This Thursday would have been sculptor Alexander Calder’s birthday. It seems an appropriate moment for Not Extractions, but Abstractions, a show curated by Michael Clifton, which honors and echoes Alexander Calder’s whimsical spirit and rhapsodic love of reductive forms. The exhibit is actually the second part of a show presented at Karma International in Zurich earlier this year, and includes the work of six artists. Simplicity and bursts of saturation are the connective glue between work as varied as Polly Apfelbaum “Fallen Paintings” (made from colorful strips of clay), the flattened yet lyrical plant compositions by Jonas Wood, and Hanna Sandin’s hovering mobiles.

The show is on exhibit through August 14th at Clifton Benevento, 515 Broadway, NY, NY

Rotter and Friends, the side project of Jess Rotter of Kemado Records, and Nightwood, my lovely neighbors who take unwanted furniture and wood and make it beautiful, have recently teamed up to collaborate on a home line, available through the Rotter and Friends website. The pieces include wood block prints with Jess’ vintage-inspired music illustrations, hand-colored, limited edition posters, and, if all of that weren’t 70’s enough for you, wood burn art. These are two of my favorite homemade, DIY Brooklyn companies, so I am personally very excited. Plus, I really love all things 1970’s. I can’t help myself. Click “Read More” for additional images.

I generally hate it when the post office leaves those sticky “we tried to deliver it, but you weren’t here” notes on my door (I don’t actually believe they ever ring the bell to see if  anyone is home. I think they just see it wont fit through the mail slot and leave), but today was different. After a short walk to the taco truck that serves as the Pratt station, I am now the proud owner of this new Risto printed edition of Josh Slater’s All Together. Click “Read More” to see the “taco truck” as well as a VW in my neighborhood I am now obsessed with .

After his very impressive stop-motion film “Muto“ and after releasing several teasers over the last weeks and months, everybody’s favorite Italian Blu is back with his new film “Big Bang Big Boom.” This time he takes on the theory of evolution and shows you where life might have come from, what steps it has gone through and how it might end. And as always Blu’s universe consist of 1.000.000 liters of paint, trash and creepy creatures. Enjoy.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Unlike a paperboy, a papergirl does not follow the same route. She goes where ever she wants, never takes the same road twice, talks to strangers and doesn’t even collect money at the end of the month. She is the kind of girl all the boys, and girls for that matter, want to hang out with. And they all can. Papergirl is a Berlin-originated arts project that started in 2006, that has since spread all over the world, taking art back to the streets and to the people.

The concept of Papergirl is that any artist who wants to participate in the project is welcome to submit. The only guidelines are that submissions need to be presented in sets of two and most importantly, the art can be rolled up. The selected pieces will then be exhibited at a gallery. After the closing of the exhibition, Papergirl keeps one copy of each piece for their archive, rolls up the rest of the artwork and attaches information about the artist and the program to each roll. Then a pack of cyclists roam every district of the city and randomly hand out the art to people on the streets for free. Sina Hickey, founder of the Albany chapter and one of the brains behind this year’s Berlin edition, explained that this aspect of the project is the essential element of Papergirl, since it reaches people that wouldn’t usually get in touch with art much to actually have a piece for themselves, without having to pay anything.

The routes of the Papergirls therefore need to cover all parts of the city, especially those that don’t have galleries or museums, and the art should be given to those who least expect it. Instead of trying to make money, the project focuses on presenting the art in a spontaneous, unique and direct way. When I asked her what kind of reactions the Papergirls had gotten during last year’s paper route, Hickey just smiled and said that they had seen everything from grateful faces, to people just ignoring them, to having the art thrown right back at them. She also explained that the project is in part a reaction to the ever increasing anti-graffiti movement in Berlin, and that the handing out of art on the street is a creative approach to dodge these strict laws. The last exhibition in Berlin, Papergirl’s fifth, was the biggest so far. Added incentive-Papergirls will help you to trick your bikes out into tall cycles or low riders, so you can help distribute the art in style after the closing.

This year, Papergirls from other cities like Capetown, Manchester or Bucharest, were invited to participate in the Berlin edition, in order to share ideas, experiences and vision for the future of the project, which they hope to expand worldwide. There will also be a symposium on the topic “The Art of Giving Art.” The Papergirl Berlin exhibition is on at Neurotitan Gallery until the 23rd of July. For more dates, locations and info on Papergirl Berlin, check out their Facebook page.

