Ace Hotel

SCI-Arc surfaces. Thanks for the visit.

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:58:36 -0700

SCI-Arc surfaces. Thanks for the visit.

Tom and Jodie got married in a real live church, but they...

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:16:00 -0700

Tom and Jodie got married in a real live church, but they primped and after-partied with us at Ace Hotel Portland. Kirk Mastin captured it all on real live film.

Photo

Sun, 13 May 2012 06:02:15 -0700

Photo

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:46:39 -0700

Wendy MacNaughton setting up her post 99% Conference / Behance...

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:56:16 -0700

Wendy MacNaughton setting up her post 99% Conference / Behance show (now up in the gallery space) at Ace Hotel New York.

All photos by Wendy except for the portrait of Paula Scher by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings

We made a custom nail polish with Uslu Airlines in homage of a...

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:32:56 -0700

We made a custom nail polish with Uslu Airlines in homage of a love for travel and new horizons. You can snag a bottle for your mum until 5:30pm EST today — we’ll need some time to get it to her in the mail for Sunday.

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing...

Tue, 08 May 2012 19:51:10 -0700

“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

Maurice Sendak, rest in peace.

INTERVIEW : WENDY MACNAUGHTON BY JOCELYN K. GLEI San...

Mon, 07 May 2012 22:39:00 -0700

INTERVIEW : WENDY MACNAUGHTON BY JOCELYN K. GLEI

San Francisco-based illustrator and artist Wendy MacNaughton’s illustrations have the improvisational quality of an observer, a lone wolf. She uses illustration to weave a facetious and compassionate homage to the mundanities and Seinfeldesque neuroses that tie us all together. As a sort of visual afterparty to Behance’s 99% Conference, Wendy’s collection Guts, Grit and Getting *%!# Done will be up in the gallery space at Ace Hotel New York May 9 - June 8. It’s an illustrated inventory of making ideas happen based on Wendy’s observations, insights and takeaways from the conference.

Jocelyn K. Glei, Director of the 99% Think Tank and Conference, interviewed Wendy about how to change your life by not doing yoga.

How would you describe your work to, say, my grandmother?

First I’d apologize. Then I’d tell her I draw from observation — of people, circumstances, places, life — and tell stories through pictures and words. And no, sorry Nana, not like Norman Rockwell.

You seem to have a particular fascination with pointing out the details — half-empty whiskey glasses, lonely sandwiches, etc. Why?

The little things tell the story — we get swept up by the big picture but I think the little unnoticed details tell us more about what’s really going on.

There are also quite a few pieces related to thinking too much and procrastinating… What’s your preferred mode of procrastination?

Let me think on that and get back to you. But really, folks. I know if I overthink an idea, it ends up spoiling it. Knowing that, the risk is over thinking not thinking about it. I guess I catch myself coming and going. It’s a challenge to put things aside and just have fun with an idea. That’s what drawing does for me. It clears my head out and I get to play — ideas come on their own.

You have a lot of sketches from attending book readings… what was the last great book you read?

I beg everyone to read Miranda July’s It Chooses You. Not only is she a great writer, but this true story is super relevant to people working in, on and around technology and who are interested in human connection and storytelling.

A lot of your illustrations seem to happen in transit (airports, events, street corners) — is there something in particular that’s appealing about transitional spaces and moments?

When in transit, people reflect, mull, worry, remember, sleep… These are all very intimate acts to be doing in a public space. And I love to eavesdrop. So I guess drawing in public is like visual eavesdropping on someone’s private time. It’s also very mediative for me. Drawing allows my brain to stop moving (see question above). Kind of like putting a baby to sleep in a moving car.

Who or what recently inspired you to do something differently?

At a conference recently a friend asked me what I was going to do the next morning. I said, yoga. He said, do you always go to yoga at home? I said, yes. He said, well since you’re not at home, why not do something you can’t do at home? And i did. And it ended up being a profound, life-altering experience.

