travel – Page 24

Dominoes are part of a large new concrete landscape

Artist Bo Droga and his volunteer crew have been creating a large row of dominoes along US1, under the Metrorail tracks in Coral Gables, FL. The large columns in the area at the University of Miami along Ponce de Leon Boulevard have been turned from drab cement to black and white domino pieces. Droga’s work is inspired by many things, usually by his immediate surrounding and the local material at hand. “The common thread within my artwork is the simplicity in form, and use of everyday material,” he says.

The volunteers helping him on the dominoes project are all moms, all volunteers and all French.

The “Miami Dominoes” installation will eventually include 46 of the columns when completed, as of now, there are still a few more being worked on. They are up to 18 feet high.

Droga is Australian, who came to Miami by way of Paris. After all these years, he is the one who had the eye to see something that was staring us all in the face all these years.

I must admit when they were building Metrorail in the early 1980s, I would see the pylons/columns which we called “Stonehenge South” at the time and thought they would make great surfaces for advertising. Thank God that never became the case.

The crew uses large metal forms to create the round domino dots. The area will eventually be part of the long Underline project and Droga envisions outdoor tables and people sitting around in the area playing dominoes – a sort of sister to Domino Park that is in Little Havana.

Dorga originally had the domino idea for a project in Australia, but it never got off the ground due to permitting issues and when he moved here and saw the Metrorail pylons, he knew exactly what to do.The Miami-Dade County transportation and public works department helped him get permitted and he was off.

One thing that the local community has noticed – the dominoes are a “double six” set, where in Miami, “double nines” is popular. Droga knows that, but feels that the sixes make for a better look and art installation.

Bo Droga, artist

========
Don’t miss my next post. Receive Tomversation via email
each time I publish Click here.
=======

Is he a time traveler?

This image is from 1936 – Park Avenue South and 14th Street in NYC. Notice something strange for 1936? Is that guy with his back to us on a cell phone?

I love these time traveler photos that I come across once in awhile.

Just attending a lot of art things

Sorry I haven’t posted here lately, there’s really not much going on. Just living my life.

Been to a bunch of art festivals we have during the winter here in Miami. There was one today, Saturday, a block party called the French Quarter Block Party and there were all New Orleans-themed things like a crawfish boil, beignets, jambalaya, and things like that. With live music, drinks, ice cream and all. The whole town came out. We had a few block parties this winter. I live in a small village in the Miami area.

It was lots of fun. I cover the news for my town, so I have that here in the Coconut Grove Grapevine. Along with a bunch of other art happenings I attended this winter. I interviewed a bunch of artists who participated in the arts festivals in town and also attended shows in Miami starting with the Art Basel events in December. I think I posted some of it here in the Tomversation blog. It’s also all in the Grapevine.

The butcher the baker and the candlestick maker

cyclemessenger

In 1896, Alice Austen traveled around New York City taking photos of everything. Most images were of people working – police, city employees, mailmen, etc.

These were the people who made the city run daily. This is a photo of a bicycle messenger and there are photos of various other workers like a shoe-string peddler and a sponge peddler and a knife sharpener. Could you make a living doing these tings? Remember the scotch tape store that was a recurring skit on Saturday Night Live? It was a store in the mall that just sold scotch tape. That’s it.

The cost of living is so high these days that it makes you wonder how people survived by selling shoe-lace strings. But when most things cost a nickle or less (like wasn’t a newspaper a penny or two?) I guess it was possible.

Alice’s photos were donated to the Library of Congress. There are many shown here at Mashable. Check them out, they are really enjoyable to see.

Another old NY Herald photo

nyherald

This is Christmas shopping at Herald Square in 1930. Love this photos, as it shows the New York Herald building at the upper right and at left is Macy’s.

Enjoying the Beaux Arts Festival

The Beaux Arts Festival is in town this weekend. Starting in January a whole bunch of art festivals take over the South Florida area. It’s a lot of the same artists that make the circuit and go from show to show, so there is not much new art to see, but it’s fun to be out and for my friends and me it’s a lot about the food.

The Beaux Arts Festival is a yearly event benefit for the Lowe Art Museum on the University of Miami campus. This is

the 67th year.

