Blu Dot always catches my attention by doing something creative. Starting on Wednesday, they will begin The Real Good Chair Experiment, tracking Real Good Chairs on a journey through N.Y.C. You will be able to follow the chairs in real time here.

This just in from the fabulous Vanessa de Vargas of TurquoiseLA. If you are in L.A. this weekend, be sure to catch this sale!

We are delighted to invite you to our premier designer tag sale, a HIGH-END DESIGNER SHOPPING EVENT!! Please feel free to forward this to your friends and contacts!!

The Designer Tag Sale is an interior designer yard sale/tag sale organized by interior designer Vanessa De Vargas and design editor Vanessa Kogevinas. Hosted by entrepreneur Amy Swift (SMARTY.), the sale will feature over ten top Los Angeles designers selling items from their personal inventories including small furniture such as side-tables, lamps, rugs, pillows, art, accessories and more at incredibly low prices! Nothing will be over $200 and prices will run as low as $5.

Designers include Molly Luetkemeyer, Ron Woodson, Jamie Rummerfield, Lindsey Dann Miller, Vanessa De Vargas, Paula Smail, Carla Lane, Jennifer Culp, Michelle Workman, Krista Ewart, Kelly Van Patter, Erica Islas, Jonamor Décor, Stephanie Visser and Cory Pernicano.

Confirmed vendors are Sobe, Elixir G, New Editions, and Yelp who will be participating as a media sponsor.

Free gift bags will be offered to the first thirty attendees and will include items from Henry Road, Bueller Designs, Blue Pool Road, Yelp, Fauna Pet and C Magazine’s newest issue!

There will also be a raffle with gifts from Apartment Therapy, Kreme wallpaper and Anney Friday Jewelry. Complimentary entertainment will include Elixir G Margaritas, Yvonne’s Gluten-Free Cookies, light passed appetizers and beauty treatments. DJ New Berlin will be spinning.

Any non-purchased/left-over designer inventory will be donated to Biet T’Shuvah, a local Venice residential treatment, spiritual and education center.

The Designer Tag Sale will also feature free mini-consultations and appraisals by designers so we ask that you bring pictures of your home and furniture items if you wish to participate.

Entry fee is $10. Cash only please.

We look forward to your participation and support, and thank all of our participants, without whom this event would not be possible!

Check out our blog for websites and more info!!

 

Designer Tag Sale logo and invitation designed by Tatiana Kogevinas.
All rights reserved.

Thanks to Maya over at Visualingual, for letting me know about the Charley Harper exhibit at Fabulous Frames in Cincinnati (10817 Montgomery Road location). Here’s the story, from Fabulous Frames’ blog:

Included in the exhibit will be approximately 50 original paintings created by Charley for Ford Times and Lincoln Mercury Times magazines between 1948 and 1982. The illustrations were reproduced in the magazines, but the originals were thought to have been lost until they were discovered in a Ford Motor Company vault earlier this year.

With the permission of Edsel Ford II, the entire collection was returned to the Harper family, which organized this exhibit with Fabulous Frames & Art, an art gallery and custom-framing shop that has had a relationship with the Harpers for over 30 years. Charley’s son Brett Harper will be on hand during the opening reception to introduce this important body of work.

The exhibit opens this weekend and runs through August 8. Also, Fabulous Frames has some wonderful Harper prints for sale online here. Some may surprise you; Maya got me giggling over this one:

I love this Blenko-looking bottle one as well:

all images from fabframes.com

One really cool thing that happened in Maine last week was the lighting of Robert Indiana’s EAT sign atop the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland Maine. Best known for its incredible Wyeth exhibits,  the Farnsworth does a great job of keeping up with the art world, and is finally honoring one of the area’s adopted sons. Indiana has been living on Vinalhaven Island for decades, just a quick ferry ride from Rockland Harbor.

The most extraordinary thing about this event was that it was the first time Indiana had ever seen his EAT sign lit. The sign was commissioned for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and was taken down after a day because hungry and confused people kept looking for a restaurant nearby. Apparently, the sign has been stored in a former 8-seat outhouse behind Indiana’s home on Vinalhaven for decades. The EAT sign is not the only exclusive the Farnsworth has snagged; this exhibit is full of never before seen work. The Robert Indiana and the Star of Hope exhibit, where he has replaced his iconic “LOVE” with “HOPE” as part of the Obama campaign is full of unseen work. I highly recommend a stop in Rockland for anyone in the area. The exhibit is running now through October 25th.