(And sorry, I am not telling you what it was.)

From the 99% Conference 2012.

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:02:12 -0700

From the 99% Conference 2012.

Ace Palm Springs, posted to twitter by Jennifer Emerling.

Sun, 06 May 2012 23:23:00 -0700

Ace Palm Springs, posted to twitter by Jennifer Emerling.

INTERVIEW: SHE KEEPS BEES X SHENANDOAH… …wherein we...

Sun, 06 May 2012 07:01:48 -0700

INTERVIEW: SHE KEEPS BEES X SHENANDOAH…

…wherein we resurrect a tag game of bright minds performing in the lobby at Ace Hotel New York during May at our live music residency on Sunday nights, curated by Chris Tucci, who spins B-sides and rarities before and after sets. She Keeps Bees unleashes their smoky, pure power tonight at 10pm, and Shenandoah plays a set of melodic pop noir on May 27. Coming up — a round robin with North Highlands (May 13 — Mother’s Day!) and Lacrymosa (May 20).

Shenandoah:

Hello She Keeps Bees, glad to make your acquaintance. First question that comes to mind is what do you do to boost the spirits when you encounter many red lights? (AKA difficult times).

She Keeps Bees:

Hi Shenandoah! Wonderful to meet you! Andy and I like to dance. Dance it out and drink coffee — surrender to the change, honor it and be pleasantly surprised by the natural solution. Or I’d like to think we don’t do what we normally do, which is complain and sulk and have a beer in bed at 3:30 in the afternoon.

What’s your favorite tree? Favorite Ray? Ray Ramono, Ray Charles, Link Wray, Ray Davies, Amy Ray, Ray Stevens, Ray’s Pizza, Ray Ban, Ray LaMontagne, Rachel Ray, Blu Ray!

Shenandoah:

My favorite tree is ceder for smell, oak for shade, and aspen for glittering on hill tops. The redwoods are where I come from, they make places pretty dark and musty.

So many good Ray’s. I’m really into Le Carrè, John Le Carrè.

If money wasn’t a concern, what would your house look like? Where would it be?

She Keeps Bees:

We’re not very extravagant, so we’d probably still choose something pretty humble even if money weren’t a concern. Free Cabin Porn is always making us drool over secluded cabins in far away places.

Last Question: What place in the world would you most like to visit/play a show

Shenandoah:

Ooh, Greece, definitely Greece!

Day one of Snow in the Desert at Ace Hotel & Swim Club...

Sat, 05 May 2012 21:38:47 -0700

Day one of Snow in the Desert at Ace Hotel & Swim Club — we bound books with Trinie Dalton, “broke the ice” with Leah Rosenberg’s snow cones with locally-foraged ingredients like serrano pepper and basil, made power talisman necklaces with Anna Sew Hoy, unwrapped 80s queer books with Eve Fowler, danced to Abby Portner’s magic poolside mix and hung the #$%% out with host Betty Nguyen. Tonight, between scanning the skies for the supermoon and a meteor shower, we’ll be enjoying Betty’s all-women producers DJ set and Abby’s live, interactive performance in the Amigo Room. Tomorrow, more art, more snow cones and Dorian Garry’s poolside set. It’s pure magic. This is what the desert is all about.

SNOW IN THE DESERT INTERVIEW: BETTY NGUYEN

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:43:00 -0700

Betty Nguyen is a curator, writer, instigator and artist, founder of Living Arts Fund and founder and editor of First Person Magazine. She curates and hosts this weekend’s Snow in the Desert at Ace Hotel & Swim Club, an activated art space for women. Artist workshops are open today from 2-4pm in the Clubhouse, and we’ll have DJs by the pool all afternoon Saturday and Sunday. Betty DJs tonight in the Amigo Room as well. She’s whip smart — as evidenced below.

You’ve said that you “embrace all forms of cultural delivery.” How do those semantics disrupt ideas of art?

