Douglas Newby Insights - Page 23
Period Photograph Before Its Time
This casual photograph taken in the early spring of 2019 is current, but the photograph already feels dated.This is not a picture taken in Cuba with its arrested political and physical development and is not a small town in the Midwest where current civilization and trends have not yet landed. This is New York. This is Manhattan. This is where North American trends originate. But still I look at the photograph and already feel 50 years in the past because we are so close to having such a different urban future. Will we have Yellow Cabs in the next few years? I don’t think so. Will there be intervals of empty streets in the late afternoon in the middle of the largest city in the country? I don’t think so. It is not the historic buildings that make this photograph look like a period image before its time. Classical architecture is a wonderful backdrop for any technology that is emerging. Archaic predetermined streetlight timers are not going to regulate the flow of air taxis, drones, mini-vehicles, autonomous transportation devices, and shared lanes of pedestrians and myriad forms of movement. Uber is planning on relocating a major part of their corporation to Dallas, also chosen as a demonstration area for their air taxis and other forms of advanced transportation. Are younger cities like Dallas more open to technology or less resistant to change than New York? Will New York regulation, unions, and urban tradition keep Yellow Cabs as the look of the future? I still don’t think so. I suggest anyone living or visiting New York enhale the street scenes of Manhattan that will seem as quaint as pictures of horses and buggies on New York streets a hundred years ago. *Period Photograph Before Its Time
#YellowCab #PeriodPhotograph #PeriodPhotographBeforeItsTime #AirTaxi #NewYork #NewYork2019 #Manhattan #CityNostalgia #Nostalgia #Dallas #Uber #PrimitiveTransportation #PrimitiveStreetTraffic #Primitive #Yesterday #FleetingLook #Urban #Urbanism #City #Streetscape #Historic #Architecture #Architect #NewYorkArchitecture #NewYorkStreet #airtaxi @uber
Neiman Marcus Inside Out
Neiman Marcus has been famous for their downtown windows originally showing off fashion of designers Stanley Marcus discovered in Europe and brought to the United States. They joined Marshall Field on Michican Avenue in Chicago and Saks Fifth Avenue to entice one to trek to the city just to look at the fashion framed by the windows of these iconic retailers. These windows were like an amuse-bouche that whet your appetite, maybe even giving one courage to go inside the store to see more. A purchase was accelerated by the foundation of aspirational desire that came from admiring the goods in the deep store windows. Now Hudson Yards turns the visual concept of retail inside out. At the Hudson Yards Neiman Marcus, the best view through a window is not on the street looking into the store front window, but from the inside of Neiman Marcus looking outside at the Vessel, a walkable sculpture by architect Thomas Heatherwick. This sculpture might have cost more than all the inventory inside Neiman Marcus. It seems to me Hudson Yards is a parenthetical experiment between the adrenalin-charged destination of a downtown Neiman Marcus and increased online shopping. Will an experiential-oriented mall ever replace a stroll down a New York street of store windows or shopping online? As retail, technology, and transporation rapidly evolve, it will be interesting to see if the trend is moving towards Hudson Yards style malls or towards a more vibrant street scene of the future. *Neiman Marcus Inside Out
#NeimanMarcus #HudsonYards #StoreWindow #StanleyMarcus #Retail #Mall #InsideOut #NewYork #Dallas #ThomasHeatherwick #Vessel #Architecture #Architect #Design #Experiential @reflectionofaman
Day at the Office
With a wheelbarrow and a cell phone, anyone can be a CEO of their organization or personal industry. The smile of this young CEO reflects his open-door policy and lack of irritation at being interrupted. He didn’t even demand makeup, hair, or wardrobe for this photo shoot. *Day at the Office
#Texas #Dallas #CEO #Wheelbarrow #Furniture #OfficeChair #LoungeChair #ExecutiveChair #Recliner #Office #Industry #CellPhone #PhotoShoot #Portrait #Foundation
Swiss Avenue Value
Homes on Swiss Avenue boulevard might offer the greatest combination of aesthetic attributes and value in Dallas. After many years of Swiss Avenue and the surrounding Old East Dallas neighborhoods being suspect, now a new generation of very successful young professionals and families have embraced this beautiful safe neighborhood. With historic districts on three sides of Swiss Avenue, and Lakewood shopping center and Lakewood conservation district at the end of Swiss Avenue, the Swiss Avenue historic district is now surrounded by beautiful homes and neighborhoods. Further, new residential and retail development is surging in the next layers of neighborhoods surrounding Swiss Avenue. Munger Place and Swiss Avenue is also in the heart of the restoration area, and is the origin place of all great 20th century architecture in Dallas. Before Hal Thomson and Fooshee & Cheek were designing homes in Highland Park, they were designing homes for the society families and industrialists who wanted to live on Swiss Avenue. Three miles further out from downtown Dallas an acre of land is selling for almost $2 million an acre. Swiss Avenue land closer In has even more intrinsic value. Pictured here is a perennial favorite home on Swiss Avenue. It is beautifully designed on almost an acre of land with views down the boulevard to the downtown Dallas skyline. With well over 5,000 s.f. and high ceilings, spacious open rooms, and an enormous amount of large windows, this one hundred year-old renovated home is a perfect example and exemplifies why Swiss Avenue homeowners are so excited about where they live. What other city has a neighborhood of architect-designed homes in such a lovely environment just two miles from downtown? A few blocks away, the Sante Fe Trail leads you to White Rock Lake and SMU in one direction and Deep Elm and Trinity groves in other direction. The value of a home is derived from the aesthetics, site, and neighborhood.
