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by Maggie Perez at 8:44 pm 2006-05-26
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For those who like to gawk at big-name celebs, I recently went into the glitter-strewn trenches at the Whitney Art Party, an annual silent auction benefit in New York. Among the sightings were Chloe Sevigny (She gets around — I saw her on my block the other week during the Tribeca Film festival), Eva Mendez (whom I didn’t recognize but is incredibly beautiful) and Moby, who later jumped up on stage during a live “karaoke” performance.

As glamorous as it may sound, it’s no fun circling around hawk-like trying to snap pretty people’s pictures (especially when you’re not even sure who they are). Though the party did take a turn for the better when a bombshell singer took the stage to do a dead-on rendition of Janis Joplin’s “ Take a Another Piece of My Heart”. For the full blow-by-blow click here.

Matmos

In other Whitney-related news, I saw a great performance by Matmos and So Percussion at a Whitney Live event (sort of like Free First Thursdays but with a longer wait time to get in). Matmos is an experimental electronic music duo made up by Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt. Schmidt is part of the conceptual art department of the San Francisco Art Institute and together the two have worked with Bjork on a number of projects. Teamed up with So Percussion, an experimental (you guessed it!) percussion group, they rocked the house to a packed crowd, and served as the perfect intro to an evening of wandering through the galleries and catching a last few moments with this year’s (also somewhat wayward) Biennial.

Update: For those who just can’t get enough, I finally uploaded the pictures from BOTH these events (Art Party and Matmos) to my flickr site. Enjoy!

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Hi, this is Maggie again (New York correspondent and WACTAC alum). After posting about flickr I remembered I forgot to add a link to one of my favorite photographers from the Minneapolis area: massdistraction. I love how she always refers to her six-year-old son as her “little man” and takes amazing pictures of things like plastic toys that have been left abandoned on the stairs.

smziggurat_0605181626568.am.jpg

Susan Weil, Ziggurat, 1986

In other news, I recently did an interview with Susan Weil. At first, when I was asked to do the interview I had never heard of her work, but it turns out she was a friend and contemporary of Pollock and de Kooning and had a major influence on the work of Robert Rauschenberg, who she married back in the 50’s. When I discovered all this and saw her amazing contributions to abstract and figurative painting, I thought it was outrageous that her work has garnered so little attention after all these years.

The last straw was when her name didn’t appear on a Wikipedia search, so for the first time I was compelled to write my own Wikipedia article. You can also check out the interview above to hear Weil’s own thoughts on how women artists have been overlooked over the years. Best of all, she’s still doing incredible work today.

 
 
by Maggie Perez at 12:55 am 2006-05-18
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Don’t know if I need an intro, but anyway I’m a proud WACTAC alum who’s now crusin’ around New York (on her bike). I’m a big fan of the flickr.com online photo community, and just this morning my friend — who is also addicted to the site — sent me a link to a great newyorquino’s page who was doing a photo shoot in the Walker’s sculpture garden. The end result:

Coach Said Not To Walker Art.jpg

Coach Said Not To Walker Garden

It seems he was taking pictures of a band called “Coach Said Not To.” I checked out his other photos and they were wonderful as well. I highly recommend seeing more of linus (especially his doors series) and poking around flickr in general. It’s a highly addictive activity.

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