I’ve never regarded one art form higher than another: film, music, performance, dance, painting … if the shit is good, I’ll take it. They all influence each other if we are open to them. I have very fluid instincts. I trained in college as an art director, so I envision worlds through texts and vice versa. Just because work is fun or colorful or punk doesn’t mean it’s not informed. My work goes deep and I enjoy it. The disruption comes from opening people’s perspectives to expand what art is or how it can be presented which includes where it can be presented like at the Ace Hotel.

Tell me about interviewing Yoko Ono and Missy Elliot.

Yoko Ono is so fucking alive. The bigger the name, the more I tend to be restrained as an interviewer. But that’s bullshit right? I interviewed Yoko Ono for First Person Magazine’s “Discomfort of Sculpture” issue that also included Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, and Maya Deren. I first encountered Ono’s work at ICA East London in 2000. She showed these big Oxford shoes in larger than life rat cages on top of tons of used paperback books. A map of the world was on a table top with her Imagine Peace rubber stamps all over the table for you to make an impression on a country or border line, the ocean whatever needed it. And the last memorable piece was this long dark corridor that led to a light box of a rainbow. Her work is so provocative in a positive way. It’s sometimes difficult to do both in a work. And it’s always been there in hers for me. She was on tour as the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band with her son and I was pretty nervous, thinking I had to make sure the questions were related to music. But she just went straight out the gate with, “You know John and I did a lot for promoting peace to end the Vietnam War” after I said I thought we were simliar… refugees of war. We talked about both being women and immigrants. And working in the arts as Asian women as being really fucking hard. I can name one other Asian woman curator at the New Museum. And one in Tokyo at the Mori. Oh, yeah and I made her pink peace sign sugar cookies for her show with Sean Lennon.

[[MORE]]

Missy Elliot was a tough one. I posted on Friendster, “What do you want to ask Missy?” I don’t think anyone took me seriously. I really wanted to interview Ciara. What happened to her? Missy was so gracious and kept thanking me, so I chickened out of trying to “out” her during the interview.

Do you see yourself as a hybrid instigator and creator? Or is it all creation?

I’m probably more like an alligator… independent with a very good memory. Like I said, as an art director, I like to do pairings and also imagine broader contexts for a work. I like to bring out the best in an artist and their work. It’s a collaboration and discussion for sure. It’s fun to make connections in the work that the artist hadn’t seen. When I asked these artists to lead workshops at Ace, it was difficult for some to understand because they wanted a lot of context. I think we will have some pretty great stuff to engage in. I like getting to know people through projects and this includes the public. It reflects a lot about a person, not only their actual work produced but how they work and play. I like to read personality and have fun in the process. I talked to Leah about the idea of the sno-cone as an “ice breaker” activity amongst participants.

I’m DJing in the “Amiga Room” tonight — playing women icons, producers, singers and this song here by Neneh Cherry, my best friend Tama’s godmother. I like that they put an image of Marilyn Monroe on the video. It’s super tragic but real in a fake way. Sometimes people get confused because dear gawd, as a curator I can’t be cool or DJ or perform, too. So, I like to break those dumb taboos. I will hang in a goddam buffalo stance. You feel me?

What inspired you to create this retreat? Do you see it as fulfilling something that’s missing from the arts for women, or an affirmation of something that already exists? Both?

I hope to meet women who are fun, creative, and generous. I wanted to do something that wouldn’t have any profit margin in mind when I started. I founded the Living Arts Fund to create a new mindset that wasn’t just throwing up art shows and hype. I wanted to make a new space for gathering and exchange. There is this oasis in the desert that you guys at Ace have created and I thought it would be a great place to soak in some scenery and have some different conversations. All the presenting artists are super complex in their approach to what they do. Thanks for engaging. It’s an inspiring place that I’d like to come back to and navigate more possibilities.

How did you curate this group of people? What mattered to you in the process?