*Swiss Avenue Value
#Dallas #SwissAvenue #SwissAvenueBlvd #SwissAvenueHistoricDistrict #HistoricDistrict #Historic #Preservation #Home #MungerPlace #OldEastDallas #Value #SantaFeTrail #Architect #Architecture #Design #HistoricHome
Classical Architecture Compels a Look
What a surprise to see what looks like a series of pen and ink drawings of classical and historical residential buildings at the Whitney Biennial. And yet, my most powerful and profound insight from the exhibition came from this series by artist Milano Chow. I realized that I loved looking at modern residences with planes of intersecting glass that allows the home to merge with nature as I look through it or around it. These modern glass façade homes are visually appealing architectural poetry. However, while I can look through these homes, I am seldom tempted to peer inside as I am so enamored with the sculptural shape and even the reflection of nature and the environment in the glass. On the other hand, impressions of historic buildings like these pen and ink drawings with double-hung windows immediately draw my attention to what might be inside. Maybe it is my inner Jimmy Stewart thinking Grace Kelly is looking over my shoulder in Rear Window, or maybe it is sexier and more provocative to show just a little bit of glass. The viewer of these drawings is rewarded when every window is reviewed and then a figure emerges in one window of each building. The person seen through the window in each drawing conveys a different personality and emotion. Art is about discovery, and this art allows me to discover and think in a new way about windows and glass.
#PenAndInk #ArchitecturalDrawing #HistoricalRendering #Art #ArtInterpretsArchitecture #Drawing #Architecture #Window #Glass #MilanoChow #WhitneyMuseum #WhitneyBiennial #WhitneyBiennial2019 #Museum #Artist #Exhibition #BiennialExhibition #BiennialArtists #NewYork
Bridging the Gap
Curran Hatleberg photographs while he travels around the country getting to know places and people. These photographs do not try to define the places and people but convey some of the detail, mystery, and magic of places we haven’t stopped to explore. I love this photograph bridging the gap between what we know and what we don’t know. And makes us curious to want to know. *Bridging the Gap
#CurranHatleberg #photography #photograph #photographer #car #Bridge #BridgingTheGap #WhitneyMuseum #WhitneyBiennial #WhitneyBiennial2019 #Design #Museum #Art #Artist #Exhibition #BiennialExhibition #BiennialArtists #NewYork
Pottery and Weaving
Craft or art? Pottery is the only craft that ranks one notch higher as art than weaving. Primitive and utilitarian, both of these art forms seemed to hit their zenith in the 1970s. This was a time of organic, back to nature, and when the Whole Earth Catalog movement was at its height. Now there is a resurgence. The weavings of Sheila Hicks were shown at the Biennial a few years ago. The Nasher museum in Dallas is having a one-woman show of her weavings and the DMA is about to install one of her pieces. Pottery has always had a special place for me, both working on the wheel and going to the Art Institute of Chicago looking at centuries of ceramics, and as a student doing site surveys in Oaxaca collecting pottery shards from centuries ago. Ceramicist Theaster Gates won last year’s Nasher Prize. This piece by artist and ceramicist Simone Leigh combines textiles and pottery. It pulls from both of these ancient mediums and cultures as craft and art communicate her black feminist thought. This art demonstrates how powerful contemporary radical political thought is when it draws from the power of history, culture, form, art, and craft. *Pottery and Weaving
#SimoneLeigh #WhitneyMuseum #WhitneyBiennial #WhitneyBiennial2019 #Design #Museum #Art #Weaving #Textiles #Pottery #Ceramics #Artist #CraftOrArt #Exhibition #BiennialExhibition #BiennialArtists #NewYork #BlackArt #BlackFeministArt #NewYork
Whitney Biennial Textiles
