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COWBOY RAY KELLY at WINDOWS ORCHARD GALLERY MAY 1-13

'Cowboy' Ray Kelly opened a show of new sculptures at Windows Orchard Gallery on the Lower East Side last week (show is up until Sunday).  According to curator Gregory de la Haba, "As a young art student he was Motherwell's favorite bartender. As a young artist he was Rothko's painting assistant for three years during the building of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. As a young man he founded the Rivington School and No Se No social club/art gallery on NY's Lower East Side where everyone from Debbie Harry to Keith Haring stopped in for the one dollar beers and when, in the 1980's, he turned empty, needle infested, lots into welcoming sculpture gardens for all to enjoy. He is a living legend, one who helped transform our great city into the art center that it is, especially on the LES when no one, no one, except crazy, broke, artists wanted to be there."

Buffalo Brown. Miami's One-Man Super Session

Buffalo Brown has been in every band that has formed in Miami in the last ten years.  You can look it up.  He plays jazz, blues, soul, funk, Latin funk, salsa, and every other genre of music that exists or will someday exist.  He is a force of nature and a natural force.  Check out his band Elastic Bond at www.elasticbond.com, and you also must examine Cog Nomen at www.cognomenmusic.com  It's magic...

Courtney Love's Extraordinary Art

'And She's Not Even Pretty', Courtney Love's new gallery show at Fred Torres Collaborations in Chelsea, is a clever meditation on what it means to be alive and erupting with inspiration.  A violent, sad, and infinitely childlike celebration of fraught relationships and spiritual goblins.  She explains to The Minute why creating visual art is in a way more terrifying to her than making music.

PRIMARY FLIGHT-MIAMI GRAFFITI AND STREET ART EXPLODE IN WYNWOOD AND THE DESIGN DISTRICT

Wherein The New York Minute goes south for Spring Break...


If Miami is the Street Art Mecca, then Primary Flight/Primary Projects is the Qaaba.  Primary Flight major domo Books IIII Bischof sounds off…

Jonas Mekas-The Godfather of American Avant-Garde Cinema

Jonas Mekas at 'My Mars Bar Movie' premiere at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, which he founded.  He poured shots of Tequila for everyone after the movie!  An incredible NYC legend. 

"For some twenty years Mars Bar, on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue, Manhattan, has been my bar. That's where we went for beer and tequila whenever we had to take a break from our work at Anthology Film Archives, and it was also a bar where most of those who came to see movies at Anthology ended up after the shows. We always had a great time at Mars Bar. It was always open, there was always the juke box, and very often there was no electricity, and it was old and messy and it didn't want to be any other way -- it was the last escape place left in downtown New York. So this is my love letter to it, to my Mars Bar. Mars Bar as I knew it."  
-Jonas Mekas

Shane LaVancher. Photographer.

Out of his Spring Street studio,  Shane LaVancher creates images that are an incongruity: expository, yet simultaneously antithetical to his work as a fashion photographer.  Beauty, frenzy, and death play an important role in his work; as well as whimsy and absurdity.  Although now that I think about it, maybe he, along with collaborater Jason Clay Lewis, has captured something of the essence of his subjects, and of his profession as well.