Good news if you can’t get to Berlin, Papergirl hits the US this summer. The deadline for submissions for the NY State Edition has just been extended to the 1st of August, so all of you who still want to participate—get your sharpies, your brushes and your crayons and get busy. Those who want to contribute to the San Francisco edition still have until the 18th of August.

Click “Read More” for a video trailer, some photos from the last exhibit and up-coming dates.

Dumbo Art Center NYC: August 23-27
Armory in Manhattan NYC: August 28-29
Marketplace Gallery Albany: September 3-6

from SinaBasila on Vimeo.

Since 1997, Marc Jacobs has been infusing the world’s largest luxury group, LVMH, with contemporary art via collaborative fashion collections with artists such as Richard Prince, Steven Sprouse and Takashi Murakami. Certainly the nexus of high-fashion and high-art is nothing new, and within Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, the company’s fairly new gallery, the space is what it is: a luxury store. Sharing a name with fashion’s most iconic brand, it is a brazenly commercial space for selling. Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton opened in 2006 in the center of Paris, with an eye towards cultivating a relationship with fine art, and, along with Jacobs’ collaborations, infusing the company with a bit of a cultural and intellectual aura.

Curator Hervé Mikaeloff’s show, titled Perspectives, brings together 16 new works by Camille Henrot and Odile Decq, two established, female French artists, in an attempt to understand the space and the world of viewpoints. Odile Decq is an architect who has just completed an extension of the MACRO (the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome), while Camille Henrot, a 31-year-old visual artist, has been pre-selected for the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2010. The meeting of their two visions gives the Perspectives exhibition all of its meaning. Themes of voyage, displacement, and otherness are central to the selection of work represented in the show.

Camille Henrot observes the inauthenticity of objects through the eyes of the other. Her interests lay within the origins of man as constructed through myths, objects, and the symbolic trail that they create. Travel, ethnocentrism, and memory are all central focuses of her practice. For Perspectives, Henrot has constructed her own Musée Imaginaire, a personal anthropology where the exhibition is the theater. Through video, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography she explores journey and misunderstandings, reduced understandings of otherness. Her Objets Augmentes consist of ephemera like a mobile phone, a pair of scissors, a mirror, all immersed in a bath of tar so as to transfigure themselves into the unrecognizable. Her work consists of a reappropriation of the objects it distracts and a distorting of objects known as symbols of modernity. Through her video work, Henrot leads us back in time accompanied by stray dogs through Egyptian excavations (Cynopolis), then to travel in space only to find ourselves waiting for airport departures and arrivals in various cities (Arrivals/Departures) that are either now extinct or just recently birthed. These works seems to evoke diversion, especially in the history of art and art practice, without any systematic approach.

Architect Odile Decq’s three installations combine steel, metal and glass to create dominating optical illusions and surprise; head-on, sensitive and playful architectural signatures. Le plongeon du funambul (The Plunge of the Tightrope Walker) is presented outside on the building’s panoramic terrace to simulate the city of Paris as a pool, as if the spectator were about to dive in. Ligne de fuite et Homéostasie (Creepage and Homeostasis) in the space’s lobby comprises two spheres, essentially black moons, one of which is filled with air and toy with the idea of balance and space. Decq creates impressions of depth and horizon where really there is none in Architecture Mobile’s red and black carpet, strewn with skyscraper silhouettes. Through Decq’s various, vaguely vessel-like forms, the artist transforms Louis Vuitton’s fashion Mecca into a point of departure.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that the exhibition stumbles: while the show is a thoughtful attempt to reexamine everyday perspective, it fails to regard perhaps the most ironic perspective: that of Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton itself. Since the recent economic plight in both the United States and Europe, consumer remorse and guilt is only exacerbated though superficial purchases and conspicuous consumption. Justifying the purchase of a designer handbag is much easier when the object is akin to cultural and artistic craftsmanship. And so it is no surprise that many luxury brands have recently focused their attention on culture and the arts. What resounds most in Perspectives is the irony that the modernity and post-colonialism critiqued in the works of Henrot and Decq were always part of the same historical development – late capitalist globalization. And Louis Vuitton, with it’s iconic LV stamped on everything from handbags to Hummers, is no innocent player in this field. It’s a shame then that the show remains inert and scarcely impossible to disassociate the works from the brand itself.

