Photos © James and Karla Murray

Whether it’s their photography from our My Sqft series, images from their best-selling Storefront books or their most recent “Mom-and-Pops” life-size installation in Seward Park, chances are you’ve already admired the work of Karla and James Murray. And now there’s an opportunity to further appreciate their work and the work of those they have mentored. Earlier this year, James and Karla hosted two, two-session workshops, which taught the art of capturing New York City storefronts. Starting August 1, the workshop’s participants will show off their photos at the Jefferson Market Library’s Little Underground Gallery. Celebrate with them during a free opening reception for the exhibit next Friday, August 3 from 5 pm to 7 pm.

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Photo byLiz Ligon via Mile Long Opera.

For five consecutive nights from October 3-7, 2018 “The Mile-Long Opera: a biography of 7 o’clock,” will bring together 1,000 singers from across New York for free performances on the High Line. The project is a collaboration between architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, with words and lyrics by acclaimed poets Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine. The free collective choral work shares personal stories, gathered through first-hand interviews with hundreds of New Yorkers about city life.

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6sqft has been closely following the progress of photographers James and Karla Murray‘s Seward Park art installation “Mom-and-Pops of the LES,” featuring four nearly life-size images of Lower East Side business that have mostly disappeared. The pair, who have spent the last decade chronicling the place of small neighborhood businesses in 21st century New York City, was chosen for the public art project by Art in the Parks UNIQLO Park Expressions Grant Program and ran a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the wood-frame structure’s build out. James and Karla will be having a free public exhibition of their photography for “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York” at The Storefront Project (@thestorefrontproject) at 70 Orchard Street from July 25-August 12, 2018, with an opening reception on Wednesday, July 25th from 6-9 PM.

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Photo by Tia Richards for 6sqft

Coinciding with the 170th Anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, members of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Statue Fund unveiled on Thursday the official design of the first statue of non-fictional women in Central Park. Designed by Meredith Bergmann, the sculpture includes both legible text and a writing scroll that represents the arguments that both women — and their fellow suffragists — fought for. There is also a digital scroll, which will be available online, where visitors are encouraged to join the ongoing conversation. The sculpture of Stanton and Anthony will be dedicated in Central Park on August 18, 2020, marking the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote nationwide.

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Photograph by Pablo Enriquez

6sqft previously reported on the arrival of “Narcissus Garden,” a site-specific installation made up of 1,500 mirrored stainless steel spheres by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama as MOMA PS1’s third installment of“Rockaway!,” a free biannual public art program dedicated to the ongoing recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy. The completely mesmerizing installation is now on view from July 01-September 03, 2018 at Fort Tilden in the Gateway National Recreation Area, in a former train garage that once was an active U.S. military base. Kusama’s mirrored metal spheres reflect the industrial surroundings of the abandoned building and highlight Fort Tilden’s history. According to MoMA, the metal directs attention to the damage inflicted by Sandy in 2012 on the surrounding area.

More amazing images this way

Photo by Naho Kubota

The iconic rotating facade panels at the Storefront for Art and Architecture have been reconstructed as mostly-empty bookshelves in an installation currently on view at the Soho gallery. Abruzzo Bodziak Architects (ABA) designed the sidewalk-encroaching shelves for the exhibition, dubbed Architecture Books-Yet to Be Written.

As its name suggests, the installation “seeks to celebrate and evaluate both existing and the missing volumes of a history still in the writing.” ABA’s design will be on display until August 25 as part of the New York Architecture Book Fair, an initiative introduced by the gallery.

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Photo by Nicholas Knight

Marking the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, local artist Tauba Auerbach has transformed a historic fireboat into a modern “dazzle” ship. First invented by British painter Norman Wilkinson during WWI, dazzle camouflage patterns were painted onto ships to distort their forms and confuse enemy submarines. The Public Art Fund and 14-18 NOW, a U.K.-based art program, commisioned the painting of the John J. Harvey fireboat, which first launched in 1931 and helped the FDNY extinguish fires until it retired in the 1990s.

“With Flow Separation, I didn’t want to ignore the John J. Harvey’s identity, so I took the boat’s usual paint job and scrambled it. Dragged a comb through it,” Auerbach said. “The palette also exaggerates the fact that ‘dazzle’  was more about confusing and outsmarting, than about hiding.”

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Photo by Pablo Enriquez

In MoMA PS1’s temporary exhibit at its sprawling outdoor courtyard in Long Island City, people become the art. Hide & Seek, created by Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers of Dream The Combine, features moveable mirrors that offer surprising and dislocating perspectives of the courtyard and the crowd looking into them. Newsome and Carruthers were named the winners of the 2018 Young Architects Program, which challenges emerging architects to design a creative, sustainable outdoor installation. Hide & Seek will be on view at MoMA PS1 between June 28 and September 3.

See the exhibit