Look, it's not that I don't think John Waters is a great artist. It's just that I think his best work is in the medium of film, not art world art. But as a filmmaker who also hangs out...
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Category archive: art
November 13, 2009
Uh, No. Playdate By John Waters
November 12, 2009
Tom Otterness Playground Comes To Hell's Kitchen South
I really prefer none, but if I have to choose, I guess I like my Tom Otterness playground sculpture tiny, variegated, slightly political, and in Battery Park City. And in that respect, Larry Silverstein, the tiny real estate developer,...
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November 10, 2009
Noah's Big Gay Ark By Clifford Richards
St. Matthew in the City, an Anglican parish in Auckland, NZ, has a super, big, gay billboard to promote their weekly LGBT service. It's a big, gay Noah's Ark by UK designer Clifford Richards, updated from his original 1970...
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[read the full post...]
November 5, 2009
Yeah, So, Damien Hirst's Sausage-in-a-Baby-Bottle Sculpture
The funny thing is, I could look at Damien Hirst's bisected calf in formaldehyde while eating veal carpaccio. I could grind my own hamburger next to his installation withmaggots and a rotting cow's head. I could lose myself in...
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Goodnight, Dead Turks: The Decemberists' Childrens' Book Is Finally At The Printer
I know that when fans read in Paste Oct '06 that The Decemberists' Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis would put out a children's book "about a talking cat who lives in turn-of-the-century Butte, Montana," many people stopped uploading greenscreen...
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[read the full post...]
November 4, 2009
Alphabet Google Earth By Thomas de Bruin
I've been spending a bit of time recently in the Netherlands version of Google Earth, and the geometry of the Dutch landscape is really distinctive. And educational! Thomas de Bruin has assembled the entire alphabet, upper and lower case,...
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November 3, 2009
A Is For Anvil: Spectacular Dutch Childrens Books Online
Het ABC voor Holland's Kleintjes met 156 Plaatjes, by Daan Hoeksema, 1923 Bibliodyssey's found another incredible trove of vintage children's books, this time at The Memory of The Netherlands. The digitized collections of libraries and institutions spanning 160 years--including...
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[read the full post...]
October 23, 2009
Busty Meccano Nanny & Pram By Andreas Konkoly
This won't be news to the readers of Pram Watch, the official blog of the Pram Museum, but to the few stragglers and delinquents among us, I say take note: "All nannies have a motherly bosom, and if you...
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[read the full post...]
October 15, 2009
Dads Across America Tonight Are Hugging Their Kids, Checking The Moorings On Their Experimental Helium Balloon Projects
I don't know about your cockamamie, gigantic, mylar balloon project, but mine is not in our backyard; it'll be in the Pantheon or the Grand Palais. Or outer space. Still, I made the kid promise me she wouldn't climb...
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[read the full post...]
October 12, 2009
Tibor Gergely X Lucy Sprague Mitchell Throwback Colabos
The awesomely named Tibor Gergely fled the Nazis for New York, where he illustrated one million Golden Books, plus the two Important Wartime Lesson stories the AFISA-Hollywood Animation Archive recently posted. They're just a taste of what's to come;...
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[read the full post...]
October 4, 2009
DT Found It: 'Sculptures For Children,' By Frances Weiss
Last fall, I'd wondered aloud who the unidentified artist was in Life Magazine's 1951-52 photos of some surreal sculptural playground equipment. All I could figure out was that some of the Jan. 1952 pictures were taken at Tibor de...
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[read the full post...]
September 29, 2009
Overpainted Kid Photos By Gerhard Richter
I've been surfing through the 566 overpainted photographs on Gerhard Richter's website for another project. I'm up to around #160; they're arranged chronologically, and in early 1998, snapshots of Richter's kids and his wife Sabine start popping up. It's...
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[read the full post...]
September 25, 2009
It's Just A Plan Colombia: Awesome Activist Art By Beehive Design Collective
I was just surfing through some images of the protests at the G20 in Pittsburgh when I was stopped and stunned by the absolutely incredible banners of art-activists of the Beehive Design Collective. the Beehive Collective translates in-depth socio-political...