Perspectives in on display at Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton from June 4th to September 5th, 60 rue de Bassano, Paris.

Right now, by appointment, you can catch a great little show in an apartment/gallery space on the West Side Highway called West Street Gallery, featuring the work of four very talented young artists. The salon-style arrangement is less salon and more a complete take-over of the small apartment, which has been put to good use by curators Alex Gartenfeld (who lives in the space), Matt Moravec and Joel Mesler (who sublets and runs the Spare Room, which is literally a spare room in the apartment). In the Spare Room, Ryan Sullivan’s visually arresting paintings command the viewer in, and upon closer inspection one gets a sense of the serious process involved here. Sullivan’s words on the process reveal his curiosity and possibly an inner mage: “In general my philosophy is to use the physical properties of paint to guide the work. The vast majority of painting follows fairly rigid technical guidelines… if you don’t follow them, paint does unpredictable things; it cracks, changes color, wrinkles… The pieces in this show are all made differently, but all three turn traditional technique on its head in order to make use of the natural — almost alchemical — tendencies of paint itself.”

Traditionally, Bonackers were the working class fisherman that lived for over three hundred years in Springs, an area just north of East Hampton. The name comes from Accabonac Harbor, where these baymen would fish for clams and scallops from Gardiner’s Bay. At one point, Bonackers had their own dialect, which was probably passed down from the English settlers who came from Kent and Dorchester in the early 1600’s. Up until the 1940’s this area had no public transportation and very few automobiles. Mainly a fishing and farming community, people would walk the ten miles into town if necessary from this tight-knit community. We all know how this story ends- here, more than most places in Long Island, a great deal of the local fisherman have been priced out of the area as real estate in the hamptons skyrocketed. However, a few Bonackers still remain, living year-round off of the land and isolating themselves from the summer home community that has overtaken the area. Growing up in Springs, Tara Israel decided to try to document what she could of not just Bonackers but all of the people who live year- round in Springs and East Hampton as way to preserve and honor some of the community and culture she grew up with. The project is very much underway with plans to photograph everyone from fisherman to historians, librarians, local artists and politicians. For the time being, she has a really good start going on with a mix of portraits and landscapes that are a lot more country than glitzy.

Katherine Krause: Why did you want to do this project?
Tara Israel: It started accidentally. I’ve always been a portrait photographer, but had been struggling to find my voice. I was home for winter break and just shot portraits of the people that I was with. My teacher, Joel Sternfeld really encouraged me to look at East Hampton on a deeper level, both as a supportive professor and as someone who took a few months to understand what I was trying to say. It was then that I realized how hard it was for viewers to step away from whatever concept of the “Hamptons” they may have and actually look at the stories reflected in this body of work as just people from a small town. There is a whole history that exists here separate from the seasonal community so it is quite frustrating to see that phenomenon shape every conversation and serve as the point in which everything else orbits around. There is a reason that most people from the East End will just tell strangers that they are from Long Island and not name a specific town. It has been much easier to just avoid the conversation because most people don’t understand.

Katherine: What does Bonacker mean to you?
Tara: A true, true Bonacker is related to someone in a family that a street named after them in East Hampton or Springs. They are the families that are mentioned in every local history book- the Lesters, Talmages, Kings, Bennetts, Barnes’, etc. The families that built the town and still run it. Many have lost their livelihood because of environmental and legislative changes, forcing them to move away or exist as a pretty closed community. Many new families, mine included, have come in and changed things. To be a Bonacker is a birthright, and I guess technically you need to have been born there. I was born at Southampton Hospital, however I’m still not entirely deserving of the title because my family is from elsewhere. That’s where the title of my project “(a)Bonac” came from. I’m local but also not. I’m a Bonacker, but also not (using the “a-” prefix). Everywhere and nowhere. I feel like the most public exploration of a Bonacker was in Men’s Lives by Peter Matthiessen. Many of the family compounds that Matthiessen mentioned in his book still exist, but not like how I understand them to have been when I was a child/ when the book was published.

