After the Museum: The Home Front 2013, an exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design,  raises many questions about the future of the museum industrial complex, but stops short of declaring definite solutions.

“Permanent Loan” by Project Projects displays famous artworks that have been replicated as black-and-white reproductions or as 3-D printed objects. This exercise suggests the democratization of once singular objects wherein famous pieces aren’t bound to the museums in which the originals reside. Similarly, Keetra Dean Dixon and JK Keller’s “Museum As Manufacturer,” a tiny mass production line that would recreate art objects, wonders about a time in which authenticity is no longer necessary.

“On Display,” by Superscript, HAO and Neil Donnelly, is an evolving presentation of people’s comments on architecture and design. It questions how far the interactivity between artist and viewer will go. “Cavity” had Charlie O’Geen carve a hole into the museum’s wall, exploring the museum’s history but, more importantly, meditating on the museum space itself. Does the wall make the museum? How does that space contribute to one’s viewing of art?

Snarkitecture’s “Bend,” winding foam and vinyl furniture on which one is actually allowed to sit, suggests that museums of the future will be a lot less stuffy. (The title wall for the whole show encourages photography, which most museum guards don’t usually meet with approval.)

After the Museum raises the above issues because they’ll likely be a part of the conversation about the future of museums. The  challenge is to present artwork in ways that makes museumgoers go to the museum and not just stay home.

Heretofore, many efforts by museums to become more like interactive playplaces has seemed like an afterthought, too little too late. In the future, museum curators will need to make their exhibitions as fun and interesting as a BuzzFeed list — and ultimately (hopefully), more rewarding. They will need seamless mobile interactivity and compelling multimedia that is considered during the development of the exhibition, not after. They will also need  to focus on the museum as an experience — one that can’t be duplicated with jpegs.

Fortunately for museums they have a number of things the internet lacks: centralized governance, institutional backing (read: money), the bona fide art itself, and many smart people who know everything about it. They also have physical space in which the art can be explored, in its true scale and unpixelated glory. It’s time to capitalize on what can’t be found elsewhere.

After the Museum: The Home Front 2013
Museum of Art and Design
Through June 9

Photos by Rani Molla.

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter. 

Rethinking Space

As residents of New York City (and many other large, densely-populated cities) are acutely aware, space is a luxury continually diminishing in quantity and increasing in price. These constraints require revisiting how we define and create space. Pop-up shops, mobile exhibits and, in fact, the Streetfest as a whole, were a temporary way to take back space from bustling lower Manhattan. Just as moving from the suburbs to the city requires a change in one’s conception of personal space, new building will also require a change in how we delineate space in the first place. Storefront for Art and Architecture commissioned the Spacebuster — a box truck that emits a giant inhabitable bubble out of its back doors — as a location for discussions and presentations throughout the day. It was big, bright and temporary way to create space.

Green Art

Like architects and builders, artists and designers can no longer ignore the environmental repercussions of their work. Terraform One addressed waste by reporposing the Styrofoam used in just one hour in NYC into a community art project. Festivalgoers made art on unlikely surfaces (faces, for example) and out of old clothing. A number of exhbitions also took this as a way to reintroduce greenery back into urban lives. Plant-In City demonstrated how terrariums could be both aesthetic appealing and environmentally useful—not to mention compact enough to fit in a tiny apartment.

Mobility

Many of the ideas at the Streetfest were literally carried by vehicles. Art Cart NYC showcased artist Hellbent’s Mix Tape series as a way to widen the ways in which people consider exhibiting and viewing art. Bus Roots toted plants around on a van’s green roof, using them as a means of artistic and environmental communication. Even foodtrucks were out in full force. The point is agility: the ability to go where there is need instead of expecting those in need to find you. Mobile units can also be a lot cheaper than their stationary counterparts.

Community

Many of the projects required working together in order to come up with community art, ideas and solutions. Alexander Gorlin Architects with Community Solutions showcased how they wanted to revitalize the Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn by adding mixed use attachments to prexisting buildings in order to create storefronts and community spaces and, by extension, a more inviting community. For them, community means a better quality of life. OpenUrban.com solicited people to add to its worldwide urban development wiki, so that users could better understand how their areas are being developed, and act accordingly.

