Browsing: Heather Sparks

Still Life with Gastric PeptideMia Brownell My grandfather wasn’t a big farmer, but his small garden in Kentucky was a miracle. There was rhubarb, corn, and peppers a-plenty, but mostly I remember the tomatoes. He bred his own, saving the seeds of the best specimens every year. By the time he was getting well into […]

One evening four years ago, photographer Andrea Tese received a phone call from a home-care nurse. Could she come to her grandfather’s house to assess the situation? the nurse asked. Her grandfather had been very ill and had stipulated he did not want to die inside a hospital; he wanted to stay at home. But […]

When was the last time you awoke right at the first peak of day? Or put away your work simply because night was falling? We are less and less tied to rhythms of natural time, living instead in the glow of computers and smartphone screens. Our days and nights roll by, marked as much by […]

Many common air pollutants—ozone, various sulfur oxides, and even some particulate matter among them—are completely invisible to the eye. How interesting, then, that the EPA and other environmental organizations around the world, use color scales to communicate information about air quality. The US Air Quality Index, for instance, starts at green, meaning good air quality, moves […]

In one important way, grocery stores were very different during my childhood. Catsup was only packaged in glass bottles. Soda came in either aluminum cans or glass bottles, and there was no bottled water—no Fuji, Poland Spring, or Evian. Crackers were wrapped in waxed paper. Everything was bagged in paper. Now, some 30 years later, […]

Though New Yorkers are currently chasing down the next piece of Banksy street art, graffiti typically blends into the background. If you’re not a tagger, you most likely are not paying attention to the coded messages embedded in the endless stream of stylized names, faces, animals, and jokes that are constantly thrown up then torn […]

Top row, left to right: 1) Exhibition signage. 2) Projection in the background: Jon Cates. GL1TCH.US: An unstable book for an unstable art, 2005-present. Television screen in the foreground: Holly Lay. Gentlemen Prefer Glitch, 2012. 3) Kim Asendorf. Spike’s Peak, 2013.  Bottom row, left to right: 1) Martial Geoffre-Rouland and Benjamin Gaulon. Corrupt Yourself, 2011-present. […]

Postcards from Google Earth (one of five images in the collection)Clement Valla A wave of digital art, and its acceptance in the mainstream art world, has been building since computer technologies entered people’s lives over 20 years ago. Just last year, MoMA acquired 14 video games for its collection. Now comes the first-ever auction of […]

It began like so many creative endeavors—with a barstool discussion. “Who would be your television dad?” New York artist Amanda Tiller mused. A friend chose Cliff Huxtable, Bill Cosby’s alter ego on The Cosby Show. Later, Tiller thought a lot about Cosby and his famously be-sweatered character: We all know Cliff, a beloved father, doctor, […]