Dale Messick and Brenda Starr featured at Society of Illustrators gallery

brenda-starr

The Art of Dale Messick – the Brenda Starr cartoonist, will be on display at the Society of Illustrators in NY from January 3 to March 23, 2019.

I won’t be in NY during this period, but would have loved to see the work up close. As a kid, I would read all of the comics in the NY Daily News, including Brenda Starr. I used to like the way it was drawn as well as the stories.

The Society of Illustrators is a small gallery/museum at 128 East 63rd Street, a great place but easy to miss.

The first time I went, I was meeting my cousin there, it was raining and I knew the general area, but couldn’t find the museum. I stood under a red awning to get out of the rain and was looking around the area, wondering, “Where is this place?” only to turn around and realize the awning I was standing under was the awning to the Society of Illustrators entrance!

========
Don’t miss my next post. Receive Tomversation via email
each time I publish Click here.
=======

Celebrating the King Mango Strut

We have a parade in our little village each year called the King Mango Strut. The last Sunday of each year the town comes out and we parody everything that’s gone on during the year – local things, politics, etc. I write the daily news for our town called the Coconut Grove Grapevine, and nine years ago, the Grapevine was one of the things parodied as the “Gripevine” – since people always felt we were constantly griping about things, here’s a little of that here.

Anyway, here is some of this past Sunday’s 37th annual King Mango Strut.

Trina as RBG with Regina

Trump and another RBG

That’s me on right with friends.

Start of the Strut

Trina and AnnaMaria

We don’t like Rick Scott.

A trip through New England with Weekends With Yankee

I wrote about Annabel Langbein as having one of my favorite Saturday morning tv shows but I have another, it’s Weekends With Yankee, a half hour show that takes you through the back roads of New England. Yankee is a magazine and Weekends With Yankee is the tv show.

I usually hit the gym early on weekends – 7 am or so and I grab breakfast on the way home and settle in for these comfortable Saturday morning shows.

I think in another life I lived in New England, because I’m always drawn to it; I feel the same about Arizona and New Mexico, so maybe in a second other life, I lived there.

I’m always considering moving to Southern Connecticut. I like it’s location between New York City and Boston, and I like the small villages along the water on the Long Island Sound.

Anyway, back to Weekends With Yankee; what’s great about the show is there are three or four segments where they go all over New England. One segment may be a visit to a lighthouse, another might be a visit to a small bread factory in a small Vermont town, another might be lobster diving in Maine. You just want to be there as you watch.

It’s homey and informational and I want to be immersed in it all.

Thanksgiving week in NYC

I’m back in NYC for Thanksgiving week. I noticed that one of my best friends, Santi, is in town from Miami, I saw his posts on Instagram, not sure why he didn’t notify me but we’ll hang out and have fun. This video above is last night’s ice skating at Bryant Park, it’s a little long, but I had hoped the music could be heard because the skating is so in sync with the music – Barry White singing, “Can’t Get Enough of You.” It was so loud, filling up the park, but for some reason, it is not very loud here.

nyc1

A few Octobers ago, Santi and I ended up here together, too. His wife was coming but she got sick and there was a Nor’easter or hurricane or something on the way, so she never made it. Luckily neither did the hurricane.

So Santi and I and some of his friends had a ball. We were all over the city every hour of the day.He showed me so many things I had not seen or known before, and I thought I knew every inch of the city. I saw the Lady in Gold at the Neue Galerie, which I had never seen before, the painting or the gallery. I remember him getting into an argument with some tourists who were from a country who as supposedly communist at the time, he just started yelling at them in the museum when he heard they were from whatever country it was.

nyc2

Since it was October, four of us went to this Oktoberfest at a German restaurant in the east 80s, I believe. We drank a lot of beer and ordered this pile of meat. It was a huge platter full of everything you can imagine – pork chops, steak, knockwurst, whatever, tons of meat! And I try not to eat much meat in my daily life, so it was something for all of us to get through the pile of that meat.

It was a fun week, he had stayed at a friend’s in Greenwich Village so we spent a lot of time down there. I’m hoping for a repeat of all that this time. We’ll see. I may drag him to one of my favorite museums today – the Museum of the City of New York, which is in Spanish Harlem, a quirky neighborhood I think he would love.

nyc7 nyc9