Price accessibility (free)

The real point of “free” is that the lack of a price barrier makes things inherently more inclusive than their paid counterparts. In honor of the event, small little libraries were placed around the area, where people were encouraged to “Take a book, return a book.” Ad company Sub Rosa set up a sustainable, collaborate play space in which festivalgoers were allowed to design play structures, free of charge and free of rules. Numerous exhibitors set up art and design projects in which passersby could partake. They were free, but worth a lot more.

Photos by Rani Molla.

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter. 

Roy Lichtenstein Whaam! 1963 Acrylic and oil on canvas support: 1727 x 4064 mm frame: 1747 x 4084 x 60 mm Purchased 1966© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, via Tate Modern

Nearly a decade later, aside from general knowledge of pop art, Benday dots and the flickered memories of the print, I still didn’t know much about Lichtenstein and his work. That’s where Tate Modern and Twitter came in.

Last week, as a way to broadcast its Lichtenstein retrospective to a broader audience than London, Tate Modern curators gave a Twitter tour of the exhibition. The whole tour (#TateTour), questions and all, lasted less than an hour but is preserved idefinitely online.

By using Twitter as the communication medium, the curators were forced to be succinct — a difficult task when you’re trying to convey a lifetime of visual information. It’s an issue many designers and journalists face, working remotely. How do I communicate as quickly and accurately as possible? Pictures help. As does a comprehensive knowledge of your material — but one that’s not sentimental about cutting extraneous detail.

Roy Lichtenstein, Landscape in Fog 1996 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/DACS 2012, via Tate Modern

The tour went room by room in tweets, embedding photos and including interesting tidbits about the artist and his oeuvre: I learned that Lichtensein’s mechanical style was a response to the fluidity of abstract expressionism. I learned that Lichtenstein’s take on “Femme d’Alger” was actually meant as a sign of respect to Pablo Picasso, not a pop sendup. I even learned about Lichtenstein’s later works and how they were inspired by and infused with Chinese landscape paintings.

@elizawindso He was influenced by the Chinese landscapes of the Song dynasty, yet another style that he ‘Lichtensteined’ #TateTour

— Tate (@Tate) April 25, 2013

His removed, mechanical style was a reaction to Abstract Expressionism & the idea of emotional release through painting #TateTour

— Tate (@Tate) April 25, 2013

In the three minute video linked from the Twitter tour, co-curator  Iria Candela gives more info and a better visual idea of the exhibition.

The tour wasn’t an exhaustive treatise on Lichtenstein, but it wasn’t supposed to be. It was a well-rounded taste of the exhibition and an admirable effort on behalf of the museum to branch outside physical walls, dormrooms included.

Lichtenstein: A Retrospective
Tate Modern
Through May 27, 2013
@tate

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter. 

Tagging has been around in some form as long as people have written. What we know of tagging now, though, is largely dependent on the modern materials artists use (paint markers, spray paint), and through a sort of visual history, with people in different locations communicating to and learning from one another.

Typographer and designer Christian Acker goes a long way toward capturing that visual history and giving the artform its proper respect in his new catalogue of the various American tagging styles, Flip the Script: A Guidebook for Aspiring Vandals & Typographers. The book is set up as an overview of American tagging: what it is, where it came from, where it’s going. It features hundreds of lush — well, as lush as blackletter could get — reproductions of regional alphabets completed by graffiti writers from around the country. There are a lot, and an index would be helpful in future editions.

History in the writing

As a typographer, Acker maintains that graffiti alphabets don’t work well as fonts. That’s because the actual tags look much different than the sum of their letters, with each letter altered in relation to the next and the piece as a whole. But the exercise of having hundreds of artists write out separately the letters and numbers of their tags is an interesting — and academic — approach to an artform that’s rarely studied with this much precision. More importantly, in asking for the alphabets and talking with these artists, they were able to give voice to their own lettering.

At a discussion of his book at the Type Directors Club in New York City, Acker said that having the taggers complete a font helped them tell hidden stories. ”Stories are made up of words. Words are made up of letters,” Acker said to a room of type enthusiasts. “When I was going to the letters, I got stories.”

And really, that’s the most impressive part of this book. Each handwriting is accompanied by lengthy quotations by its authors.