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[read the full post...]
September 20, 2009
Sartorialist Temporarily Screws Up Arthur Elgort Camera Ready Market
In 1997, fashion photographer Arthur Elgort published Camera Ready: How to Shoot Your Kids, an awesome and inspiring collection of eleven years' worth of his best photos of his own kids, combined with wise, useful, not overly technical advice....
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[read the full post...]
September 18, 2009
A Child's Machiavelli, AKA The Other Little Prince
It's like my dad always told me: "If you can't beat'em, make sardonic Machiavelli references about'em." When John DiIulio fled the Bush White House in 2001, he described the hyper-politicized environment as being run by "Mayberry Machiavellis." And when...
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From Ford's Dept Of Awesome/Horrible Ideas
After bugging my dad for months asking why we couldn't get a Citroen Karin, I learned not pay too much mind to concept cars. So the downright goofiness in the Ford Transit Connect Family One Concept of storage bins...
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[read the full post...]
September 10, 2009
And A Little Woodworkblogging On The Side
Swedish illustrator Anders Nyberg keeps a blog for all his wacky side projects. Come for the fantastical wooden toys, stay for the giant Lego "thing" Nyberg and his daughter made one Sunday afternoon using all their Lego pieces. Anders Nyberg...
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[read the full post...]
September 8, 2009
The Triumph Of The Crayolatariat
On the Fourth of July, we took the kids to The Crayola Factory: A Hands-on Discovery Center in downtown Easton, Pennsylvania. Though it's impossible to say such crafty entertainment could not be found without three hours in the car, the...
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[read the full post...]
September 2, 2009
Good Mourning
I mean, I know it's a mourning photo, but this dagguerotype is just so incredibly sad. MOURNING DAG OF FATHER, BABY & MOM'S FOLK ART PAINTING, currently $400, auction ends Sept. 7 UPDATE: Sold for $2,034. [greg french early...
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[read the full post...]
August 24, 2009
Indie Rock Coloring Book By Yellow Bird Project
Graphic artist Andy J. Miller has been collaborating with the Yellow Bird Project on their Indie Rock Coloring Book for almost two years, almost since the YBP itself was founded. There's a page for each of the 32 indie...
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My Name's Doug, And My Cool Trick Is Painting Starbucks Cups
Here's a modern craftywork project from Our Gen X Ambassador Douglas Coupland: Something "kids can do by themself [sic], or maybe grandparents need something to do." Or Gen X'ers who look like grandparents. [youtube via dt reader chris]...
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August 17, 2009
Thriftshop Find: The Family of Man, The Magazine
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Thriftshop Find: The Family of Man, The Magazine, originally uploaded by daddytypes. Obviously it's kind...
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August 4, 2009
This Week In Affordable Artworks: Jane Mount's Kid Book Self-Portrait
I always make sure to have my vintage Pynchons and Nabokovs slotted in there just in case someone like artist Jane Mount comes over. See, like the rest of us, Mount likes to judge people by what's on their...
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[read the full post...]
July 28, 2009
Who Knew? Mike The Magicat
Our era didn't invent the idea of people being famous merely for being famous. Gong Show judge/psychic Jeane Dixon, I'm looking at you. I'm old enough to have seen your later TV career, but too young to know how...
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[read the full post...]
July 25, 2009
Recycled LACMA Bears By Robert Fontenot
When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art decided to deaccession over 100 items from its collection, artist Robert Fontenot was there to scoop them up. He bought over 50 items, mostly from the museum's costumes and textiles department,...
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[read the full post...]
July 24, 2009
Dan Meth's Comic Influences? You're Soaking In It!
IN: This video montage of artist/illustrator Dan Meth shows his influences and inspirations in roughly chronological order of exposure. OUT: And this animation montage of more movies adapted from toys is the output. If it were just Care Bears...