As part of my curating process, it’s normally mandatory for me to meet the artist first on a human level. To see if we can work together as a collaboration. This means personality, insights, core principles of just being a nice person who is enthusiastic.

Talk to me about radical food. I’m starving.

Thanks for asking. Radical Foods is the framework behind the current issue of First Person Magazine. It was an awesome and very challenging issue. I started a non-profit last year called Living Arts Fund and now position First Person Magazine under its umbrella. It just put me in a different spell for curating the issue. I encountered a lot of artists who work outside of galleries or have “left the art world.” Allen Ruppersberg’s “Al’s Cafe” was super inspiring. In the 70’s, he said he moved to LA because of the surf and the girls, and opened this spot only to serve coffee, beer and his assemblages. You could buy his art for like the price of a pie at Denny’s across the street and just hang out and talk. The cops busted it thinking it was some illegal drug ring and didn’t get it. Al said he was happy that happened because after three months he didn’t know how to end its run. I learned a lot about how art can happen outside of museums and galleries and it’s exactly what I was looking for. You can still get some copies of this issue. I’ve brought some to show this weekend at Ace. They’re kinda rare. All the issues are limited editions, more like books. This one has a gold letterpressed cover on it that my boyfriend made. The purple mountains on it are upside down…

“Ice Cream Underwear” by Carissa Potter.

RIP.

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:15:36 -0700

RIP.

We love the hustle.

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:02:45 -0700

We love the hustle.

SNOW IN THE DESERT INTERVIEW: EVE FOWLER

Fri, 04 May 2012 01:03:03 -0700

Eve Fowler is arguably one of the country’s greatest living conceptual artists — trained in photography at Yale and in journalism from Temple University, she documents queer lives, interrogates “non-creative” visual forms and bridges the word with the body. She’s joining us this weekend for artists workshops at Snow in the Desert, an art space for women at Ace Hotel & Swim club. We asked her about her work, and what we can look forward to on Saturday afternoon…

What is your relationship, or your work’s relationship, to ideas of “beauty”?

I don’t really think too much about beauty in an art context. When I look at art or when I make art I tend to think more about what the artist was thinking or, regarding my own work, I’m trying to get information out into the world that matters to me in some way. I have a lot of art up in my apartment right now because I run an art organization, Artist Curated Projects, and I really love most of it but I don’t think about any of it in terms of beauty. When I was in grad school the worst thing you could tell someone was that their work was beautiful…

Talk a bit about the series of works you created at your residency at One Colorado — related to one of our favorite books in the world, Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.”

The public art project I made this year using text by Gertrude Stein is something I’m really excited about. I have been working with that text for a couple years making collages. Last year driving to my studio downtown I would see neon posters, made by Colby Posters, on telephone poles and fences. This is a very common form of advertising here and these posters have been used by a lot of artists. While I was using Stein’s text to make cardboard, wood and paper signs and collages I started to think these posters might be a great way for the general population to experience this text that I really love and enjoy. I see some of the text in “tender buttons” as really queer & coded but I think it’s so open-ended that it could mean so many things depending on who the viewer is. Aside from being posted in public, the posters have been used for classes, occupy LA and other protests. I recently made larger versions of them, paintings, for a show in Austin, Texas — along with a sound piece I made in collaboration with Tara Jane O’Neil. The sound piece combines ambient sounds collected while I put the posters up and “this is it with it as it is” spoken continuously for three minutes.

What will you be working on this weekend at Snow in the Desert?

I think this weekend I will have my library that I collected from the One Institute Gay and Lesbian Archive. They sell books for 50 cents there and over time I collected about 65 books. The books are wrapped in collages — I think we will unwrap them together and talk about that project a little. My library has some very obscure books in it but I think the books and the authors are important because they were out when it was hard to be out — making it easier for everyone now.

Bookmaker and badass Trinie Dalton joins us this Saturday as...