From Acker’s interviews with the artists — many of which are recorded on his Youtube page — we learn that Philadelphia tagger Cornbread began his lengthy grafitti career by writing his name along the train route of a girl he was wooing in order to get her attention. We also learn that the that the reason the Cholo style bears resemblance to Old English because Mexico’s printing press predated those of the rest of the New World.

Creativity or Plagiarism?

Like linguistics, the meaning and the execution of tagging are always in flux. Acker catalogues this continually moving art form to show, generally, what tagging looked like in a given place and time. In doing so, numerous artists discuss where they got their inspiration, whose tags they’ve copied and how they’ve updated them with their own idiosyncrasies.  It’s a healthy conversation that designers should take to heart.

Unless you live in a vacuum, you’ve copied someone. It’s best to be upfront about your inspiration than ignore it and a appear like a thief later. In all of our arts — writing, blogging, designing, drawing, data visualizing — it’s probably better to be open about our inspiration than accused. What arises from the relationships of tags as well as the taggers’ own words, is an artform that is comfortable having an honest discussion of inspiration, that doesn’t just draw a line between copying and the creative process. In many ways that open discussion has led to its proliferation.

The more positive side is what you can learn from other artists — those tackling many of the same conundrums. Graffiti is often perceived as a lonely venture, but like any art or text visible to the public eye, it is a form of communication. Adding to others’ work creates a conversation, and a more evolved product all around.

Since Acker began this documentation project 10 years ago, four of the artists in Flip the Script have passed away. Fortunately, the book preserves the stories and lessons behind the tags — even after they are painted over and power-washed away.

 
Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter. 

From a cultural standpoint, what’s particularly appealing about the museum is its name. Design and—even more so—craft occupy a more quotidian space in public perception of arts than, say, fine arts like oil painting. These terms can be an ego punch, but they’re also a way to lower the barrier to entry that the high walls of a museum can present—at least for museumgoers. It’s arbitrary, but the difference between “craft” and “art” is huge in the American psyche. The first seems more housework than artwork—although its creation can be be finer.

But really, the Museum of Craft and Design is a museum like any other (except you’re supposedly allowed to touch some of the work). And the work of the artists featured would happily find itself in a museum with a haughtier name.

The small museum houses three exhibitions, a group working area and the perfunctory museum giftshop. It’s a beautiful open space that possesses good design: clean lines, fun but effacing furniture, and hipper bathrooms than those normally open to public use. The Museum of Craft and Design is utilitarian in the best way possible.

Affinity by Rebecca Hutchinson

Currently Rebecca Hutchinson‘s Affinity hangs down from the rafters in a corner room. The works are made of porcelain, paperclay, paper and natural materials and look like a post-apocalyptic  wilderness just rained over with volcanic ash, preserving everything as it lay.

Creatures From the Deep by Arline Fisch

In a darker room nearby, Creatures from the Deep by Arline Fisch swim in suspended animation like the jellyfish they resemble. Fisch uses textile patterns to form thin wires into aquatic sculptures that congregate at the ocean’s depths.

work by Michael Cooper

A retrospective of work by Michael Cooper takes up the main gallery. His multimedia creations are mashups of cars, guns and furniture, among other reoccurring subjects. The larger-than-life creations look like an upscale take on steampunk, with wood inlay appropriate for luxury cars and housing.

The night Visual.ly attended, museum workers were setting up for a crafts lab with e-commerce crafts site Etsy. Outside the small workshop area hung signs reminding guests not to bring beer from the event into the gallery. It might be a craft and design museum, but no one’s mistaking it for anything but art.

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter. 

In Visual Explanations, Edward Tufte elegantly likens the trajectory of data visualization and art, from representational to abstract, by discussing the development of maps:

“To go from maps of existing scenery to graphs of newly measured and collated data was an enormous conceptual step. Embodied in the very first maps were all the ideas necessary for making statistical graphics – quantified measures of locations of nouns in two-dimensional space – and yet it took 5,000 years to change the name of the coordinates from west-east and north-south to empirically measured variables X and Y. The even longer history of art took a similar course: The naturalistic coordinate system of painted cave-wall and canvas was first dislocated by Cubism’s fractured images from multiple viewpoints and then eventually abandoned altogether in 20th-century abstract painting, as the two dimensions of the canvas no longer referred to worldly scenery but only to themselves.”

