Inside Out in Times Square

WHAT I’M WEARING // YASO Faux Leather Jacket // H&M Blouse // MAVI Jeans (Old) // CHINESE LAUNDRY Leopard Loafers (old, via Delia’s) // HURLEY Backpack // JUSTFAB Sunglasses

Last Friday, Jim and I took our friends Gina and Mark to MOMA and then headed slightly cross-town to Times Square.  The street artist JR currently has the Inside Out Project set up there and we wanted to check it out and hopefully get to participate.

JR is best known for his portraits, so as part of this project he’s taking portraits of New Yorkers throughout the 5 boroughs and installing them in areas around the city.  To make the process crazy efficient, they have a fully outfitted photography studio truck, so they’ve been moving the truck from neighborhood to neighborhood.  If you visit their Facebook Page, the portraits done around the Rockaways and other Sandy stricken areas are so powerful it makes me well up.  I highly recommend checking it out.

We had heard the photo truck was in Times Square so we took a quick walk over to see if we could participate.  Sadly, they weren’t there due to a 10k race being set up for the weekend.  But we still had a great time enjoying the incredible weather and checking out all the portraits pasted to the sidewalks.

Gina and I also wanted to take the opportunity to take our own portraits amongst the portraits.  How meta, right?

The Inside Out Project is supposed to be in Times Square through May 10th. Jim and I are still hoping to make it there one day after work to get ours done. If you participate you have the option to either have it pasted at the site, or to take it home with you. We’d love to have the portraits for our apartment, so fingers crossed we’ll be able to make it happen!

Single Fare 3

On February 13th, Jim and a slew of other artists had work featured in the Single Fare 3 show at RH Gallery in NYC. Jim and I attended the opening and afterwards went out and grabbed a bite to eat. It was a fun, weekday date night in the city.

Single Fare 3 is unique in that it’s an open call art show. The only real criteria is whatever artwork you submit has to you the NYC Metrocard as the basis for the piece. It’s a really interesting show concept and as a result this is their third year holding the show and several well established artists submit pieces.

At the opening, during the first hour pieces sell at $200. After, everything sells for $100. We arrived during the first hour and were surprised at how many pieces we already sold during the first choice hour.

There were thousands of entries and each and every one of them as unique as the other. People painted on the metro cards, made sculptures out of them, or re-purposed them. These are some of my favorite images from this fun evening out.

Jim’s pieces at the show.

All this art talk makes me so bummed I missed Armory in March!

Pinning / Bedroom Redesign Inspiration

As part of Jim and my Cleaning House project, one big part of the project is re-designing our bedroom. We had re-designed our apartment back around 5 years ago immediately after we got married, and the bedroom was the first room we did. Somehow between doing the bedroom and the rest of the apartment, our tastes changed and now our bedroom makes no cohesive sense to the rest of the apartment. It’s really bizarre. For example, our bedroom’s color palette is sage green and dark brown and the ENTIRE rest of the apartment is gray, white and different shades of purple.

So our goal is to make our bedroom a cozier version of the rest of the apartment. I started a dedicated board on Pinterest . Here’s some of my favorites so far.

Are you on Pinterest? You can follow me and my pins here.

Go Brooklyn Open Studios

Last weekend, my husband Jim participated in GO Brooklyn Open Studios. The event is organized by the Brooklyn Museum, and the way it works is local artists throughout the borough open up their studios for the public to tour and view their art.

I helped Jim man the studio both Saturday and Sunday and the turnout was awesome! Despite the horrendous down pour on Saturday, we were really surprised by how many people still came out to view everyone’s art. Jim also had lots of our friends come out to support him and see his art for the very first time as well.

As a fun project, Jim took polaroids of a lot of the people who came through with plans to post them on the wall in his studio. It was a big hit. Everyone loves having their photo taken, especially polaroids. He also provided refreshments and snacks, which I thought was a nice touch.

Most importantly, his recent body of work is incredible, and I am so excited he finally had an opportunity to share it with the public. He’s so talented, and I can’t wait to see where he takes some of his series and concepts.

Old City Philly

As mentioned in my post yesterday, Jim and I took a quick detour to the Old City District of downtown Philly on our way home to Brooklyn.  Here are some of my favorite shots from our quick, hour long walk.

Chelsea Gallery Hop

The day Jim and I visited the High Line extension, we decided to check out a few galleries in Chelsea. There are literally hundreds of galleries in that small area, so there was a lot of art to see, both street art and traditional media.

I honestly went to so many galleries and saw so much art that I don’t remember the names of everything that I saw and visited.

The highlight of the day for sure was seeing Tauba Auerbach’s show at the Paula Cooper Gallery. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, it’s very technique oriented. She’s best known for her “folds series”, which are absolutely stunning in person. At this show she also featured some new woven canvases which were pretty incredible and intricate.

Other highlights was the Pace Prints gallery showing works from Shepard Fairey to Chuck Close, and an amazing Avedon photography show at the Gagosian Gallery.

I wasn’t allowed to take photos in a lot of the galleries we visited, but these are some of the best shots I was able to sneak.

Considering how hot it was that day (90+ degrees and humid as hell), this piece outside of Printed Matter was the highlight of my day.

Week According to Instagram

Clockwise from top left: My recent breakfast obsession, gluten-free granola with berries and almond milk // After years of having gross siding on my apartment building, my landlord is finally adding a brick facade (and a nice one at that!).  It’s like a new apartment without having to move! // Driving to my homeland, Long Island // Finally seeing the Hunger Games movie! // Taking my Mom to see the movie and for a belated Mother’s Day lunch // My favorite studded sandals, still going after 3 summer seasons now // Impromptu trip to UCB East to see improv prior to a late night concert // AZELIA BANKS CONCERT!!! OMG Amazing! // Confetti and ball drop finale at the Azelia Banks concert.

