The Common Studio

If you need a blanket, Travis Meinolf, the self-appointed Action Weaver, will give you one. For free. And it won’t be a common fleece or wool number. It will look like folk art. It could be made by the artist or by many hands, and perhaps strung together from woven cloths of varying stripes, colors, and sizes. These free hand-woven blankets are a component of the artist’s ongoing project Blanket Offer, part of the artist’s grand mission to bring weaving to the masses.

Curated by Jeff Bergman
 
In every family, traditional portraits are hung up or carried around: cousins arrayed before a monument, parents holding their grandchildren, long-gone ancestors smiling from a black and white beyond. Though we cherish their aura, the faces and places remain static.

By contrast, Rachel Barrett composes images that could be candid or staged, but we often cannot guess which. Her portraits are sometimes not even of people. In projects as seemingly clinical as her NYC Newsstand Project, born of a desire to document the soon-to-be homogenized newsstands sprinkled across Manhattan, we find a loving portrait of an icon glowing in its snowflake-like singularity. In Bowery and Pell SW Corner, 2011, we see a shed with the battered face of a retired fighter, all swollen angles and bent supports. The sweet rust-red lacquer of Chrystie & Grand Streets, NW Corner, 2009 reaches out lovingly to grasp its green awninged neighbor in friendship. Even the shabbier newsstands stand proudly, as though their position and usefulness in this city affords them strength.

Curated by Elizabeth Essner

Everyone has sat on a gray, metal folding chair: waiting at the DMV, as an extra guest at a dinner table, working in a makeshift office. Tanya Aguiñiga, a Los Angeles-based designer, transforms this ubiquitous piece of furniture in her series, Felt Chairs. Aguiñiga spends up to twenty laborious hours lovingly hand-felting each simple folding chair, covering it in vibrant color. Metal becomes a skeleton for bright and singular textured felt, akin to skin. What was cold is now warm, what was common is now individual. How we place ourselves in this chair has changed entirely.