For example, finding a location on a map by quadrant or coordinates has obvious benefits over, say, identifying a place using only its name or a drawn landmark.

Francis Picabia. Dances à la source (Dances at the spring). 1912. Oil on canvas, 8′ 3 1/8″ x 8′ 2″ (251.8 x 248.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Collection, given by their family. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Depa

Forgoing representation frees both data visualizers and artists to find other, purer meaning. (Although as Visual.ly’s Visualization Architect Drew Skau pointed out recently, the abstracting qualities of percentages and large numbers can obfuscate the very human issues behind them.)

Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925, which wrapped up a four-month run at the Museum of Modern Art this week, traces the art world’s leap from post impressionism to cubism to non-geometric abstraction.

Vasily Kandinsky. Impression III (Konzert) Impression III (Concert)". 1911. Oil on canvas, 30 7/8 x 39 9/16″ (77.5 x 100.5 cm). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo courtesy of: the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, München

What’s most interesting about the abstract movement is just how fast its artists turned the long history of representational art on its head. In just a few decades, abstract art went from nonexistent to avant-garde, to critical acceptance, to a part of artistic thought.

Kazimir Malevich. Zhivopisnyi realizm mal’chika s rantsem-krasochnye massy v 4-m izmerenii. (Painterly realism of a boy with a knapsack color masses in the 4th dimension). 1915. Oil on canvas, 28 x 17 1/2″ (71.1 x 44.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange). Photo courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department, John Wronn.

That spread has largely been a result of the personal relationships among the early abstract artists.

You can trace the inspiration/collaboration through 350 works in a variety of media and also a network graph that maps the artists’ relationships. It’s a collaboration between the exhibition’s curatorial and design team, as well as Columbia Business School Kravis Professor of Business Paul Ingram and grad student Mitali Banerjee.

The chart decorates the exhibition’s title wall but lives on online, providing a handy way of seeing who knew whom. Vectors link artists with documented acquaintances. Artists with the most connections are highlighted in red, offering a quick way to see those most influential in disseminating the ideas and discussion of abstract art. These artists reached across continents and disciplines to collaborate on an artform that would become an indispensable part of the conversation on art.

As curator Leah Dickerman said at the exhibition’s press opening in December, the chart “shows in some sense how ideas move through the world.” It also illuminates that abstract art is “not the innovation of a solitary romantic genius sitting under a tree who’s visited by a muse.” Rather, Dickerman said, “It’s a relay of ideas that moves like wildfire through a network of artists and intellectuals working in farflung places in different media.”

These were real people having real conversations about representation—and leaving it behind to broaden their artistic horizons. A mark on paper no longer had to be anything, leaving room for people to feel it. A lack of pictorials illuminated other ideas.

Using the network graph, one can imagine the relationships between the abstract greats and how those relationships affected their work. Although it’s certainly not a definitive way of tracking inspiration—an unwieldy thing to follow— the visual aid does alert viewers to its fertile presence, even in the wordless, subjectless world of abstraction.

To explore the MOMA’s network graph, click here.

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter. 

Hoffmann and her fellow panelists, Facebook’s Ji Lee and J. Crew’s Johanna Langford, believe that being an in-house designer has silver linings, even if it’s not quite meant for the silver screen. Below, we’ve listed five perks of being an in-house designer from the lecture at Parsons The New School for Design.

1. Knowing your company

When you work with a company day in and day out, you not only learn its mission, but you also become familiar with all of its products—not just the one you’re designing for at that moment. That leads to a much more holistic and unified approach to the company’s design. At the MOMA, where the design work is to “visually communicate the museum,” the team of designers must ”make sure people come to the museum and then find their way around the museum.” That means the six in-house designers are familiar with the museum’s art, its patrons, its signage, mailing and more. They know the museum inside and out, and are thus better able to design for it.

2. Caring about your company

In addition to knowing their brand, designers who are happy with their jobs can also come to deeply care about it and take pride it.  Langford, who is VP of Brand Creative at J. Crew, said that she developed an ”emotional connection to the brand” as an employee and a customer. She tries to convey that brand nostalgia in the company’s advertising. Accordingly, she said, it’s important to find a company that fits your personality. Lee, a Facebook designer, agrees: “I’m only going to work for a company I believe in.” That concept caused him to make the jump from Google to the social network, after he found that he largely identified with Facebook’s hacking culture and entrepreneurial ethos. “It’s rewarding because I believe in this company’s mission,” Lee said.