Yesterday I spent a perfect afternoon at the Atlanta Botanical Garden checking out the Henry Moore sculptures. These sculptures sited throughout the property’s garden, conservatory, and orchid house were a perfect match of work and site. While I don’t pretend to be any sort of expert on sculpture, the relationship of scale to site, views to the work, and the context of placement in the gardens and the skyline of the city in the background were remarkable. Each piece was dynamic in that each view of it from 360 degrees made it appear to be a totally different work, offering a variety peeks through holes and crevices in parts of the pieces, and changing appearances from sunshine and shadows. Here are a few shots I snapped yesterday:

The exhibition will run through October 31, 2009. Tickets for adults are $15.

You can see the rest of my cruddy pictures here.

It seems like full circle. I forget how many years ago but I don’t know, maybe seven, Drew and Sina set off to their first International Contemporary Furniture Fair with their dream of launching a modern, accessible, online home furnishings site. Here they are kicking it at ICFF again this week:

Sina, is it live or is it Memorex?

Drew considers the ramifications of changing his usual facebook photo pose with the daring leg up position…

For those of you in Atlanta this weekend, the Modern Atlanta House Tour is a can’t-miss event. $35 gets you into the party on Friday and a tour pass for Saturday and Sunday. I highly recommend allowing time on both days to hit as many properties as possible, and if the map sucks as bad as last year, realize you’ll likely need an hour or two to mapquest everything if you don’t have GPS the night before you tour. For more information about where to get tickets and the homes that will be featured, click here. For a little sampling of how good the tour was last year, click here. The house I shared with you went on to be featured in Metropolitan Home a few months later – Modern Atlanta is not messing around!

If modern gardens are more your thing, you may want to attend the High Museum’s Artful Garden Tour this weekend. Click here for more information. I would try to do both, but I am going to see Coldplay on Sunday night and it’s just too darn much.

As for Saturday night, the K2 Modern Art Series will be celebrating the modern design aesthetic from 8-11. For more information, click here.

Athens GA has always been a cool town – not only the birthplace of great bands, but also a place where visual arts and architecture are celebrated. For example, right now they are in the middle of You, Me, and the Bus phase II. After phase one, four artist-designed bus shelters were constructed around town. The competition for the eight additional shelters is wrapping up as I write this. This is a perfect combination of public art form applied to an everyday function. Such shelters are usually banal and uninspired.

Has your town had its version of the Cincinnati pigs, the Chicago cows, the Outer Banks dolphins, what have you? I’m hard-pressed to find a city that hasn’t had some version of that project. Isn’t this shelter project a much better and original use of public art funds? What types of public art do you have in your neck of the woods? Would these shelters make you a little more likely to want to take the bus?

photo one by Trevor Frey for Athens Online

photo two by John W. English for the AJC

Has anyone been to the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson? I have not, but the upcoming Raoul Dufy exhibition (Febuary 7-July 5) makes me want to plan a trip:

The exhibit has been travelling the world, and it was in Japan before it landed in North America. As I was checking out the museum online, I saw that a Eudora Welty exhibit is scheduled to start on April 11. As a fan of her writing, I read further to figure out what they were going to be showing. The show will feature

photographs of Mississippi that constitue a near complete re-creation of her first solo exhibition held in 1936 at the Photographic Galleries of Lugene Opticians in New York City…In these photographs, Welty captures America in the depths of the Great Depression revealing a compassion towards her subject that also became a hallmark of her writing.

Sounds cool – I had no idea she was a talented photographer as well.

So what exhibits are you looking forward to in the near future? Have you ever been to Jackson Mississippi or the Mississippi Museum of Art? Do you have any hot tips on what else to check out while I’m in town? Please let me know in the comments if you do. I’m off to mapquest my route!

image from here.

With my crystal ball intact I foresee that…

1.) You already know who the Obama’s have chosen as their interior designer. If my sense of foresight is broken, the honored designer is Michael S Smith. Smith’s clients have included Steven Spielberg, Cindy Crawford and Rupert Murdoch among many others. His style: “European tradition and American modernism.”

To take a look at Michael Smith’s previous work Read the rest of this entry »