Katherine: Do you think the summer community knows this other community exists?
Tara: Its not “this other community” -it is the community. My stepmom was a lawyer. She was in a meeting with some other lawyers in Nassau County one winter years ago. Before it began they were all making small talk and one of the lawyers started to talk about an article he read in the New York Times. He turned to her and asked if we got the Times “out there”. Jokingly she replied, “Yes, but a day late.” The other lawyer said “well when you read about this tomorrow…”. He totally believed her. Based on that story I don’t think most people understand what this town is. Heck, I feel like I’m only just beginning to understand it and I’ve lived here my entire life.

Katherine: What’s your favorite fun historical fact abot East Hampton you’d like to share?
Tara: I could go on and on about Pussy’s Pond in Springs, which is the location of the fresh water springs that my beloved hamlet is named after. Instead I want you to look up Hugh King. He taught local history at Springs School and also ran the Academic Enrichment Program there forever. He has retired from the school as people do and has devoted his life to town history and is the official Town Crier. Because of Mr. King I actually spent a summer in my early 20s giving tours at Hook Mill. It is because of him I know why Newtown Lane is so wide and why there are those wacky steps into the graveyards in town (both have to do with livestock). Everyone who grew up in Springs or East Hampton has a fantastic story about Mr. King. I want everyone to google “Hugh King” and envy every child that went through the local public school system when he was a teacher. Everyone I’ve shot that had him as a teacher still remembers something he said or did going back 20 years. Captain Kidd also buried treasure on Gardiner’s Island. I was given a tour of the island by Lyon Gardiner himself before he passed and he made sure to point out where it happened. There’s a plaque at the site. According to some book I read about the Hook Mill written a million years ago when I gave tours there the wood for the mill was (I quote) “floated over from Gardiners Island by two Indians and a Negro named Shemp.” Its all full circle.

Katherine: Where do you see this community headed in ten years or twenty years?
Tara: Who knows. I can say that its important for us to celebrate our local history and be proud of what we have gone through- good and bad- as a community. Even those who move away when they turn 18 this town made us who we are. Be proud.

Katherine: Do you think the fishing and clamming industry is doomed for the east end?
Tara: BP fucked us all. The commercial industry has been struggling for a while, both because of complicated tensions with ever changing laws and because of the economy, and environmental issues have only made this worse. Time will only tell how the oil catastrophe will affect this. Local farming is a separate conversation as that gets into inheritance tax, etc. There are fewer commercial operations, many turning to charter ventures. What I’ve been more exposed to personally is how it affects sport/ subsistence fishing. I do think that because of pollution and strict laws it will become more difficult to engage in fishing that way. There is a very high quality of life right now because many people know how to live off of local farms, gardens, hunting and fishing. Hopefully that will remain. I grew up near a commercial dock owned by my neighbors who often would give us fish that people would catch that day and gift to them. Recently there has been a lot of local fish gracing my plate caught by friends. There has been an active movement to revive the farming community, but so many things have affected big and small scale fishing operations. Erosion, pollution, climate change- all are very real concerns for the town. The East End is blessed to have had brilliant people like Larry Penny working on environmental issues for the town, but a million Larry Pennys can’t fix what BP did or climate change and what that may mean for our waters in the very near future. The industry is still an industry- boats still go out for both short and long trips. There will always be a demand for everything from bass to lobster to tuna to shellfish. It is just the complicated nature of an economy that is burdened by the weight of environment issues and legislation. As much as it is about the potential loss of an industry, it is also the potential loss of a tradition that has been passed down from generations. I recently stopped into the Marine Museum in Amagansett- a place I haven’t been since I was a child- and have been thinking about it ever since. As much as the industry has faded, it is equally worth discussing what it means to individual families who have bonded over fishing together or clam bakes. The thought that that it could all together vanish is distressing. It’s not dead yet though. Buy local fish or go out on charter boats and catch your own fish. You have people like the Vegessi sisters in Montauk that operate Lady Bones, following the tradition of their fathers boat Lazy Bones. Support your local fisherman.

