After his mother died from cancer, Dr. Robert Jackler of Stanford University worked through his grief by searching out print tobacco ads from the '20s through the '50s. Appearing in publications like Life and the Saturday Evening Post, the ads featured such cigarette-smoking luminaries as Rock Hudson, John Wayne, Joe DiMaggio, Ronald Reagan, and Santa Claus. And of course there were plenty of models hired to pose as doctors and dentists for ads with slogans......

Photo by Jake Dobkin. London street-art gallery scenesters are taking over part of Bowery starting tomorrow. The gallery Lazarides (owned by Banksy's agent, of the same name) is coming cross the pond and setting up a pop-up gallery in a former restaurant supply store at 282 Bowery. The show is titled The Outsiders, and the works will be housed both inside and outside of the space. Here's what to expect:“Lazarides promises to cut to......

We're one step closer to a new Grand Army Plaza—earlier this week, the Design Trust for Public Space began installing an outdoor exhibit in the center of Grand Army Plaza which will officially open tomorrow at a public celebration. The Reinventing Grand Army Plaza installation presents the top 30 entries of an ideas competition organized by the non-profit. The top 30 were narrowed down, from over 200 entries submitted worldwide, by an anonymous jury. Marty......

Last night Jesse Frohman's "In Bloom" exhibit opened at SoHo Grand's gallery, and Papermag describes it as "epic," twice (doubly epic!). The show features Frohman's now 14-year-old images of Kurt Cobain, and allegedly some photos of flowers. He told the website, "This shoot was supposed to be a five hour shoot. We had to do it in 15 minutes. It was crazy." It took place in NYC just before Cobain's death, and the singer arrived......

On Saturday, Fort Greene photographer Erin Patrice O'Brien unveiled her new exhibit at Brooklyn's Corridor Gallery. The images on display were not that of her normal clientele (she used to take portraits of celebrities), but of the young mothers living in New York. She told the Daily News, “I was interested in someone who never gets their story told as opposed to someone who always has the limelight." This wasn't the limelight that Diablo Cody......

Images courtesy of the New York Historical Society. The New York Historical Society has brought a couple of paintings out to the streets. The mini installation of sorts is comprised of their portraits (replicas, of course) of Abraham Lincoln and Peter Cooper; both are currently on display at the Astor Place Triangle. They note the significance of the location, saying "the Astor Place Triangle stands directly opposite The Cooper Union: the distinguished school established......

Beginning today, the New York Transit Museum (the only museum dedicated to public transportation in the nation!) will start showing off their goods. Their collection includes recent arrivals and "the best and most unusual of the Museum’s acquisitions," as well as the stories behind them. Ever wonder how they get their hands on these pieces of commuting collectibles?Collecting at the Transit Museum tends to be a bit different from the way most museums collect. Often......

The New Museum unveiled its new exhibit, After Nature, yesterday. Running through September 21st, they say it's a departure from "the fictional documentaries of Werner Herzog" and instead draws inspiration (and its title) from W.G. Sebald's book...though rapture, ruins and environmental disasters also acted as muses. Bringing together 26 international artists on three gallery floors, expect to take in paintings, photographs, installations, films, writings, and living sculptures. Perhaps the most jarring piece is the headless......

There'll be an opening reception tomorrow night (at 7:55 p.m.) for photographer Miru Kim's Naked City Spleen show at Gestarc Gallery in Red Hook. The work is part of Kim's ongoing series of photographs that depict her nakedly exploring abandoned subway stations, tunnels, sewers, and even the now-demolished sugar refinery in Red Hook. Now all she needs is a shot of herself in the IKEA cafeteria. Also on view is a film and video installation......

The Museum of the City of New York unveils a new exhibit today "coinciding with the 2008 election and providing insight into New York's often pivotal role in American electoral politics." Campaigning for President: New York and the American Election covers presidential politics spanning back to the inauguration of George Washington on lower Manhattan's Wall Street. Below are some of the pieces that will be on display, as well as some facts from the press......

Opening tomorrow as a counterpoint to the Red Hook Ikea kick-off is a photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library that chronicles the disappearing industrial sites along Brooklyn's waterfront. Called "Twilight on the Waterfront: Brooklyn's Vanishing Industrial Heritage," the photographs are the work of Nathan Kensinger, who has compiled an impressive body of work over the last five years by sneaking into dilapidated properties around Brooklyn. The series vividly documents the accidental beauty of decaying......

Coinciding with the opening of Governor's Island, the Emergence Art Show launched on May 31st; the exhibit is housed in a couple of the abandoned mansions on the island. The summer exhibition includes:Experimental and participatory art involving more than 30 artists/collectives, with a strong emphasis on audience and artist interaction. Using the theme, "Creative Pioneers in Uncharted Territory," exhibitors will use the context, history, and recent steps towards revitalization, or "emergence," of Governors Island as......

Last weekend the Swoon and Tennessee Jane collaborative exhibit, Portrait of Silvia Elena, opened at Honey Space (Suckapants has some nice photos). The installation is a memorial to Silvia Elena, a 17-year old girl who was murdered in Juarez, Mexico, in 1995 -- one of the many brutally killed there since the early 90s. Housed underground, one must descend through a hole in the floor to get to the exhibit. There's a ladder to aid......

In March, simultaneous installations in two Chelsea galleries – one called The Assassination of Barack Obama, the other The Assassination of Hillary Clinton – were canceled “due to extreme legal pressures,” according to LVHRD. This morning the artist, Yazmany Arboleda, again attempted to hang his work in an empty storefront across from the New York Times building and got as far as putting up the name of the exhibit in the window before the......