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[read the full post...]
July 22, 2009
Father/Son Art Show At Minnetonka Center For The Arts
Today was the last day of Father/Son Art Show, an exhibition of work by four artist dads and their 5-9yo sons at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts. One of the artists, John Scheuerman, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune...
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[read the full post...]
July 21, 2009
Ruh Roh! Glenn Ligon Colored [sic] Coloring Book Paintings
So remember how tight that concept was of that one Charleston, SC artist, who decided to make a civil rights coloring book, then have actual kids color it, then turn those into paintings a couple of years ago? Yeah,...
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[read the full post...]
July 20, 2009
Finally, Stitch Wars Is Here, And Not A Plush Jar-Jar Binks In Sight
Sheesh, teasers from Stitch Wars, the Star Wars-themed indie craft exhibit/sale at Bear and Bird of Lauderhill, FL have been dribbling out for so long, it felt like the release of Episode I. But it's finally out, and after...
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Stoke The Insanity! Threadless Cakes
hahahahahahhahaahhahahahahaa.... lololololooolollolol.... wtfwtfwtfwtfwtfwtfwtf.... whoawhoawhoawhoawhoa... mmmmmmmmmmm.... This is my mind on Threadless Cakes. Any questions? Threadless Cakes: An online cake competition by Chris Cardinal & Threadless.com [threadlesscakes.com via waxy]...
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Small Coloring Book By Small Magazine
I've always liked small magazine, even as I've watched with amused resignation as the cool, progressive, creative, self-aware, modern, world-changing, ethical, sustainable, handmade, independent kid's product world small embodies turns out have the same retrograde gender biases as the...
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[read the full post...]
July 1, 2009
There's Some Rubble In Brighton Tonight
Anish Kapoor, the British elemental sculptor who you may know from such public sculptures as the Bean in Chicago, was the artistic director of the Brighton Festival this year. Which gave him the opportunity he'd been waiting for "for...
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[read the full post...]
June 24, 2009
Disney Can Happen To Anyone: Pooh Unplugged, By Karen Finley
After a decade as cannon fodder in the right-wing's culture war, where her every artistic move was invariably introduced as the latest from "controversial and obscene chocolate-smearing performance artist and NEA grant recipient," I would expect that by 1999,...
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Make Your Own Inaba-style Pool Noodle Rooftop Furniture
A bunch of art world non-profits [as if there were any other kind of organization in the art world at the moment] are holding a big love-in of some kind this week at X Initiative, the old Dia building...
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[read the full post...]
June 16, 2009
Hola, Puerta De Los Alphabet Blocks Grandes!
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Reconstruyendonos II, 2009 by Belkis Ramirez , originally uploaded by C-Monster. Most artists just show...
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[read the full post...]
June 15, 2009
Art For The People! 20x200x20% Off
I've written about 20x200 before; it's the online art gallery that publishes limited edition photos and prints at prices ranging from $20 to $50 all the way up to $5,000. Until Tuesday night, though, those prices will range from...
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[read the full post...]
June 11, 2009
Mass Modern Auction @ W20: Thinking Of The Children
Part of me wants to shout out about all the interesting-looking kid stuff in Wright20's upcoming Mass Modern auction June 27, and part of me wants to shut my piehole, because there are lots of lots being sold no reserve,...
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[read the full post...]
'Dov Working On Various Construction Projects'
For those who have a hard time imagining American Apparel CEO Dov Charney making anything other than a complete, skanky, sexual harassing ass out of himself, this slideshow of all the crafty toys and furniture he made as a...
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[read the full post...]
La Plus Ca Change: Yet Another Murakami x Vuitton Anime
Once you get the elements in the computer, you can remix them any way you like, year after year after year after year after year after year! Happy 6th anniversary Murakami x Vuitton mashups! [via felix] Previously: Louis Vuitton,...
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[read the full post...]
