24 Hours

Things have been kind of quiet on the blog this week, as a whole lot of art related stuff has kept me from working on any actual art, which I hope changes this coming week. Meanwhile, here's what kept me busy the past few days.

Every few years the College Art Association holds their annual conference in NYC. I'm not a member and don't participate in the conference, but it does draw a lot of people I know into the area, and so I will try to get up there for a visit. With that as my basic plan, early yesterday morning I boarded a train in my hometown, bound for New York. It arrived on time, and I climbed out of Penn Station and hit the streets of Manhattan around 12:30 pm. First thing was to contact a few friends from grad school, John Siblik and John Lustig. (Don't have a current photo of them together, so I posted one above of them playing some one on one basketball in Carbondale a long time ago.) As expected, they were wandering through the gallery districts of Chelsea, so I was given a meeting address and I started walking that direction.

It took about 20 minutes to get down to the block on 22nd where I was told to meet them, but no sign of them. (I did, however, have to detour around some event that had limousines disgorging people who posed on the sidewalk for photographers before going into some invite only function in a gallery) A second phone call found them still a few blocks away, so I walked back north and met them halfway. We had a relaxing lunch in a small Italian restaurant nearby, then went back to gallery hopping. We had no agenda, so just checked out some street level spaces and went through one of the large buildings with gallery spaces on multiple floors. As is typical of these kinds of tours, the quality level of the art varied from dull and pointless to very impressive.

Late afternoon we took a subway back up to the 50's where all the conference hotels were. I dropped off my stuff in the room where I'd be crashing for the night, and we met back at an Irish bar that has been a designated spot for the SIU art people at these things. One beer apiece and we went over to the Hilton for the official alumni reception. A much larger room than last time (including a hotel employee to dispense the alcoholic beverages instead of the bathtub full of beer from last time), but it seemed like fewer people in attendance. Chatted with a few professors from during my time there, met a few new ones. We ended up staying for the whole thing. Dropped by a open portfolio session, where I saw a printmaker friend from Mississippi, an adjunct from my current university, and met a few new people as well. From there, back to the Irish bar, where we were joined by Armen, another midwesterner grad painter from our Carbondale years. I guess we're not as young as we used to be, because by midnight we were all pretty much tired and decided to call it a night. Below is a photo of some of the free items picked up in my day's wanderings.

We got up early this morning (as I was assured by my roommate, no need to set an alarm- the heavy traffic on the avenue would be noisy enough to wake us up), and grabbed breakfast at a small place a few blocks away. I said goodbye to Siblik, heading for an early flight home, but met up with Lustig. Like me, he has a long time interest and involvement with comic books, so after another breakfast stop (him, not me) we walked the blocks in a radius of Times Square, finding that none of the shops opened before 11:00. We worked our way back to a store on 7th by that point, where we spent about an hour looking through new comics, back issue bins, and bound collections. Looking at the older stuff was fun (an inspiration for both of us in our artistic development), but no need to buy things we already owned, and we had no interest in any new things they had in stock. (such is the state of the current comics industry) Said goodbye to John outside the store, and he went north as I walked south back to Penn Station. I arrived there about 12:30, just about 24 hours after I had left it, with plenty of time to catch my 1:00 train back to the Jersey shore. All in all, a very good day.