Allen Frame’s portraits of New York friends just before AIDS. — In this new book of color photographs, all shot in 1981, Allen Frame attempts to revisit a time that gave rise to an aesthetic that was distinctly New York. The distinctiveness was related to a circle of friends, many — though not all — gay men, who were making art…

By: Jessica Robinson — Jan 13, 2021

An Artist’s Adventures in Wonderland By: Jessica Robinson For more than five decades artist Hunt Slonem has been painting and reimagining his obsessive motifs: butterflies, birds, bunnies, and portraits of Abraham Lincoln, whom he refers to as his Marilyn. Repetition plays a huge role in his work. Excess and extravagance define his life and art. The slippery fine…

An Outsider Artist’s Secret World By: Jessica Robinson — Kendall Messick is an artist whose genre is telling stories. He tells them by creating installations with still photography, film, video and an ever-evolving assemblage of two and three-dimensional media. “At the core of my ongoing body of work is an exploration of memory, intimacy, acceptance and humanity,” says Messick. …

A trailblazing queer photographer who embodied the grit of 1970s and ’80s NYC gets the retrospective he deserves at Brooklyn Museum By Jessica Robinson In 1973, artist, photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons was on the A train headed to Rockaway Beach with a group of friends when she first laid eyes on Jimmy DeSana, a small, handsome Southern gentleman, utterly self- conscious yet completely natural.

But you don’t have to go the Met to see it — “The Hours” will screen at BAM and in Sheepshead Bay this month By Jessica Robinson As the house lights dim and the curtain rises on the new Metropolitan Opera production of “The Hours,” the first thing one sees is a large clock showing real-life time ticking away, a symbol of this era-hopping story about one single day in the lives of three…

In Crown Finish Caves on Bergen Street, 26,000 pounds of cheese is aging right under your nose By Jessica Robinson originally published in the Brooklyn Magazine.