Nightmare On Sesame Street, By Jeremy Natividad
Jeremy Natividad did this scary doodle of Sesame Street monsters gone bad. You can see more of his work here or on his blog, Mighty Robot. [via carlovely's tumblr--seriously, is every single tumblr a dope hipsterfest?--thanks dt reader and...
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[read the full post...]
June 10, 2009
That's The Thing About Ninjas...
You never realize it, but they've been right there the whole time. [about colon blank via boingboing]...
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[read the full post...]
June 8, 2009
Snow White And The Seven Murdered Jews Of Drohobycz
Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer and artist who lived in the city of Drohobycz, now part of Ukraine. After the Nazis took over and began killing Jews, Schulz was kept alive for a year by a Gestapo...
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[read the full post...]
June 6, 2009
Chris Burden's Atomic Alphabet
In 1980, the Cold War was raging, and artist Chris Burden was settling into the grown-up teaching job he'd secured at UCLA through his previous decade of attention-grabbing, self-mutilating performance art [c.f., getting shot in the arm, getting nailed...
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[read the full post...]
June 4, 2009
The Family That Flays Together Stays Together: Freaky One-Eyed Kid Car By Elmer Presslee
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Now how is it that a kid in a music video full of rubber, gore-faced...
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[read the full post...]
June 3, 2009
Tetrascroll: AKA Buckylocks And The Three Bears
You know how sometimes you're just sittin' there, building a dome and whatnot, or you're telling your kid the same bedtime story for the bajillionth time, and to keep it fresh, you gradually transmogrify Goldilocks and the Three Bears...
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Sotheby's Gets A Turn At Adorable Warhols
Andy Warhol published a boardbook in 1983 through his Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger. It's a series of silkscreen paintings of toys and animals taken from vintage ads. We have some copies, and it's cool, but neither kid has shown...
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[read the full post...]
June 2, 2009
The Kid Who Grew Up In The House On Pooh Corner
I just found this drawing by Mike Mills on his Humans blog. It was from his show this spring at Pool Gallery in Berlin, titled, "The only way out is through":With the help of drawings, pamphlets, historic findings and...
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[read the full post...]
May 31, 2009
Lord Have Murphy! ECS, Eames Contract Storage
"ECS we hope will help architects, designers and school administrators whose planning and maintenance requirements are extraordinary and multitudinous." In an attempt to expand their reach into the dorm and contract furniture market, Herman Miller launched the ECS, the Eames...
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[read the full post...]
Girls And Their Toys: Rare Wood Blocks By Judy Chicago
Before the 70's when she got all into vaginas and became famous as a pioneer of Feminist Art--and before she changed her name to Judy Chicago to free herself from the male subjugation of women who were named after...
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[read the full post...]
May 29, 2009
Here Come The Sweet, Artist Print ABC's
Turntable Lab's having a site redesign sale, and DT reader Rolf has flagged a couple of great, limited edition, silkscreened alphabet posters that are even cooler at 20% off: Above, Burlesque and Mike 2600's six-color alphabet is a full...
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[read the full post...]
wee see: Video Tai-Chi For Babies
The whole problem with the "Oh, my 6-month-old just loves Baby Einstein! I put her in front of it and she's transfixed!" concept of baby videos is precisely the transfixed part. It's not that she's so into Baby Einstein,...
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[read the full post...]
May 23, 2009
Nuclear Power: It's Childs Play
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Nuclear Childs Play poster, originally uploaded by daddytypes. This protest poster from the 80's is...
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[read the full post...]
May 19, 2009
A-S-S + Hole: Vito Acconci's Name Calling Chair
Name Calling Chair is a kind of alphabet of building. Name Calling Chair equates basic building with basic language with basic insults. What you see is what you get; what you read is what gets you. When he created his...
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[read the full post...]
May 18, 2009
Ernesto Neto's Playwomb At The Park Avenue Armory
One of the most beautiful kid-friendly art installations the kid has been to was Ernesto Neto's From What Are We Made, Made Of Of , which he showed at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in late 2006. I got a ton...
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[read the full post...]