Katherine: You mentioned this project, on a personal level was a way of giving back or making an amends to your town- do you care to elaborate on that?
Tara: I’ve gone around the world trying to “find myself” and I realized that I was here the whole time. I spent my youth rebelling against god knows what. Its a small town thing but I had this resentment that the reason I couldn’t get away was because the town was holding me back. In reality nothing was holding me back- I actually just didn’t want to be anywhere else. Just like the most loving family, you make mistakes and you take them for granted, but you have that luxury because they’re not going anywhere. This project is reaching out to the community that in one way or another really helped me overcome the obstacles I made for myself. I spent years apologizing for my mistakes. Now thats out of the way I’m finding it just as therapeutic to show gratitude via celebrating this magical town. I went to the East Hampton High School senior banquet one year and a kid in the limo made the toast “may the bridges we burn light the way to a brilliant future.” I never forgot that. I’ve burned all sorts of bridges over my lifetime, however I’ve worked hard and worked from the heart. I have never felt pressure to conform how I live my life yet I feel that I have been accepted, as have been my amends. This is a pretty accepting and forgiving place.

Katherine: Who are some of the people you plan on photographing?
Tara: I’m still very much connected to the people I grew up with, so I’ve just been shooting the people that are around. I’m starting to reach out to people that I may have lost touch with but were a large part of my youth and also people that represent the history of the town as a whole. I can explain all of these things but it isn’t until I show the images to people that they understand what I’m talking about. This will go on for at least another year or so- probably forever- but in the next few weeks I have shoots lined up with a bunch of people I grew up with, both true Bubs (Bonackers) and and locals by birth in the same first-generation boat as me. Some are working for the town, others are in the arts, running businesses, working for the schools, finishing up graduate degrees or dealing with changes to the local economy. A lot of people have pursued some really remarkable projects that I’ve been really excited to learn about, such as I-Tri Girls in East Hampton which is run by Allyson Follenius that is working on addressing issues faced by most teenage girls by training them to compete in triathlon.

Katherine: Is there anyone you would love to shoot for this project, if so- who?
Tara: I want to shoot the people of the Springs and East Hampton Fire Departments. It is a volunteer operation so in addition to everything else they have going on in their lives they volunteer to risk their lives for the town, as often did their parents. It is particularly challenging because of the nature of the calls they get- car fires caused by summer people not knowing how to drive on the beach, electrical issues in the older homes, etc. There are also a few local businesses that still exist as key points of my youth, like One-Stop and Barnes Store. I wish I had shot Lyon Gardiner before he passed. Hugh King is also at the top of my list- I’m just waiting to hear back from him. There was also this one janitor at the East Hampton Middle School- I don’t know his story but I’m obsessed with him. I see him driving around town and it always makes my day. All the kids loved him because he was such a nice guy. I swear I’m not actually a creep- its just what happens in a small town. You remember the most random things.

Katherine: Being born and raised here and now living in Manhattan- do you think you will ever come back to live out here full time?
Tara: I’ve always referred to the East End as “home.” I live in NYC but East Hampton is home. The idea of raising a family anywhere else seems just crazy to me. The history, the people, the resources, the opportunities, the schools… there needs to be a very good reason for my future not to bring me back to where it began. I was told years ago to be wary of compartmentalizing identity and a few people hiding behind the label of organized religion. We seek ways to put the ocean in a box. Ultimately the day comes when you have to choose between the ocean and the box. Often we are limited by the labels or practices we’ve adopted and we are forced to pick the box. I was told to always pick the ocean. East Hampton is my ocean.

Los Hombres de Teamo: Cuevas (left) and Sànchez

Deep in Mexico City, where a group of interdisciplinary designers are working together to make their country relevant in the global fashion market, a movement is afoot. At the forefront of this loose-knit syndicate is Teamo (Spanish for “I love you,” with the space removed; pronounced tay ah moh), the design partnership of former couple Rafael Cuevas and Roberto Sànchez. For the past four seasons the funky label have presented their shredded-hem-chic collections at one of Mexico City’s four fashion weeks to wide acclaim and international attention—tastemaker extraordinaire Humberto Leon of downtown style mecca Opening Ceremony has called in with fanfare—and, with growing invitations from the states and an NYC showroom on the horizon, now look to take the thing worldwide.