3. You can experiment/screw up

While design firms are usually trying to impress a one-time client on a single project — which often means giving clients what they expect — in-house design teams have more latitude to experiment and, by extension, make mistakes. That’s because they’ll likely still have their job the next day, while freelancers and agencies run the risk of not being hired again. One of the MOMA’s designers who presented along with Hoffmann, Greg Hathaway, described an over-the-top series of advertisements and title walls for an exhibition by installation artist Claes Oldenburg. Hathaway had wanted to design the exhibition in the same vein as Oldenburg’s delightful large-scale works (think of his upside-down ice-cream cone). For the MOMA design team that meant 3-D fonts and a guerilla marketing campaign at fastfood chain Shake Shack. Unfortunately for the team, Oldenburg took his work a lot more seriously and they had to redesign everything. “Our dreams of a fastfood empire didn’t take off,” Hathaway said. “That’s OK because there’s always the next show.”

4. You’re in it together

Lee started out at Facebook as a creative director but found that the egalitarean work ethos there made him a better fit as a general contributor. According to Lee, that was fine with him because being equals means understanding one another’s contributions better, a relationship that improves the workplace environment overall. ”Where there’s usually mistrust between accounting and creative, for in-house we’re all working toward the same goal so there’s more respect,” he said. ”Everybody has the same mission.”

5. More time

In-house designers not only have more time with a company than freelance designers, they also seem to have more time in general, according to the MOMA’s Hoffmann. “Ad agencies are super fast,” she said, while “museum in-house is super slow.” There are a number of reasons for this, many of which touch on the understanding built out of the above four perks. And the benefits are obvious. While deadlines might help push out a product quickly, time will help create a better one. The fulltime structure also allows for longterm thinking about the company and longterm projects, which might be too amorphous for visiting design teams to take on or even understand. For Lee, that infinite time—although he says each individual project is rushed—has let him step far outside his comfort zone, not to mention the boundaries of commissioned design. He even helped decorate Facebook’s newer New York offices—a commission that probably wouldn’t be on a graphic-designer’s job description.

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter. 

This week, Visual.ly looks at fine art that is more accustomed to capitalism. Art Expo, “The world’s largest fine art trade show,” showcases hundreds of exhibitors in the spralling 75,000 square feet of Pier 92. The contemporary pieces at Art Expo will appear in galleries and living rooms around the world, and accordingly, they vary greatly in quality and style.

The huge, carpeted space is full of fresh flowers, but smells like a locker room. It’s definitely not as glamourous as the Armory Show, nor as edgy as the trendier Independent, but this kind of accessible and affordable art will be a part of our daily lives, whether we like it or not.

These artists are a lot less squeamish about money than those holding solo shows in galleries downtown. After all, their booths go for between $3,450 and $50,000. That said, they’ve got a lot to lose, too. 

Roderick Stevens, wearing a kilt and long curly hair, makes multimedia constructions — typewriters, toy soldier flags, assorted Americana — that have comic-book lure and the noir of Dick Tracy. Stevens has spent a lot of time away from his home state Arizona at outdoor art fairs, but this is the first time he’s participated in something as big as Art Expo.

“You pay a whole lot of money for a booth and you pay a whole lot of money to ship your art out here,” says Stevens, who in his estimation paid 10 times the amount he normally pays to exhibit. “Then you wait to see what happens.”

Lillian Samson-John makes intricate and time-consuming pieces using silk thread or beads and glue. Comely under a pile of curled hair, she sits in her tiny booth against the southern wall of the elongated Pier 92.

She’s sold at shows in Nigeria, but none anywhere near this size. She and a fellow artist from her home country, Abbey David, split a booth to bring their art into the United States.

It’s much more than they’d normally spend to showcase their art, but Art Expo represents a jump into the big time. Says Samson-John, “You have to spend this much to bring this work out into the public.”

Chicago wholesale art seller Slaymaker Fine Art represents 80 artists, selling their original pieces en masse to galleries around the world. Their paintings and drawings sit in stacks one would normally associate with reproduced posters.