Chashama and Chris Rubino team up to present, "The Center of Something," an exhibit centered around the artist's "take on New York as a destination for both visiting and living." Since Chashama is in Times Square, the exhibit itself will become a temporary tourist attraction itself. But will the locals or the tourists be the ones flocking to it?The exhibit is modeled after the dozens of stores in the neighborhood selling the same inane......

The Gowanus Canal, ripe with gonohorrea, served as a very unlikely muse for artist David Eustace. He worked on his Gowanus-drenched art project for two years, so technically he started before the canal's STD was diagnosed (but really, who didn't think it a possibility at that point). So, in the market for some art? These pieces were, in fact, dipped in the canal -- and will be again!The exhibition revolves around four large works......

Tomorrow, iconic photographs of American presidents over the years will be on display at Federal Hall. The exhibit, "The American President," is put together by the Associated Press, which is showcasing over 80 photographs of presidents "at war and at ease, in victory and in defeat, confronting national crises and facing personal scandals, running for office and leading the country on the world stage"--and photographs of this year's presidential candidates on the campaign trail. The......

John Bachman’s lithograph of Olmsted and Vaux’s design via Racontours. 150 years ago today the Board of Commissioners of Central Park chose the “Greensward plan” submitted by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux for the design of America’s first major urban public park. Except for the rock outcrops, the park is almost entirely man-made; the meadows were swamps until the designers had them drained and dumped tens of thousands of cartloads of soil to fill......

© MURAKAMI, a retrospective of the work of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, opens Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, where it was on view until February, the exhibit primarily focuses Murakami's work between 1991 and 2000, when the artist began exploring "his own reality through an investigation of branding and identity." (One additional work, Murakami's 6,613 pound, 18 foot-tall Oval Buddha sculpture, will be on......

Sure, you know Dave Eggers as the celebrated author and founder of McSweeney's, that plucky independent book-publishing house in San Francisco, but were you aware that back in the day he was on track to be an art curator? While it’s been a long time since he’s organized an exhibit, he’s in town now to put together a show at apexart that explores, in Eggers's words, “a very small and specific type of artmaking exemplified......

Photos © John Coffer Noah Kalina, the photographer who made a splash by taking a snapshot of himself every day for years, now has some unusual competition: John Coffer, a master of nineteenth-century tintype photography, is unveiling his series “The Daily Tintype” tonight at Gerald Peters Gallery on East 78th Street. The willfully anachronistic exhibit features 365 tintypes from his daily life, one per day from 2007. Coffer (pictured above) himself is quite a character,......

The tenth edition of The Armory Show, the International Fair of New Art, starts tomorrow and continues through Sunday at Pier 94, on the West Side at 55th Street. The massive show hosts over 150 galleries and nonprofit organizations from around the world; here's a small taste of some of the 2,000 works on display.......

Will 2008 be the year frustrated artists stop whining about the Whitney Biennial for being too cliquey, too scattershot, too short on women, minorities, and criminally overlooked artists like the ones doing all the griping? Hardly, but this year’s themeless Biennial, which opened last night, goes a long way toward appeasing the disgruntled hipster artist crowd with a big, rowdy slate of installations and events at the Park Avenue Armory through March 26th. Curators Shamim......

"The Blue Wall of Violence" courtesy of MoCADA Yesterday, The Daily News printed an article that began, "A cop-bashing art exhibit at a taxpayer-funded museum in Brooklyn portrays the city's Finest as trigger-happy racists who have put bull's-eyes on the backs of black New Yorkers." The exhibit is a retrospective of the artist Dread Scott's work called "Welcome to America," and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) is calling the paper out......

Photos via the Guggenheim Museum. Everyone's bursting with anticipation for the opening of Cai Guo-Qiang's new exhibit at the Guggenheim; the site-specific installation serves as a mid-career retrospective and is now just four short days away from being unveiled. The NY Times has a lengthy profile of the artist (who has lived in New York since 1995) which begins with this insight: "his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of......

Paintings by Jasper Johns, from left: Periscope (Hart Crane), 1963; Flag, 1958; Winter, 1986 (all photographs by Jamie M. Stukenberg / Professional Graphics Inc. Jasper Johns, a South Carolina native currently residing in Connecticut, first came to New York City in 1949 when he (briefly) attended Parsons School of Design. In 1954 he painted his first flag picture, and by 1958 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Today, The......

SKATE: Free skating at Bryant Park just got...more free! Now you can get free rental skates every Wednesday provided you are one of the first 100 people to get over to The Pond Exhibit Area. 6 to 7:30pm // Bryant Park // Free MOVIE: If you have 5+ hours to spare, catch the uncut version of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, which he called “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.” The original......

In April of this year Marvin Franklin, a subway track inspector, was struck and killed by a G train. It quickly came to light that Franklin, who had worked underground for 22 years, was also an accomplished artist. He held an arts degree from FIT and dreamed of opening his own gallery one day, giving the proceeds to the homeless (which he once was, and who were frequent subjects in his sketchbooks). Franklin's art......

Recently, legend became reality when a 10-story building in SoHo was being converted to a luxury condo. Unearthed in the walls was a large mural created by graffiti pioneers Fab Five Freddy and Futura 2000.The artwork contains a variety of images and writing executed in spray paint, grease pencil, magic marker and whatever else was on hand — in silver, gold, pink and red. There are cartoonlike pictures of a bomber airplane, images of a......

Metro has an interview with NYU professor and Department of Sanitation anthropologist-in-residence, Robin Nagle. The piece comes on the cusp of “Loaded Out: Making a Museum,” an exhibition Nagle helped curate which focuses on the DSNY's history and its vital role in shaping the city. The exhibit opens tomorrow and will run for a full month, but she mentions this is just the first step in creating a Sanitation Museum.Police and firefighters have museums. Why......