Honoring Dan's Papers Cover Artist Lili Almog
There are at least two surprising facts about this week's cover image. One, it's an overhead photograph of National, Sebonack and Shinnecock golf courses. Secondly, its photographer, Lili Almog, who incorporated her own drawing into the image, is not particularly known for taking pictures of golf courses. Rather, she is known for subjects as varied as Carmelite nuns, Chinese Muslim women and destruction of Kibbutz structures in Israel. While Almog's images have been diverse, certain recurring themes have also evolved: the importance of landscape and the environment, women in their own private spaces, and the idea of intimacy.
Intimacy is an especially evocative concept. We surmise that Almog's Chinese women form a close connection to material needs and the environment in order to survive. Conversely, her Carmelite nuns are absorbed in monastic seclusion; their intimacy comes from bonding with internal elements. (Almog's photographs often show the nuns with their heads down or turned away from the camera.) Even her barren buildings, destroyed by the Carmel Fire in Israel, exist by themselves, devoid of a close union with both the land and the era that created them.
ART REVIEW: "#NSFW: Bodies" Explores What It Means To Be Human. Gabrielle Selz for Hamptons art Hub.
In 1959, the great theologian Paul Tillich wrote in his catalogue essay for the "New Images of Man" show at MoMA: "Whenever a new period is conceived in the womb of the preceding period, a new image of man pushes towards the surface and finally breaks through to find its artists."
Brick by brick, two artists are creating an alternate Lego reality
When gallery-goers stop in front of photographs from Nathan Sawaya and Dean West's In Pieces series, they often fail to spot a secret hidden in plain sight. Take the Edward Hopper-esque image above, Bus, shot on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. It looks like a naturalistic street scene. But look closer, and you'll see the dog is made out of Lego. Oh, and the mannequin in the left-hand window? Lego, too. In fact every one of the compositions involves at least one Lego component: Sawaya handles the bricks, West the camera.
Deciding Not to Remove Sacred Larry's Legs
What's white, 16.1 feet tall, female, sexy, on the lawn of a house in Sag Harbor and looking like it doesn't know if it is coming or going?
Why, it's Larry's Legs, a sculpture originally made as part of a larger work by the late Larry Rivers of Southampton. It's owned by Janet Lehr and her partner Vered, both of Vered Art Gallery in East Hampton, and it's their house where the lawn and the sculpture are.
Art Has Legs - Barbara Goldsmith
It may seem an insignificant power spat in the small village of Sag Harbor, on Long Island. It isn't. It is a quintessential example of a continuing, centuries-old battle over what can be deemed art, what can't and who can rightfully judge the difference. I should say who among the living, for time has a way of sorting it all out.
For about four years, close to the side of their white clapboard home, the gallery owners Ruth Vered and Janet Lehr displayed a Larry Rivers mixed-media construction of a pair of attenuated fiberglass legs, 16 feet tall, modeled on a 1969 work called "40 Feet of Fashion." Rivers, the provocative painter, sculptor and filmmaker, died in 2002. By 2010, a Rivers painting had sold for $1,142,500; that year, Fred W. Thiele Jr., the Sag Harbor village attorney and a state assemblyman, decided that Rivers' "Legs" - which had long been established and exhibited as a work of art - was, in fact, a "structure." As such, it was not a "conforming use," according to the village code. (Mr. Thiele dug in his heels and told a Times reporter, "It's a structure, and a structure is a structure is a structure.")
UPDATED: Sag Harbor ZBA Stalls "Legs" Decision; Suggests Compromise.
The "Legs" of Sag Harbor will not be walking anywhere. At least for the next month, that is.
On Tuesday night, the Sag Harbor Zoning Board of Appeals tabled Ruth Vered and Janet Lehr's application for variances to allow Larry Rivers' sculpture, "Legs," to remain on the side of their Madison Street home. While all members of the board, save Michael Bromberg who has recused himself from the case, expressed reservations about the precedent they would set in allowing the sculpture, deemed a structure by the village building inspector, to remain on Lehr and Vered's property line, chairwoman Gayle Pickering suggested a compromise might be reached in this matter after literal years of debate.
When a Story gets bigger than it's britches
Sag Harbor Express, March 16 2012.
By Christine Bellini
Serendipity would have it, the very week Brian Boyhan, editor and publisher of this very newspaper, The Sag Harbor Express, asked me to write a column "on the media," I was interviewed by "the media" in my capacity as neighbor and all-around opinion monger, on what my thoughts were concerning the Village Zoning Board's ruling on "The Legs" erected as sculpture alongside a private residence on Henry Street.
Plan for famed 'Legs' statue draws crowd
An oversized pair of legs brought a standing-room crowd to the small Sag Harbor Zoning Board of Appeals hearing room Tuesday night, with residents filling every seat, standing against the walls, and flowing out into the hallway.
Nearly 70 people wanted to talk about a request by Ruth Vered and Janet Lehr to legalize their controversial "Legs" statue, a 16-foot-tall casting of a pair of women's legs by local artist Larry Rivers. The legs appear to be walking along the side of the women's home.
While the formal application was a technical request for a variance to lot line regulations and height limits, the comments expanded to question the entire zoning code, the role of art in the village and even the nature of Sag Harbor itself.
Sag Harbor's 'Legs' Trudge Through Zoning Issues
The tall, toned "Legs" sculpture striding alongside a Madison Street church-turned-house in Sag Harbor continues to trudge through a bramble in which zoning requirements and calls of artistic legacy and expression are brushing against each other uncomfortably.
Hamptons 'Legs' might walk
A Bitter battle over whether artist Larry Rivers' landmark sculpture "Legs" will take a hike from its current home in Sag Harbor is about to come to a head after years of debate.
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