Owner Woody Slaymaker dons piercing eyes and a pinstripe suit. Slaymaker says he usually sells over 2,000 pieces, from the 6,000 he brings, which he says is more than worth the booth price. While we spoke, a sales attendant was securing a transaction with a gallery in Australia. “This is the only trade show where people are buying,” he says.

Perhaps Art Expo’s catalog describes the show better: ”Contemporary art you can afford to love.” It’s also an economy in which artists are fine with selling. Like designers, this is how they can afford to do what they do: selling art, so that they can make more art.

It’s also a city that’s actively doing something positive about its art scene.

How does one do that? It likely involves nurturing a culture around art that is both approachable and accessible.

Following the lead of a number of cities nationwide, The Big Pineapple holds a monthly Night Market — an evening art fair meets street fair meets street art — that encourages both artists and buyers to step into each other’s shoes.

The event helps the city of 400,000, overrun by more than 7 million visitors per year, to find its own artistic voice. (Plenty of people come to tourist destinations looking for trinkets to remember their visit, but work that’s steeped financially in remaining the same does not do much social and artistic heavy-lifting). What’s needed is participation from artists who are more concerned with their own expression than maintaining the status quo.

Among numerous other inventive pop-up booths, 808 Urban had a fierce showing at Night Market. The nonprofit collective teaches teens to be career artists. The organization functions through mini organizations or “Junior Boards” of eight to 10 teens from the same high school. Their roles on the Junior Board cover much of the skills needed to become adult artists: team leaders, artists, videographers, photographers, graphic designers.

They take classes in their craft but also in culture — which in Hawaii, due to its confluence of populations, is multifarious and moving. Collective members also learn the pragmatics of the art business: How to secure a wall for a mural, how to raise money for corporate sponsorship, how to sell their art, which collective members do in 808′s storefront The Refuge, using the proceeds for their next works. These junior boards come up with their own art projects. So far, more than 200 of their murals provoke the island of Oahu. Walls and shelves at The Refuge bulged with everything from painted graffiti cans to portraits.

The nonprofit creates possibility outside of Honolulu’s tourist market.

“When you grow up on Hawaii, you want to get off of this rock,” says Refuge Co-Director and Program Manager Sierra Dew, who is an artist herself. ”With projects like these, kids can say, ‘I see myself working here now.’”

Many other elements and organizations at the Night Market furthered the communal process of art making and buying. The hopeful result is that art becomes part of the community, not just something that defines it. An array of hands-on arts events, as well as people from all ages and walks, made the event feel good and urgent — like a city center that hasn’t been overtaken by picture-takers. Instructors from local arts organizations taught fairgoers how to silkscreen, paint, draw, and just play around.

Events like Night Market don’t mean that Honolulu as a whole will ascend from the depths of traveler trinkets to a city that’s well-versed in the importance of design, but it can’t hurt to dip more hands in the paint.

Click here more pics from Night Market.

Night Market
Monthly 

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter. 

For those unaccustomed to art fairs, they’re basically the art world’s answer to the trade show—just more, um, arty. Even still, they usually feature notoriously bad lighting, impersonal booths, and crowds that feel more like being in a cattle drive than a culture shock. Operating under a given theme — contemporary art, for example — galleries from around the world, or a specified region, gather for a few days to show off their wares. Usually, there’s a selection process for each fair, and galleries pay a steep price to be included (so they in turn can sell their work to a who’s who of art enthusiasts).

The parameters to entry for each art fair are probably the most plausible way of gauging the art — although that’s deeply steeped in fame and commerce, so it really has no direct bearing on the quality of the art. Even within a single art fair, it’s difficult — and probably fruitless — to draw a single conclusion. That’s because by their very nature they are varied. Artists come from all over the world, working in numerous media, for infinite reasons.

That said, this week we took a look at art in 2013 through Scope New York (not to be confused with art from 1993) in a general way, and with a nod to some art that might appeal to data visualizers.

Scope made itself stand out a little bit from the orderly masses with the quirky and slightly rundown location of the iconic post office Skylight at Moynihan Station, recently the location of Fashion Week events (it was stamps and mail as usual at the Eastern entrance).

The event featured work from 75 galleries from 18 countries and four continents.

Here are some standouts for data visualizers:

And here are some pieces that were just cool:

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter.