Nuit Blanche in Greenpoint

Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche NYC from Michael Zick Doherty on Vimeo.

I think I'm still too under the weather to venture out for this, but durn, it looks pretty cool. From Bringtolightnyc.org:

Bring to Light is New York City's first-ever Nuit Blanche festival. A Nuit Blanche is an all night arts festival of installations and performances celebrating the magic and luminance of light. Nuit Blanche events enliven cities all around the globe, but there has never been one in New York.

BRING TO LIGHT NYC will be held in Greenpoint, Brooklyn primarily on Oak Street between Franklin St. and the East River waterfront in Fall 2010, beginning at sundown. The event is free and open to the public. This unique block will play host to local and international artists, performers, galleries, and musicians as they Bring to Light the street itself as well as its unique assets including metal, set design and textile workshops, residential facades, an indoor gymnastics park, and much more.

Post-reading project

If you can stand to sacrifice one of your tomes, do something cool like these sculptures by Dutch artist Boukje Voet.

Visualizing NYC

(Jelly NYC skyline by Liz Hickok.)

Super-cool art show alert: the Pratt Manhattan Gallery is hosting You Are Here: Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City, which runs through November 6. Descriptions of pieces that caught my eye:

• A “loneliness map” from Craigslist’s Missed Connections by Ingrid Burrington 
• A scratch-and-sniff map of New Yorkers’ smell preferences by Nicola Twilley
• A New York subway map in Urdu by Pakistani artist Asma Ahmed Shikoh
• The preliminary artwork for New Yorkistan, Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s post-9/11 cover for The New Yorker, and Kalman and Meyerowitz’s culinary subway map of the city

Keep your enemies close ...

From Home Truths, a series of retro-inspired posters by Sam Bevington.

When dead-tree publishing dies ...

What will awesome artists like Megan Coyle, who composes her images using select strips from the pages of magazines, do? Neatorama featured her work today.

(Pictured: "Commuters," Megan Coyle, collage artist. "Collage Scapes is at the East Alcove Gallery in Bethesda, Maryland, until November 5, 2010.)

Art and urbanity

Cast your vote in the urbancanvas design competition; make NYC (more) beautiful. About the program:

The urbancanvas design competition is a unique opportunity to challenge professional artists and designers to create printed artwork for temporary protective structures at construction sites that will beautify New York City's streetscape and promote maintenance of these structures. The competition seeks complementary designs for different types of temporary protective structures located on City-owned property: construction fences, sidewalk sheds, supported scaffolds and cocoon systems.

Our animal overlords

Above: "Chill at 5:25" by Shuichi Nakano, part of the "Searching for Paradise" series. Disorienting, fanciful, right up my alley. Pink Tentacle features more: monkeys, giraffes, hippopotamuses, oh my!

Photography of Afghanistan

Not images from the war. Just images of everyday life in Afghanistan. By Jan Chipchase. I like the man selling boomboxes, a man loading grain in Mazar-e-Sharif, and this customized gun butt.

Current obsession

Sophie Blackall's illustrations of Craigslist "missed connections" ads. Ephemeral and yet so touching!

Bubbling up

Fabulous teapots at the TEA-OFF! 2009 competition, sponsored by World Kitchen. I'm particularly enamored with the ONE Teakettle, which is white porcelain until the water boils, causing a pattern to appear on the outside of the vessel.