Schooled in the more parent-friendly arts of “Communications,” Sànchez, from Cuernavaca, met Cuevas, from Guadalajara, in Mexico City via MySpace. The networking site proved an effective to for their marketing and DJing careers (respectively) and the guys so adept in its use they became ‘experts’. “In fact,” says Cuevas, “when MySpace was huge in Mexico they used to invite us to give talks about it.” The tech-savvy duo, whose latest collection “Skate Witches,” takes as inspiration “that girl in high-school whose a little bit skate and a little bit goth,” are among the first in the web-phobic nation, wary of unreliable domestic shipping, to have a fully-functioning site and retail in the US. In what seems to be de rigueur for their milieu Cuevas and Sànchez are both multi-talented and allow their side work to influence their label. Cuevas is a musician and something of a showman who likes to choreograph his catwalk shows with exacting detail. Sànchez’s drawings of Courtney Love, Mary-Kate Olsen and especially Kate Moss on the label’s tee-shirts have caused something of a frenzy with stores clamoring for exclusive rights to carry specific renderings (Bonadrag won out on the Morrissey shirts and sells all that are to be had worldwide). Nor are they afraid of creative collaborations—their latest collection, SS10, will be presented in a video directed by their friend, the editor of Nylon Mexico.

Like many of their colleagues in the budding fashion scene the boys of Teamo are under 30 and grew up with an immediate awareness of fashion with the runways of Paris and Milan a mouse-click a way on their desktop. As Cuevas says, “Online made everything immediate. With that awareness we are pushed to be more creative, to compete on a global level.” So, in what has become a worldwide trend for artists, chefs and others seeking to reinvent themselves while holding themselves to a standard of authenticity, the designers of Mexico City’s nascent avant-garde looked inward, to their roots, to their country’s rich textile heritage and sartorial sensibilities, and sought to re-imagine them in contemporary terms. By comparison, “Jean-Paul Gaultier did a line inspired by Mexico a couple of years ago,” says Cuevas, “but it was pretty ‘folkloric.’” So, he implies, in deciding to do native Mexican style justice, Teamo had found their manifesto: to use Mexico’s design legacy and, well, make it cool. “For example we did a collection about Day of the Dead which is very important here. It is about not taking death too seriously. It was kind of scandalous, doing all black and white for Spring which in Mexico is usually all color. But we made it go from black to white, from death to life and it was very cool.” Chloë Sevigny thought so—she picked up a lucite bangle bedecked with skulls from the collection.

Carla Fernández in her showroom

To give us a sense of what is happening on the vanguard of this scene Teamo took us on a tour of their friends’ showrooms. We met Carla Fernández, whose Taller Flora label, housed in a gorgeous Art Nouveau mansion, specializes in hand-woven geometric pieces designed for multi-purpose use. Indeed, each separate, huipil and scarf, sewn at one of the indigenous co-ops with whom she has exclusive contracts, can be worn in three or four different ways, as she showed us. Celebrating the native talent in her country Fernández has brought in some of the best tailors from London to work with the Maya craftsmen to whom she promises steady work engagements at a rate many times that which they would receive selling to a middle man. No surprise then that this forward-thinking designer, presenting real, sustainable progress for (at last count) more than 150 indigenous laborers in the Mexican countryside is putting together an installation based on the “emancipation of women”.

Manhes modeling Manhes Y Massun in Massun's house

Isabelle Manhes and Sophie Massun are partners in Manhes Y Massun, an elegant womenswear line inspired by Manhes’s love of Golden Era Hollywood and Massun’s stunning Art Deco mansion home. As Manhes modeled foxy graphic pieces from their latest collection (“Electric Storm”), striding down the grand staircase of Massun’s ‘30s house to ooohs and aaahs, she talked about Dietrich and Ava Gardner as touchstones to the label. Like others in this group of friends, Manhes feels a great forward-moving energy among the young designers but posits a final breakthrough in the future. “We are wondering what will happen,” she says. “With sourcing of fabrics and placing pieces in stores, which is really difficult right now.” Noting that her label does exclusively special order at present, Manhes cites the country’s dated practice of consignment as a hugely prohibitive, and perhaps final, block to young designers’ growth.

Andrés Jimenez’s Mancandy, as do many other young brands, survives in part on the sponsorship it receives from textile giant Caltex—that and Jimenez’s many sleepless nights. After being inspired by his friend Sànchez to come to Mexico City and try his hand at designing a line Jimenez worked for 15 days straight and on the 16^th presented the 20 looks of his first collection. Named after his own flip nickname—Andy Mancandy—the label aspires to dress “the man everyone wants.”  His second collection won him the prestigious Lycra award and stylists came calling to dress Uma Thurman and others for the Spanish-language Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. Three years and five collections in, Mancandy is known for its unisex vibe—think boyfriend pants—and retails online and at cool spots in LA and NY. Not surprisingly—once you get to know this bunch—Jimenez is also the designer of his own very sleek website, photographer of his own lookbook and a million other things besides.