May 13, 2009
How To Draw Animals The Robert Lambry Way
In case you're ever called upon to draw some animals, you may want to brush up on this flickr set of scans from Robert Lambry's les Animaux tels qu'ils sont [Animals as they are]. Lambry's instructions were originally made...
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[read the full post...]
May 8, 2009
Faces Tape By Our Children's Gorilla
The Swedish kid's design company Our Children's Gorilla has advertised on Daddy Types before, but they come up with such awesome stuff, sometimes I think I would pay them to write about it. Seriously, I think I'll PayPal them...
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[read the full post...]
Hans Christian Andersen's Paper Cuts
The way I remembered it, Hans Christian Andersen was a perennial houseguest of wealthy patrons and would make his intricate paper cuts as a sort of hostess gift. There are something like a thousand still in existence, which would...
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[read the full post...]
May 7, 2009
Awesome Coloring Book Paintings By Charleston's Favorite Angry Black Artist
Maybe if I were black and had decided to stake out an art career in a bastion of the overly genteel, "we don't have a problem with our black people at all" South like Charleston, I'd be as cynical...
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[read the full post...]
May 5, 2009
Molto Colani! The Limited Edition Luigi Colani Action [sic] Figure
Decked out as they are in remarkably detailed recreations of the butter yellow trenchcoats the Professor created for Swissair in 1990 and possessed of the maestro's intense, visionary gaze into the biomorphic future, the 1/6 scale collectible figures of...
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[read the full post...]
April 29, 2009
What Do You Make Of This? A Pteradactyl! Custom Crafty Purse
The kid is a non-stop art machine. We are literally drowning in art, which comes home from school in totebag-sized loads, and which has transformed every box that passes through the house. [My printer cartridge box? Now a duplex...
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[read the full post...]
April 23, 2009
Pocahontas Went To London On A Yellow Submarine
Another awesome library sale find: a beautiful copy of the 1967 psychedelic classic [I'd never heard of], Pocahontas in London, by Jan Wahl, illustrated by John Alcorn. The kid points out it's not as historically accurate as the D'Aulaire,...
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[read the full post...]
April 20, 2009
Where The Wild Things I Like Are
So, one horrible thwacking sound from my DVD burner, one fast trip to the Genius Bar, one extended playdate at the playground, and one brand new drive--and just to be safe, one iPod Touch--later, and I'm back in business. Here...
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[read the full post...]
April 14, 2009
Tweenbots Trick New Yorkers Into Helping Them
The chirpy soundtrack blots it out, so you can't tell from the video is that people are not graciously helping the Tweenbot, a smiling cardboard box on wheels, pick its way through Washington Square Park. They are responding to...
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[read the full post...]
April 13, 2009
I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke, Starting With Romania
K2 calls any drink a "Coke." I'm not troubled by this because it means I'm doing my important dad job: teaching my kid to love the right brands. Which makes it all the more unsettling to watch Choose, a...
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[read the full post...]
April 9, 2009
Zeus's Roommate
When the kid was born, one of my wife's best friends gave her a vintage copy of Norse Gods and Giants [1967], by Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire. Apparently, they all used to read it together in elementary school. It's...
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[read the full post...]
April 8, 2009
The Egg and Stuff: Mod Swedish Playgrounds by Egon Moeller-Nielsen
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Stockholm - Tessinparken, originally uploaded by jaime.silva. I don't like to get my awesome vintage...
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[read the full post...]
April 7, 2009
Child Crawling, 1887, By Edweard Muybridge
The painter Thomas Eakins convinced the University of Pennsylvania to underwrite Edweard Muybridge's massive, multi-year study of motion using high-speed photography. From 1882-86, Muybridge camped out in Philadelphia, photographing seemingly everything that moved. The result, Animal Locomotion, was an...
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[read the full post...]
April 6, 2009
Who Knew? Pre-Bearpocalypse, The Berenstains Were Awesome.
