An Afternoon In Two Worlds
Dan Friedman: Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day at Super House and The Loving Cup at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery
Over the past few years, Tribeca has become home to many new and established galleries.
If I were giving you directions on where to see art in this neighborhood, I would suggest you take a stroll along Walker Street. This is the aortic valve of the neighborhood, the main street pumping life into the downtown gallery scene dense with galleries providing visual enrichment with their artists rosters. Over the past few months 52 Walker has displayed immersive installations from artists I admire like Diamond Stingily and Sara Cwynar, Cheyenne Julien’s excellent exhibition 41 Floors recently closed at Chapter NY ( I wrote about it for 1202), and James Cohan utilizes both of their gallery spaces on this street to their fullest by exhibiting thoughtful group shows and artists whose work is technically mesmerizing. To name a few favorite shows I’ve seen here are Naudline Pierre’s The Mythic Age, The Superfluity of Things, and Jesse Mockrin’s The Venus Effect. I am looking forward to the weekend where I can spend time taking in Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s The Book of Violette , look at that wallpaper!
This past Saturday, I found myself in two different words within a few blocks of each other on Walker. I felt like Alice going down a 1980’s vivid and acid rabbit hole walking through Super House’s exhibition of Dan Friedman’s masterworks titled Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day before finding creative enlightenment in the historic and contemporary objects on view in Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery’s The Loving Cup. My favorite weekends are when I can escape my world for an afternoon and fall into others.
Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun Day is a question I constantly ask myself and Dan Friedman’s work will certainly imbue your life with fun if you are lucky enough to own one of his eye-catch pieces. This exhibition commemorates the 30th anniversary of his passing from complications related to AIDS in 1995 and showcases a wide-ranging selection of objects that belonged to him and his loved ones. Born in 1945 in Cleveland, Ohio, Friedman was an artist, educator, and graphic designer known for his neon assemblages designed to evoke the fun he experienced in his life. He received his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and went on to teach at Yale’s Graduate School of Art and Architecture, The Cooper Union, and SUNY Purchase. While Friedman was teaching at Yale and worked as a corporate design executive at Pentagram (a major independent design firm) in the 1970’s, he started to redecorate his one-bedroom apartment above Washington Square Park into a Day-Glo wonderland that served has a 3D, tactile “sketchbook.” He lived, worked, and experimented with the definition of “good design” by playing with shapes and colors to challenge the aesthetics of taste in modern American interior design. Friedman eventually left his 9 to 5 to focus on developing his own visual language and design philosophies that allowed him to fold his day and night lives into playful objects that stir up some fun all day long. In his 1994 book titled Radical Modernism he wrote, “I have used my home to push modernist principles of structure and coherency to their wildest extreme. I create elegant mutations, radiating with intense color and complexity, in a world that has deconstructed into a goofy ritualistic playground for daily life."
Friendly faces greeted me as soon as the elevator doors opened to the gallery 6th floor space. Power Screen is not just any room divider, it is a companion. It is sticking out its tongue for service, to hold additional objects on display and be silly at the same time. I would love to see whose collection this belonged to and where it was placed in their home. There was a pair of objects on view that reminded me of an article the designer Sophie Collé wrote for Architectural Digest about all things round and name checks Friendman in the piece. She writes, “Perhaps it’s that as adults, we strive for balance and perfection—both visually and in life. Could our love of the ball be purely for aesthetics? Is it their versatility (cue Dan Friedman’s entire oeuvre) and incredible ability to be both completely functional and functionless? Their ability to both ground and achieve weightlessness depending on scale and materiality? Their inability to be pegged to one specific era? All of the above.” I completely agree. If you’re gonna add a pop of color to your space, what better shape than a ball?!
It’s one thing to see a chair that looks inviting to sit on, but the one on view in this slice of Friednman’s world urges you to see in big bold white letters spelling out PLEASE. A fun fact about this piece, it was originally designed for the fashion designer Willi Smith’s WilliWear offices in New York. Boldly stationed on the wall was Time Piece (Atomic Clock), the shape of an almost state, Friedman’s dream land where imagination runs wild. This made me question of this was designed to function as a wall clock or if it was just art, there are many such cases that wacky objects work with purpose. Regardless, It was a treat to take in the various elements that comprise this: the black painted wood fragments that look like ruptured pieces of willow charcoal, the comic book burst of yellow, and the unlit neon beam that harkened my mind to think about the work of Mary Weatherford, an artist known for affixing stretches of colorful light on top of her vibrant abstract canvases. The most formal piece of art hanging in the gallery is his multidimensional landscape titled A Fallen Sky in a Regal Landscape depicting neon detritus including a film real, an organic mass nearly in the shape of a guitar, and what I image is a destroyed set somewhere in the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
After my senses were hit with the visual equivalent of a lemon ginger wellness shot, I found myself ascending the mountainous stairs up 52 Walker to see Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery’s latest exhibition titled The Loving Cup. What is a Loving Cup you ask? Worry not, as the gallery defines this for us:
The Loving Cup is a decorative vessel that historically commemorates a marriage union, representing the promise of love, honor and good fortune. Inscribed with the nuptial date and the names of the betrothed, it exists as a sober testament to enduring fondness and fidelity. The Loving Cup bears witness to the fragile complexity (and often, ephemerality) of human connection, and serves as a sacrament to the sincerity of care we feel for others, and the esteem we hold for ourselves.
The Loving Cup exhibition explores how these traditional vessels become a means of archival stewardship, honoring relationships of all kinds. Contemporary artists and designers responded to this historical tradition both in concept and practice, through a diverse range of materials such as ceramic, fiber, metal, and found objects both natural and human-made.
I will always love and appreciate this gallery for juxtaposing historic and contemporary objects in their World of Interiors-esque space. After examining Sophie Stone’s delicately embellished doilies, the equivalent of fascinators for cups, I couldn’t stop thinking about the act of dressing up our small home goods. It is easy to understand why some New Yorkers take self presentation as seriously as they do, everyone’s life is so public, even in the home since our neighbors lives are in constant eyesight due to the close proximity of windows. Our living spaces are small, but our lives are full of places to go, meals to eat, friends to see. In our small spaces, objects that make up our world are also on display, why not dress them up as well? I gather ideas for future creative projects during my visit, Stone’s Tuffet, an antique flower shaped pouf the artist covered with a collection of personal trinkets they collected over the years. A document of personal history as a sculpture. I first thought this was a box when I saw it because the grey and brown seam appears as if that is where the edge of the lid met the body of the box, but it is a pouf. However, I would love to make my own trinket covered trinket box.
A few months ago I wrote about how shells kept washing into the culture I was seeing around me and I’ve seen their motif come in like a tidal wave since then. I am declaring 2025 the Shell Year, I hope to flesh out this pearl of an idea more later. Naturally, I was pulled into the works by Ficus Interfaith, a collaboration between artists Ryan Bush and Raphael Martinez Cohen, who imbue their practice with research concerning historical symbolism that is “ubiquitous to the point of being overlooked or misunderstood” through craft. The terrazzo filled oyster shells that adorn their interpretation of a Loving Cup delighted me.
Below are a few images of what a dream apartment looks like to me:
Thank you for reading,
Lauren <3