Thu, 03 May 2012 17:53:41 -0700

Bookmaker and badass Trinie Dalton joins us this Saturday as part of Snow in the Desert, an activated art space for women at Ace Hotel Palm Springs, along with artist Eve Fowler, magician/musician Abby Portner, artist Anna Sew Hoy, pastry maverick and painter Leah Rosenberg, and other incredible peeps including host and co-founder of First Person Magazine and Living Arts Fund, Betty Nguyen, who DJs women producers, singers and songwriters Saturday night in the Amigo Room.

As illustrated above, Trinie’s work recently moved Thurston Moore to epistolary splendor.

Here’s the full schedule for the weekend — it’s going to be a kind of unprecedented mix of poolside lounging and artistic power that could just change the world.

SATURDAY MAY 5

Noon-4pm Poolside
Magician and musician Abby Portner DJs and performs live with a set that invites you to improvise with her as she provides instruments and a framework of vibrations.

2-4pm Clubhouse
ARTIST WORKSHOPS

Leah Rosenberg, head pastry chef and artist from Blue Bottle Cafe in San Francisco and at SFMoMA, prepares a DIY sno-cone station where participants can select from locally foraged ingredients to build their own flavor combinations.

Bookmaker and badass Trinie Dalton sets up a collage art book station where you can make your own mini books.

The inimitable Anna Sew Hoy leads a “make your own talisman” table with clay, leather cords and beads.

10pm-2am Amigo Room
Curator, artist and First Person Magazine and Living Arts Fund founder Betty Nguyen spins an homage to both women and Cinco de Mayo. She’ll be curating songs by women producers, singers and songwriters, coordinating the decades chronologically — 50’s girl groups early on, then 70’s disco singers, then Latin freestyle jams into the wee hours.

SUNDAY MAY 6

Noon-4pm Poolside
DJ Dorian Garry plays mellow-vibed, long-playing, smooth jams. A tour manager by day, and a devotee who knows music inside and out.

See all info here.

Your mom’s big day is coming up, May 13 — even...

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:01:00 -0700

Your mom’s big day is coming up, May 13 — even though we hope you’re lavishing her year-round, it’s always nice to have an extra excuse. We have hand-screened gift wrap with vintage ephemera stamped with affirmations so we can swath up something nice for her from our online shop. If your mom likes to smell nice and feel like a fancy lady, you could get her some Pearl+ Soap — sumptuous-smelling soaps made with crushed pearl by our friend Janet Jay — set in a lovely little cedar vessel. You can even get her a subscription where she’ll get a set of these petite soaps every two months.

If your mom is kind of butch, she might be into our wings + horns boxing robes, and if she’s into the wild side, get her a beautiful and scandalous Jeremy Kost book. Maybe she’s an artiste, or she’s a peeping Tom, or she’s a high profile street fashion blogger (and she owns an old Polaroid) — if so, she might be really into this. Or maybe your dad is exploring his gender.

Or you could just stay home and make her a card with crayons in homage to the good old days, or burn your portrait onto her lawn, or get her name tattooed on your neck. The sky’s the limit! But if you want us to send her something, order it by May 9 so we can get it to you in time. And if you have mommy issues, just get something for yourself and wear black. It takes all kinds.

Filmmaker, sculptor, poet, essayist and doodler Len Lye was born...

Wed, 02 May 2012 07:57:00 -0700

Filmmaker, sculptor, poet, essayist and doodler Len Lye was born in New Zealand in 1901. He was always searching, always experimenting with the relationship between our physical and sensorial experience and the epic trip-out of “art.” One time, he got kicked out of Australia for living in an indigenous community as a white person. He set his work to music, like Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra. He worked his way to London trimming coal on a steam ship, and started making experimental films by painting onto the film itself and scratching into black emulsion to make dancing sky shapes and aura explosions — this is his Swinging the Lambeth Walk. He was a quiet and dexterous master of his arts, and we salute him.

May Day, 2012

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:48:00 -0700

May Day, 2012