Wow, who knew? Who knew that before they completely sold out and flooded the world with 300 million-and-counting books about their brainless Bear Family, Jan and Stan Berenstain were apparently excellent, talented, witty, and even famous illustrators of the...
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[read the full post...]
March 30, 2009
RIP Helen Levitt
Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95 [nytimes] Previously on DT: Helen Levitt's Photos Of Kids And Their Street Art Related: whoa, her brother is Bill Levitt of Alta, Utah?! The Mayor!...
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[read the full post...]
'Rocket Science': Rocket-Shaped Playgrounds By Lauren Orchowski
Giganta reminded me that I hadn't posted anything about the awesome photos of vintage rocket- and space-themed playground equipment that had been making the blog rounds recently. Not wanting to just do a me-too, "sweet! check it out!" reblogging,...
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[read the full post...]
March 23, 2009
Baby Remember My Name? Mystery Mid-Century Artist Pool
Can you identify the source of this photo and the artist who lovingly decorated a concrete box in the forest for his kids to play with? Andy posted it to his Reference Library flickr stream last spring, but he...
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[read the full post...]
March 20, 2009
Daddy Makes: Just Some Jetty, Happens To Be Spiral
I've had this image in my head for a long time, and I thought, with proper steps to assure a transformative work exemption under fair use law, it'd make a great t-shirt for the kids. And sure enough, it...
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[read the full post...]
March 16, 2009
Blinky The Friendly Hen Is Too A Storybook For Children
By the third time we read it tonight, with the kid on one knee and K2 clamoring on the rest of me like a chicken-laden jungle gym, I think we briefly equalled, if not surpassed, the surreal ridiculousness of...
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[read the full post...]
March 11, 2009
Why Buy A Calder When You Can Make Your Own Abstract Mobile?
From the December 1954 issue of Popular Science, "How to make an abstract mobile," instructions which were preceded by "How to Make a Christmas Tree Mobile": You can really express yourself in an abstract mobile. Unlike the Christmas-tree mobile,...
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[read the full post...]
You Can't Not Pick Your Kid's Nose
When I told her "You can pick your nose, you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your friend's nose," the kid laughed so hard I felt like George Carlin himself. Never mind that one of the things...
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[read the full post...]
March 7, 2009
The Single Most Notorious Surrealist Bugaboo
From the discussion of Meret Oppenheim's Object on MoMA's newly designed website:Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup is perhaps the single most notorious Surrealist object. Its subtle perversity was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, and the photographer Dora Maar...
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[read the full post...]
March 6, 2009
The Lucha Library Poster: From La Atlantida To Zebra Kid
El Jefe Design created this sweet Lucha Library alphabet poster last fall, para los ninos, of course. Because times are changing, and a kid these days has to know more than just "Nachoooooo!" if he's gonna survive on the...
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[read the full post...]
March 3, 2009
Milca Mayerova's Abeceda: The Czech Alphabet Book To End All Czech Alphabet Books
I worry that I'm slipping. When I first found out a couple of weeks ago about Abeceda, a pioneering artist book created in 1926 by members of a Czech collective in which photographs of dancer/choreographer Milca Mayerova "dancing" each...
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[read the full post...]
February 23, 2009
If Built, Beijing's Giant Baby Would Have Kicked Paris's Giant Baby's Ass
Alright, this is the last giant baby post of the day. Probably. I've been sitting on this for a couple of weeks, but now that Paris has upped the giant baby ante, I think it's it's time. This is...
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[read the full post...]
Buddha Gas Station Baby Welcomes You To Paris
Paris's love affair with giant babies in the windows of shops which aren't really selling anything continues. This one was spotted in the Marais, crammed into the studio of substance, a design firm founded by a former staffer of...
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[read the full post...]
February 19, 2009
Clifford Richards For Our Childrens Gorilla: Finally, Some Good News From Sweden
What with the Brio bankruptcy, the crazy changing tables, and the realization that I've been teaching the kid the wrong pronunciation of basically every name in Ikea--including Ikea--Sweden has been a source of serious buzzkill this week. Well that...
