Last month, the brilliant British artist/mapmaker Jenni Sparks released a brand new hand-drawn map of Paris. Sparks, who is known for her fabulous maps of London, new York City, San Francisco and Berlin, spends months pounding the pavement, visiting landmarks and interviewing locals to gather information and create her painstakingly detailed maps. Prints of the Paris map can be purchased here
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If you are considering a visit to New York City, and if you love music, you should know that next month NYC’s fantastic Museum of Modern Art is launching an extraordinary retrospective on the work of Iceland’s greatest export, Bjork. The exhibition will cover more than two decades of the artist’s daringly original solo projects. It will chronicle her career through sound installations, films, objects, costumes, technology, and instruments. Special museum spaces will be created to showcase sound and video works commissioned by MoMA for the exhibition.
The show will run from March 8 through June 7, 2015, and will coincide with five live performances around NYC. Entry to the special Bjork show will be included in the museum’s general admission ticket, but timed tickets will be required for segments of the show, and will be on a first-come-first-served basis. You can get more information at moma.org.
Fans may enjoy this hour-long BBC documentary from a few years back.
The former Chrissoleveni bank building in the heart of Bucharest, Romania, has been transformed into a bibliophile’s dream bookstore. Carturesti Carusel , or carousel of light, covers six floors of the grand 19th century building, with more than 10,000 titles, thousands of albums and DVDs, a café under a massive skylight, an events space, and an art gallery. Just launched on February 12th, the stunning bookstore is located in a trendy pedestrian zone with hip coffee houses, fashion retailers, bars, and theaters.
This month the iconic magazine The New Yorker is celebrating its 90th anniversary. To mark the milestone, the publication is being printed with nine different covers. Popular artists, including Peter Mendelsund, Roz Chast, Carter Goodrich, and Kadir Nelson, have riffed on The New Yorker’s first cover mascot, the monocle dandy Eustace Tilley.
I have to admit that I was dazzled by my first view of Las Vegas from a plane, but photographer Vincent Laforet’s images of Sin City from 10,000 feet at night are truly breathtaking . Taken while literally hanging out of the side of a helicopter, the brilliant photos may challenge your preconceptions about Vegas.
The increasing use of LED lighting on casinos, hotels, restaurants and shops, along with the old school neon signage create surreal landscapes that look more like a sci-fi film or a video game.
Los Angeles-based writer and map enthusiast Eric Brightwell has been creating some wonderfully idiosyncratic, hand-drawn maps of his city neighborhood by neighborhood. Under the enigmatic sobriquet Pendersleigh & Son Cartography, the project explores the diverse enclaves and corners of the sprawling metropolis. You can see more of the maps and even buy prints online.
Hand-tinted tourist postcards are just a sample of the delightful items that make up the current exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Asian Art in Washington, DC. Titled “The Traveler’s Eye”, the show includes travel souvenirs, maps, photographs, colorful woodblock prints, and these marvelous colored postcards. The turn of the century wave of Western tourism to Asia encouraged traditional artists, such as Japan’s woodblock printers, to produce European-styled tinted postcards. The exhibition runs until May 31, 2015.
