Even on cold days.

Corner of Varet and Bogart.

Strike Gently, 2008-9
materials: Letterpress on cotton paper, sterling silver wire, laminated paper match stems, wax, glue, gelatin, ground glass, flammable chemicals.
2×1½×⅜”, edition of 50.

Produced in collaboration with Dr. Glen Kowach, Chemistry Department, City College/City University of New York (New York, NY).

Thanks, Zoë!!

Sidewalk-fitti (seen in Ridgewood):

And, my extra-favorite:
Curb-fitti! Call them Street Interventions in the Narrowest-possible Space!

Glimpsed on the Lower East Side, a lower space from curb to street!

Gotta bend down to see that one—and not get run over in the process.
And, you’ve gotta look sideways to see this one: Lintel-fitti:

An abstract painting exhibition—book style

I wrote out a brief questionnaire, asking people which titles in the room (and they were very cool publications, ranging from Tao Lin to Italo Svevo) were suggested to them by Chris Walsh’s paintings.

The people in the room (not I) chose the books.
Listen to the Echoes, A Happy Man, and Shoplifting from American Apparrel came up a lot.
Here is one of the works:

Curating Book Shelves is my New Thing.

Photos courtesy of Jim Osman (curator).

still trying to reconcile hand to breast, face to body.

In his poetic book, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel emphasizes the sanctification of time in Jewish consciousness:

“Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture in time…. The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space.  Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.  It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from results of creation to mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.

(Based on the section on ‘Honoring Human Diversity’ in Mel Alexenberg’s book The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness)

Wow. Kindred spirits?

Greenpoint Shul door, on Av 7 (after damselfly flew away); the door isn't used as an entrance; I had to climb up.

An air vent, low, on the structure of the Chabad of Windsor Terrace; it was about to rain, or had rained. Av 8.

Alexenberg’s book looks pretty cool.

Visit it here at www.sarahschmerler.com/the-nine-days.

You can participate in it with me, as well. (there’s all sorts of info how on the site. but you can also leave a comment here if you want to know the submission parameters.)

short story: this is the saddest time of the year for Jews. that said: I’ve found an activity (making a rubbing every day of a different site of Jewish worship, every day) that helps make it more meaningful for me.

If you’re Jewish, take a look; hey, even if you’re not.

I’ve never much cared for the nomenclature “Jewish Art.” I’m Jewish. I make art.

This one is based on the calendar, so time is of limited supply. I welcome your comments and participation.

(many thanks to Paulius for building the site from scratch!)

Now, I am solidifying my obsession with “gettingtoart” into a new conclusion: there is no place worth getting to; You’re already there.
Yes, its The Street Art Report

July 11: Some of my favorite street art is made by a local homeless man. He has chestnut-colored skin, is very soft spoken, and can be generally be found, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk in the vicinity of Atlantic Avenue. His wares are almost never for sale, because he “needs” them to complete what appears to be an ever-changing composition on the sidewalk in front of him. (Once or twice, he has allowed me to purchase a bottle cap or such, if I tell him how much I like it.)

His daily arrangements favor groupings according to color (usually pretty bright: primary colors are a fave;some pink or white)
and also according to shape (late at night a while back, a bunch of french curves from a 99-cent store he had was pretty amazing; we both reveled at how perfect they looked in their plastic sleeve. I asked him if he would sell them to me, but he said No. Very sweetly, apologizing. he said he really needed them, even though he could see i liked them, too).

Here is a recent arrangement, from a very very hot day, with no shade cover. (that’s the Op Ed Page of the TIMES, folded up, on the right; the mirrors are from makeup compacts.)
He wasn’t very talkative.

I didn’t have money this day to give him. But I did have, at the bottom of my clutch purse, a bunch of bright plastic beads in funny shapes that had broken off a little girl’s necklace (maybe from a playdate gone south with my kid? I’m not sure how I had them). Some were pretty garish, some were sorta OK: dark blue, white, yellow, in star- and other spiky/rounded shapes. I bent down and handed them to him as a kind of payment or offering. He was a bit perplexed; then he examined them with the manner of a pawnbroker assessing the market value of a gold watch.
“Oh,” he said, with surprise and concern in his voice. “I don’t know if I can take care of these.” [emphasis mine]

But he included them anyway, as you can see.
I’m thinking that street art is art you contribute to; like signing the guest book at a Chelsea Gallery, only better.

a shrine to the only un-gentrified corner left in DUMBO?

Nice.
Perfect for place where it was sited. Dark. Not a place you’d want to linger; indeed, something I passed, feeling lost, but ‘on my way.’
(the BlackBerry camera just doesn’t do it justice.)

Listen, I need to confess. I am just hating art in galleries right now. What feels vibrant to me? The serendipitous “see”: the art I don’t expect to find, and find, anyway. It feels right. Creativity seems irrepressible, when I encounter it On My Way.

I saw this on the way to a studio visit with the lovely and talented Gregory Montreuil in the East Village a month or so ago. Poster/poetry:

The Word on the Street. That’s what I’m after.

from Pickersgill Reef's photostream, flickr

But first, some Buddhist Economics, courtesy of E.F. Schumacher, whose book, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, was excerpted by one my favorite reads, Chapel Hill, NC’s magazine “The Sun,” which says:

German-born E.F. Schumacher was a British economist best known for his critique of unfettered capitalism in the West. An early hero of the environmental movement, Schumacher urged the development of local, self-reliant economies and more restrained, conservative use of nonrenewable resources.  Buddhism, which he encountered while working as an economic advisor in Burma, played a central role in the evolution of his vision.

They go on to quote his book, above, at length. Here is a tiny bit:

While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is the “middle way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and nonviolence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. he is used to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort—that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity.

Emphasis mine.