On Saturday I went to the opening of Ai Weiwei's "Sunflower Seeds" at Mary Boone Gallery on 24th Street in Chelsea. The sunflower seeds are handpainted porcelain. Their creation was a labor intensive production requiring thousands of workers over several years. Some five million seeds were produced for the project. It premiered at the Tate Modern in London last year. At Mary Boone, they have a portion of what was on view at the Tate, which was a much larger installation. When it was first installed at the Tate, you were allowed to walk on the seeds. However, it was determined that walking on them created toxic dust and after that you were not allowed. At Mary...
Nami and I have been working on some paintings and I wanted to show them to you. I won't say much more other than to say that they will be exhibited later this year in Brooklyn. Stay tuned for more details. Thanks for looking at them, I would love to hear any feedback or thoughts that you have. You can comment on this here post, or @johnhoppin FORCE This painting depicts a force, represented by the arrow, passing through a boundary, represented by the circle. There are some markings on the bottom left. MY PHILOSOPHY This painting depicts some of my philosophy, specifically that dualities like Yes and No, Right and Wrong exist as part of the same workflow, that...
Last week I went to Philadelphia to see Ben Peterson's artwork in the show Urbanism at the Philadephia Academy of Fine Arts. PAFA was the first art school and art museum in the United States. It is on Broad Street a couple blocks from City Hall. It was the first art show I had gone to in a while and I was pleased with it. Ben's work is incredibly detailed and impressively scaled. Broad Street, Philadelphia - At 548 feet tall, the Philadelphia City Hall is the second tallest masonry building in the world. It was constructed from 1871 to 1901. It is the 16th-tallest building in Pennsylvania. The Arch Street United Methodist Church, built between 1864 and 1870. Behind...