Andy "Mancandy" in his live/work atelier

Many of the designers, including Cuevas, have congratulated the new Mayor, Ebrard, himself the son of an architect, on his celebration and support of the arts. “I finally feel like my country is behind me,” Cuevas said, “and it is really exciting to see all these boys—gay boys and straight boys—going into design. That is a big deal for such a macho country.” At their Juarez district storefront, beneath their second floor offices and a third floor atelier under construction, Teamo introduced us to a few more brands including Fou Fou Chat, a punky flea-market inspired line of jewelry, and Paola Hernandez, a sleek eponymous line of mens and womenswear by the Mexican designer educated at London’s Central Saint Martins.

Throughout our tour the theme stays consistent: A global generation of Mexico’s young designers, brought up online want to make clothes inspired by their country palatable without. And, like any self-respecting movement, this one has a hub. The art school CENTRO where a four year degree in fashion design (or interior design or cinema studies for that matter) involves deep historical background and professional training. Liza Niles, the director of the textiles and fashion program at the university has brought in lecturers from the top of the top of the worlds of fashion photography and design to give the students there an education on par with her alma mater where she also taught, Parsons. The resulting energy and attention places labels like Teamo in a mentoring position for aspiring designers fresh from school. “The younger generation looks up to us,” says Cuevas. With the inroads they’ve made into the world market, it’s not hard to see why. And, he concludes, of the younger generation for whom Teamo are pioneers, if not the entirety of Mexican fashion, “They follow right behind us.”

Teamo portrait courtesy of Teamo. All other photos by Carlos Giesemann courtesy of Mexico City board of Tourism

What do you get when you combine art collector Peter Brant with artist Urs Fischer? You get “Oscar the Grouch”, Peter on fire, and a reason to visit Greenwich, Connecticut. The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, which opened it’s doors to the public last year, is currently exhibiting their first solo show with the work of Swiss artist Urs Fischer. Filling the three generous gallery spaces, this is a large concentration of Urs’ work, sitting in a converted apple barn in the midst of a manicured countryside. The work throughout the show vacillates between reproduction and pure destruction. Two of the three posh gallery spaces have enormous holes dug right through the floorboards. In the upper gallery, the cavity in the ground reads like an invitation from the grim reaper.

Flanked by three “dust bunny” paintings as well as a handful of Maurizio Cattelan’s taxidermy pigeons, Urs provides a humorous element of grit to an otherwise pristine space. The big brother version of the hole in located in the second gallery space, at the bottom of the stairs. You might experience slight vertigo as you make your way along the narrow lip of floor surrounding the concave center. Once you brave the hole, it leads you to an open doorframe, and you will most likely begin to laugh out loud. At least I did, as you peek into a miniaturized version of all the spaces you already walked through, down to almond sized exit signs and overhead lights. The shift in scale reminded me of Queen Mary’s dollhouse in Windsor’s castle. In both cases, luxury dwarfed and viewed from a vantage point few of us ever get to assume, from above. And then, as if to compliment our fleeting feeling of empowerment, we enter into Peter Brant’s living room, or a reproduction of Peter Brant’s living room, which has been compressed into photographic wallpaper, and covers the room like a Baroque trompe l’oeil. Every detail of the original private space – photos on a table of the collector with his family, or him alone on horseback, his books and his trophies sitting on the bookshelves, vases on the mantle piece, his Jeff Koons lobster and a near by Andy Warhol – all of it, reproduced for us to view. In the center of the room, stands a wax sculpture of Peter Brant himself, complete with a wick at the crown of his head, lit and burning. And just in case you still didn’t get it, the bottom half of the grave cut out of the floors upstairs, juts from the ceiling above the burning head. The riddle to most of the work in the collection answers itself almost as soon as it’s been asked. The only one left hanging is the name of the show itself, “Oscar the Grouch”. Which one of us is the monster in the trashcan?