Here’s some of the highlights of this past week, according to Instagram.

If you’re on Instagram, you can follow me at @BrooklynBliss

Whitney Biennial 2012

Jim and I have been on somewhat of an art kick lately. The last day of the Whitney Biennial was last Sunday, so we decided to check it out.

All in all, I wasn’t blown away by any of the pieces in the show, but there was still a lot of great art to look at. In particular, my favorite piece was an installation with a room filled with baseballs and a very serene soundtrack playing. It was quite stunning, especially being it consumed you as soon as you stepped off the elevator.

Another highlight of the show was this installation of this animatronic dummy who would speak in this incredibly creepy voice. I for the life of me couldn’t figure out what the piece meant, but it was so creepy while I was in there a kid came in and was so terrified started screaming and broke down crying. Does that being the highlight make me a bad person?

Wythe Hotel, Vice and Faile

I can’t believe I went to this event and tool these photos almost a month ago! Time seriously flies. I’ve been so busy lately traveling for work that I’ve had zero time to post and edit photos. Makes me totes sad.

The Wythe Hotel very recently opened up in my neighborhood, and a few weeks back they held a party with Vice Magazine to show off the hotel, as well as to showcase some works by the very talented street art collective Faile. Jim and I had a blast, enjoying the free cocktails and making some new friends.

Jim and I both have been trying to make it a point to get out more and go to local events. There are so many in our neighborhood at any given time, it’s a crime for us not to check out at least one a week. It’ll be so much easier for me once I’m not traveling so much and my schedule goes back to normal again.

Office Desk Makeover

My original design concept I created on my Moodboard App

One of my big 2012 intentions was to re-design my work spaces, both at my office and at home. Since I’m a very visual person, and since I spend so much of my time working, it was important to me to create a space that was visually exciting to me that I’d be exited going to spend 8-10 hours a day in.

My work (i.e. real, not home) office is somewhat unique, in that it’s housed in a warehouse. The last design overhaul of the space was done in the late 80’s, so it’s in dire need of updating. While I’d love to entirely re-design the entire office right now, now’s not the best time considering the economy and other factors. I’m continuing to collect ideas and formulate an inexpensive plan to refresh everything, but in the meantime took on my individual workspace as a challenge to see what I could us utilizing what we already had in place.

Luckily the colors of my office are shades of gray, which I’m drawn to anyway. Pretty much my entire apartment is painted in a warm, gray tone. It’s my preferred neutral. Our office is also set up that there’s built in desks and cubicles, so no matter how much I may love to have a beautiful, white parsons desk, it ain’t happening. So I tackled my own corner first as a project to see what I could do to freshen things up a bit while working with what I have.

First thing I decided on was a color palette. Starting with gray as my base, I decided I also wanted to include black and white, introduce graphic stripes as a pattern, and use silver as my metal (since my computer monitor was already silver). I could later accent with bright colors should I want to, without being stuck with those colors forever.

Here’s the overall space before, and then after.

Most of the items I purchased at Ikea, including the magnet board (which I painted the stripes on), magnets, potted plant, pencil cup (which is really a vase), and tissue box. The small white desk organizer I found on Etsy. I also changed out my file sorter, which is a must have for me with an old vintage steel one I found in our supply closet that was being unused. Lucky for me it looks nicer than my old one and is black, which goes with my color scheme.

Looking at these photos now, I see what a cluttered nightmare my original desk was (at least for me). Everything was very haphazard. As you can see in the photos, when I’d have a cold I’d use toilet paper I’d steal from the bathroom instead of real tissues. What kind of impression does that set for my colleagues! Gross.

Eventually once I get through archiving everything in the notebooks next to the file sorter, those will be off my desk and clearing up more space. I’m all about having less clutter lately.

I cleared all the junk off the shelf near the ugly blinds so as not to draw more attention to the blinds. Seems to work. I also got a cute potted plant to improve my desk’s feng shui, and got an actual tissue box. So no more toilet paper for me! I’m so thankful for this now that it’s allergy season.

Probably one of the most dramatic changes I made was my message board and how I use it. I had an ugly, maroon pin board I had inherited when I took over the space, and I cluttered it with images of past work trips, time with my husband, random family images, and other crap.

Quite frankly after a while I got annoyed looking at photos of myself looking so “young”.  I not too long ago read a great article on photos people display in their workspace and how it relates to feng shui and your goals and aspirations. Snapshots of past events have a tendency to keep you there, in the past. Why waste that space on the past and why not focus it instead on the future? So I replaced that board with a great, graphic striped magnet board that now stores photos of destinations I’ll be visiting later this year, various visual reminders and images of goals (owning a brownstone in Brooklyn!), as well as various important work reference materials.

The finishing touches included my desk organizers. My pencil cup is absolutely adorable and was actually a tiny vase I found at Ikea. I also love my vintage mod desk organizer. It spirals out and you can use it to store everything from white out, post its, paper clips, and more. I love that it keeps everything concealed, yet accessible.

Surprisingly enough, my entire re-design was incredibly inexpensive.  Makes me upset at myself I didn’t finish this project sooner!

So I think I’ve geeked out enough on my workspace. My next project is my home office, which is getting the same exact design attention.

What have you guys done to make your work space more “you”?