

... Garik

... Kropf

... Chatham

... and jdx

Here's the official explanation of the show: 

The exhibition derives its title and curatorial theme from a concept élan vital (vital impetus), a term coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Rather than simply adhering to a set of mechanistic laws, Bergson contended that life has an inherent drive or impulse toward creativity, growth, and innovation. 

While his philosophy emphasizes the role of individual experience, i.e. consciousness, and creativity in this process, it also sees the 'self' as fundamentally connected to others. The 'self,' for Bergson, stands in dynamic relation to others. It is not static and unchanging but evolving constantly through its interactions with others.

Moving within and between photographic genres, "Vital Impetus" explores this relationship between the creative self and its dynamic relationship with others. The works featured in this exhibition indicate some of the near infinite ways to communicate who one is and how we seek to connect — or not connect — with others.

Azure Arts is at 5 Rivington St. between the Bowery and Chrystie. Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. 

The show closes on March 13. is now extended through the end of March!

Picture this: an art gallery for 5th and B

Top 2 photos by Stacie Joy

Renovations continue inside and out on the NW corner of Fifth Street and Avenue B... where an art gallery called Gratin is in the works for the space... 

We don't know anything else at the moment about what to expect here from the new gallery... which marks the second art space to open along this corridor after Half Gallery debuted in 2020 on the NW corner of Fourth Street and Avenue B.

The arrival will likely make at least one upstairs resident happy... back when the storefront was on the market in the spring... 

... there was a sign in the window reading: "No Cafe. No Food."

Oda House, which served the rare-for-Manhattan Georgian cuisine and other Mediterranean staples, closed here in August 2020 after seven-plus years in service. Caffe Buon Gusto was here for a bit after the corner market Zips.  

Designer Darrell Thorne is 'Under Glass and In Color' on Avenue A

Darrell Thorne, the Brooklyn-based designer and performance artist (and onetime East Village resident!), is the centerpiece of a new exhibit titled "Under Glass and in Color" in the pop-up gallery on Avenue A and Fourth Street.

The folks behind ChaShaMa, a nonprofit that transforms empty storefronts into galleries, and the National Endowments for the Arts are presenting the work of Thorne, who has collaborated with Madonna, Jennifer Hudson, Blondie and others...



Thorne and his work, including a bespoke mask created for Madonna in the "Living for Love" video, will be on display for sidewalk viewing. Here's more via the official release:

"Under Glass and In Color" combines an exhibition, a residency, and a durational performance into a vibrant celebration of life through costume, makeup, dance, and transformation.

Against a backdrop of feathers, flowers, metal, and mirrors, Thorne will create original headpieces, apply makeup and body paint, perform dance pieces, sing songs and perform lip-synchs, write his memoirs, interact with passersby, and juxtapose everyday mundane activities with transformation, ritual, and elevation.

Additionally, a digital art exhibit featuring video projections of Thorne and his dancers edited and manipulated by multimedia artist Morgan Freeman will play on a loop.

In a moment where we all must live with barriers, "Under Glass and in Color" invites viewers to observe an artist under glass, in a world of his own creation. 24/7 exhibition window viewing, performances happening periodically.

Thorne provided EVG contributor Stacie Joy with a look inside the space ...













The current preview period continues through the official opening on Thursday (June 18!). The exhibit is here through July 12.

Some good Karma for 2nd Street?

[EVG photo photo from March]

Work has been ongoing at 188 E. Second St., a former beverage distributor housed between Avenue A and Avenue B. The single-level, 2,600-square-foot space arrived on the market at the beginning of the year. (Per the listing at Leslie J. Garfield, the monthly asking rent for the raw space was $13,000.)

The plywood came down this week to reveal (via this EVG reader pic) ...



Turns out the space is the new home for Karma, the art bookseller and gallery. Karma opened in 2013 on Great Jones Street, and later moved to a temporary space back in March on Orchard Street.

Here's more on Karma and founder Brendan Dugan via ARTnews when he opened the Orchard Street space:

Karma’s roots are in publishing, but it has become known for hosting shows by contemporary artists including Mark Grotjahn, Brice Marden, Dike Blair, Rudolf Stingel, and Marianne Vitale.

He said he was working on a program schedule to host events once a week on Orchard Street, veering away from the usual schedule for galleries, which organize new exhibitions every six weeks. “It’s a way to keep busy while we finalize our space,” Dugan said. “This is an interesting moment to kind of not rush into anything.” He described the real-estate market as “really overpriced. I don’t know if we’ll find any relief, but it’s helpful to have time to look.”

He wouldn’t say where else he was looking for a permanent spot, but added that it would be somewhere in Manhattan. He did allude to the fact that Karma may stray from the pack, as it were. Dugan mentioned the absence of galleries on Great Jones Street, as well as at Karma’s Amagansett space, which will begin its 2016 exhibition schedule in May. “I like being in places just where we’re on our own,” he said.

The opening reception was last evening for the initial exhibit here.... featuring the works of Lee Lozano. The exhibit is up through Dec. 17. Find more details here.