Artist Tomashi Jackson, originally from Houston and now living in New York, focuses these art pieces, woven together with found objects, on housing displacement in New York. We are also experiencing housing displacement of people and structures in Dallas. Just as the artist’s density-layered abstractions of found materials are messy, older neighborhoods and older homes are often messy. In Dallas we have seen well-intended politicians wanting to eradicate these older homes because they are not up to a perceived minimum middle-class housing condition. These politicians in concert with affordable housing developers want to replace the messiness of diverse housing and conditions in the older neighborhoods with sameness—sanitized new apartments. The affordability component of these new apartments comes from subsidizing some or all of them for lower or moderate-income residents. Every new apartment complex means one less homeownership possibility or renting a larger less expensive apartment in an older building. In New York, the City is taking over neighborhoods with forced sales for new luxury residential development. There are many faces of urban renewal. Urban renewal is almost always pitched as a way to improve the lives of low-income residents. When in fact homeownership and renovating small houses creates wealth for low-income residents and perpetuates a diverse housing stock. Artist Eric N. Mack also explores texture with mixed materials that create a blanket or quilt that recalls those we see at the State Fair of Texas and all the qualities and meanings a quilt represents and conveys. *Whitney Biennial Textiles
@tomashi_ashi #TomashiJackson @ernatmack #EricMack #Gentrification #UrbanRenewal #Housing #EquitableHousing #Art #Artist #Design #Texture #FoundObjects #FoundMaterials #CollectedMaterials #Quilt #Sculpture #HousingDisplacement #HousingJustice #WealthCreation #ProtectNeighborhoods #SmallHouses #WhitneyMuseum #WhitneyBiennial #WhitneyBiennial2019 #BiennialExhibition #BiennialArtists #NewYork
Self-Identifying
There has been much discussion about political oppression and psychological trauma of a growing community that self-identifies with a gender. We also have seen almost a romantic and cheery feeling about the emerging liberation and freedom associated with self-identifying. These strong photographic portraits by artist Elle Pérez display the physicality, pleasure, pain, and pushing the body, that also can accompany this journey. A carved branding on the arm, vials of testosterone, bruises from facial feminization surgery, and celebration of the body is included in this series of photographs that even add more layers to transfiguring. *Self-Identifying
#WhitneyMuseum #WhitneyBiennial #WhitneyBiennial2019 #Design #Museum #Art #Artist #Photography #Modern #Contemporary #Portraits #Self-Identifying #EllePérez #Gender #Emotion #Transfiguring #Exhibition #BiennialExhibition #BiennialArtists #NewYork
Whitney Biennial 2019
My fascination with the Whitney Biennial began when the Whitney Museum selected @JamesSurls for the Biennial. This was long before my first trip to New York. The 2019 Whitney Biennial was the edgiest, most elegant, and calm Biennial that I have seen in many years. Over the next few days I will be posting my impressions of some of the work, that the Whitney has selected to give a snapshot of current American art. I have found that the work in this Biennial is conspicuously current but much of it revisits mediums and approaches from the past—found objects, textiles, weavings, pottery, photographs, and pen and ink architectural façade drawings. The exhibition also includes two of the most current political toxic topics—gender self-identification and a suggestion of life/choice conversation, which the artist contributes to in a fascinating, subtle, elegant, and provocative way. This post will also include art from some of the other artists in the exhibition including Calvin Marcus, Joe Minter, Milano Chow, Augustina Woodgate, John Edmonds, Jennifer Packer, Janiva Ellis. *Whitney Biennial 2019
#WhitneyMuseum #WhitneyBiennial #WhitneyBiennial2019 #Design #Architecture #Painting #Museum #Art #Artist #Weaving #Textiles #FoundObjects #Photography #Modern #Contemporary #RearviewMirror #Exhibition #BiennialExhibition #BiennialArtists #NewYork