Ryantown, etc.

I went by the Ryantown installation/pop-up store this weekend, which is well worth visiting if you're in the area. There's a lot to see and the photos don't do it justice. I like Rob's work. There's an exuberance and playfulness about it that is, frankly, heartening, but there's also an acknowledgment of darkness and danger that tempers the sweetness. Plus, paper cutting at his level of intricacy is totally cool. The space itself is pretty great, with tons of light and a combination of framed work and construction paper cut outs all over the walls.

It ended up being a big art-consumption weekend for me. I also went to see these incredibly gorgeous, swoon-inducing photographs of mid-century New York by Paul Himmel. The ones of the crowds in Grand Central especially were absolute knockouts in person. And I finally managed to get to the Whitney for the Jenny Holzer show, which was powerful and disorienting and much more political than what I was expecting, based on what I knew of her earlier work. Definitely worth checking out, especially since you can go look at giant vinyl Claes Oldenburg cellos and sandwiches on the second floor afterward to balance it out. AND I went to see a play, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which was hysterically funny and incredibly well done and featured a friend of a friend as the narrator who gets killed a couple of times.