New York Water Tank Project: Koons, Ruscha, Jay-Z and more

This public art season has already seen New York City land its boldest water tower to date, but next spring the sprawling WaterTank Project will up the ante in a big way, with rooftop tanks around the city becoming canvases for artists as diverse as Jeff Koons, Marilyn Minter, E.V. Day, Catherine Opie, Lawrence Weiner, Ed Ruscha, and Jay-Z.

The project, whose all-star curatorial team includes MoMA PS1’s Neville Wakefield and the Pinault Collection’s Alison Gingeras, is being overseen by the non-profit Word Above the Street. The project, which will also include designs by public school students, will unfold across all five borough over the course of 12 weeks next spring. 

More at Artinfo: Jeff Koons, Jay-Z, Ed Ruscha, and More Will Decorate New York Water Towers Next Spring

Turning NYC Water Tanks into Works of Art by Jay-Z, Jeff Koons & More

Jennifer Angus and Her Insects

 Jennifer Angus  creates stunning art with nontraditional objects  Her objects of choice are some of the 30,000 insects she has collected that create a mix of entomology and intricate patterns. it's her love  pattern and textile led her to Thailand’s Golden Triangle—a region bordered by China, Laos and Myanmar, an area that contains some of he world's largest and most magnificently colored insects. It was here she  found the shawls of the Karen tribe lined with greenish iridescent jewel beetles. It was years later she put her passion for for textiles and the beauty of insects together.


Angus now has over 30,000 bugs in her inventory, which cost anywhere from 50 cents to $25 and gets used over and over again in different exhibitions. Her insects range in size from as long your hand to a small as the tip of a finger. She works with hardier bugs like grasshoppers with pinkish-purple wings, electric blue weevils, polka-dot weevils, leaf mimics, and thorny stick insects that can withstand the wear and tear of repeated pinning. Some of the weevils in her show have been in use since she first began. 


Angus pins her insects to the wall to create patterns in that look like Victorian wallpaper. Naturally electric blue, emerald green, pink, purple and red insects come together and bring excitement, exploration and scientific discovery. She also creates small-scale dollhouses covered in beeswax are home to anthropomorphized insects.

Read more about Jennifer Angus below and watch her video.

Meet Jennifer Angus, An Artist Whose Medium Is Insects

The Work of Jennifer Angus: A Closer Look
Jennifer Angus at CAFAM

Yayoi Kusama at the Tate Modern

Yayoi Kusama 

February 9 –  June 5 2012

If you aren't aware of Yayoi Kusama You can now see a major exhibition of her work at the Tate Modern. The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama's life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as "Accumulations", to her "Infinity Net" paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessively charged vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.

At the centre of the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. She has traded on her identity as an "outsider" in many contexts - as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art happenings and events, she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan's most prominent contemporary artist.