For over 35 years, the “Metropolitan Diary” has allowed people to share fleeting memories and quirky moments that could only happen in New York. The column stands as an early example of a user-generated feature at the Times, serving as an important indicator of local culture. Dedicated newspaper subscribers can read new entries in print every Monday, and the Times now offers additional stories and interactive features online. To read more entries and see more of Kerlow’s illustrations, visit The New York Times and his website.

The Bliumis’s project is produced in collaboration with No Longer Empty, an arts organization that works to widen the audience for contemporary art by presenting high-caliber, site-specific public art exhibitions in the heart of communities. The project has allowed the Bliumises to visit families in the Riverdale, Castle Hill, Woodlawn, and City Island neighborhoods, among others, resulting in 13 family portraits. “You can see a lot, even in one photograph,” Alina Bliumis said in the article. “You can see the social and cultural differences. You can see the traditions. I think you can see everything about life in photographs.”

To learn more about “Painting for a Family Dinner” and the Bliumis’s other projects, visit their website.

In 2010, she established her own design studio Njenworks and created innovative campaigns for companies like Nike, Target, Kate Spade, and the Guggenheim and Harvard Art Museums. In addition to her internship at Eric Baker Design, Natasha worked as an intern on Paula Scher’s team at Pentagram, perhaps making her the first former Pentagram intern to become a partner in the firm’s 40 year history. For more info or to purchase the issue, visit Graphic Design USA.

The New York Times reports that the lawsuit states that Aycock learned of the plan to remove Star Sifter when the terminal’s management unit, Terminal 1 Group Association, wrote to her last December. Ms. Aycock had been commissioned by the same unit to create the sculpture in celebration of Terminal 1’s opening in 1998 as the first new passenger building at J.F.K. in more than 25 years. “The sculpture had a dual purpose,” the lawsuit said. “Not only was the sculpture intended to enrich the terminal aesthetically, but it was also intended to fulfill a functional purpose by filling an opening in the rotunda that created an unanticipated security risk in the building design.”

Aycock, who is also a member of the city’s Public Design Commission, has created 32 public works, including pieces at other airports and suspended sculptures for convention centers in California and Connecticut. Her artwork is also included in the permanent collections of the Whitney and Brooklyn Museums and the Museum of Modern Art. “There are other instances where I have art at airports where they need to do work,” she told the Times. “They tell me well in advance, they look for an alternate space, they save the work and they reinstall it. They prioritize the work of art.”

CBS News reports that Terminal 1 Group planned to begin dismantling the structure on April 24, but a judge granted Aycock a temporary restraining order halting those plans. A hearing was scheduled for April 27 to determine if an injunction stopping the sculpture’s removal is appropriate.

Parks notes that Woodruff’s series is carefully organized into four distinct groups of works, each devoted to one of the four temperaments, with a connection made through color—sanguine is represented by red, the choleric by yellow, the melancholic by black, and the phlegmatic by white. “With his fluency in pictorial strategies and a knowledge of art history that encompasses Symbolism, Surrealism, and Mannerism, the artist brings a highly original take on this subject matter,” writes Parks.

The author also praises Woodruff’s mastery of acrylic paint, although Woodruff himself declines to discuss his technique. “I’d really prefer just to have the viewer see it as magic,” he says. Whatever it is, Parks is impressed by the result. “Woodruff’s intensely atmospheric, disorienting, magical, and fascinating realm utterly seduces but nonetheless rewards us with some profound insights into ourselves and the very real world we inhabit. The artist returns us from his dream stimulated, challenged, energized and thoroughly pleasured—no small accomplishment.”

For the full article, pick up the May issue of American Artist.

Motorcity tells the tale of Abraham Kane, overlord of the futuristic, high-tech city of Detroit Deluxe and the Burner gang who fight against his plans to destroy and re-develop it. “Kane hates cars and everything they represent,” Prynoski told GeekDad. “They’ve been forgotten over the years, and they’re illegal, but because this is set in Detroit, there are old car factories and car parts, and [the Burners] can build these cars and fight. It’s kind of like the new Battlestar Galactica … where they pulled all the ships’ [computers] offline. Because cars are essentially mechanical, Kane doesn’t have the ability to tap into them.”

To read the entire post, visit GeekDad.

Minter also loves to teach. She began teaching art in the 1970s, working her way up through elementary schools into substitute-teaching in high school. In 1986, she joined the faculty at SVA, and she’s been teaching in the MFA Fine Arts Department ever since.

Minter tells Modern Painters, “When you teach graduate students it’s a lovely way to spend an afternoon. I just adore it. I do a special thing, and I don’t know of anyone else who does it. Usually there are no more than nine students, and we bounce around ideas to try to make each student better. I really believe the students learn from their peers more than from someone just coming in. Why should they believe me? I want them to explain their thinking, to make a case for it, if they have to prove to me sometimes that their thinking is better than the consensus.”

Read the full interview in the April print issue of Modern Painters, which is on newsstands now.

Image: A still from Marilyn Minter’s video Pink Green Caviar, 2009. Courtesy of Salon 94.

To read more coverage of the Center for an Urban Future report, visit Dexigner, Metro Focus, New York Daily News and Core77.

Among the highlights of the interview, Rhodes talks about the 750-seat SVA Theatre on West 23rd Street in Chelsea, which benefits students and serves as cultural center for the neighborhood. “In becoming a growing attraction for the neighborhood, we will be doing the neighborhood a public service,” Rhodes tells Rosen in the article. The SVA Theatre has also been tapped by a professional studio to be used for sound mixing and editing on feature-length films, which will provide new internship and mentorship opportunities for students—soon they will be honing their skills alongside industry professionals in a world-class theater.

Over the years, graduate programs at SVA have expanded rapidly across all fields of art and design under the leadership of Rhodes. SVA graduates are consistently cited as innovators and leaders in fields as diverse as Animation, Interaction Design, Fine Arts, and Video, and while this has been important, Rhodes notes that controlled growth will be the key to continued success. “…After having grown so quickly at the graduate level we think for the next five years our emphasis will be to consolidate and ensure that all programs are functioning in the way we want them to function,” he explains, adding that it’s important to let the programs “mature without having to divert our resources to promote new programs.”

Watch a video of the entire interview here.

Entitled Designing New York’s Future, the report highlights the talent coming out of SVA and three other New York design schools. “Their graduates have produced dozens of start-up companies that set up locally—something that has eluded most of the city’s scientific research institutions,” says the report. “They also provide the talent pipeline for New York City’s creative industries—including the city’s fast-growing design and architecture sectors.”

Among the education and business leaders cited in the report are SVA President David Rhodes, who points to New York’s dynamic creative community as a peerless resource to students, and MFA Products of Design Department Chair Allan Chochinov, whose upcoming design research class will meet at the SoHo offices of pioneering design firm IDEO. “One really important thing we do,” says Chochinov, “is introduce students to the best professional designers we know, and if we can do that in the context of their actual workplaces, all the better.”

Among the young entrepreneurs featured in the report are SVA alumni Nico Puertollano (BFA 2002 Computer Art), who started his own print and motion graphics studio after graduation, and designer Deborah Adler (MFA 2002 Design), whose innovative system for prescription packaging for Target began as her thesis project. In addition, the report’s cover features the work of SVA students Allison Shaw and Michael Yap, whose project for the MFA Interaction Design Department transforms the Williamsburg Bridge.

Click here to visit the Center for an Urban Future’s website and download the full report.

Images: (top) Cover of the Center for an Urban Future report; (next) MFA Interaction Design Department presentation.