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[read the full post...]
February 17, 2009
Friendly Frontier: Climb Every DIY, Inflatable Slide-Equipped Mountain
Friendly Frontier is the second is the artists Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich's Dummy Landscape series. It's an inflatable mountain range, "of the kind so commonly used by nature to divide countries," which is equipped with inflatable evacuation slides....
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[read the full post...]
February 16, 2009
Elephant Chair with Lamp, 1928, by Alexander Calder
Though it's not clear to me whether he made it in Peekskill or Paris, the date [1928], size [about 8-in. high], and materials [scraps of steel, burlap, and paper] place Elephant Chair with Lamp squarely in Alexander Calder's early...
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[read the full post...]
Birth Announcement Kangaroo, 1959, by Alexander Calder
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } When Cleve and Francine du Plessix Gray sent out birth announcements for their son, their...
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[read the full post...]
February 15, 2009
M-I-C See This Awesome Vintage Mickey Mural
K-E-Y Why? Because as Joey Ellis says, "I love Mickey Mouse and I force my family to like him too." M-O-U-S-E. And what did we learn this week about the arrival of a baby, boys and girls? That you...
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[read the full post...]
February 14, 2009
They Might Be Monsters: Here Come The A, B, C's by Joey Ellis
While other kids are merely learning the alphabet, graphic designers' kids "study letter forms." And their dads make awesome Letter Monsters to help them. And then their dads go like five extra miles and put their Letter Monsters online...
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[read the full post...]
February 12, 2009
Experimental Filmmaker Baby Naming Trends
From Artforum's report of the big closing show at the artist-run Guild & Greyshkul Gallery in SoHo:Aesthetics alone, however, will not raise twenty-five thousand dollars every month (nine thousand dollars for rent). Such concerns are of course appearing all around....
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February 10, 2009
The Bugaboo Cameleon As A Work Of Art, And Vice Versa
In late 2007, Thomas Brauer curated a group exhibition titled, "A Muzzle of Bees" at 33 Bond Gallery in NoHo. Brauer focused on work that "depicts the black moment after a great loss and the suits of armor we...
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Gitmo Playground By Christopher Sims
Artist Christopher Sims spent three years gaining approval to visit the US military base at Guantanamo Bay. His photographs documenting the sites of daily life--the video games, the barbecues, the McDonald's, the playground--will be exhibited at Civilian Art Projects...
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February 9, 2009
Z-Stream: One Slide-Lookin' Zaha Hadid Sculpture Actually Is Slide
Whether it's a modular sofa or a kitchen island or a whole Ideal House of Tomorrow, since every objet that tumbles out of architect Zaha Hadid's studio looks like a piece of retro-futuristic playground equipment, you might be surprised...
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Righter Than I Knew: Rolly Crump's Tower Of The Four Winds
A couple of years ago, when I posted about the Solar Do-Nothing Machine, created in 1954 for Alcoa by Ray and Charles Eames, I mentioned that though the single prototype didn't survive, its spirit lived on in the facade...
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February 8, 2009
Flame By Tom Dixon, Heavy Machine For Sitting Baby
This is how Kenny Schacter described Tom Dixon's Flame Cut Series of steel furniture when he showed it at Design Basel Miami last December:An installation of unfeasibly heavyweight furniture where Dixon challenges our ideas of acceptable materials, processes and...
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February 4, 2009
Girard In The House!
House Industries pioneered the Alexander Girard objet revival in 2006 with their awesome wood blocks set, which they adapted from the sun-covered matchbooks Girard designed for the Casa del Sol restaurant in NYC. That's the House approach: adapt some...
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February 3, 2009
Christoph Niemann's Lego New York
Around our house, everything over three blocks high is the Empire State Building. The NY Times' resident illustrator/dad Christoph Niemann and his sons re-created, not just the Empire State Building, but the very essence of New York City life...
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February 1, 2009
November Was Nakaban Month At Chigo
Chigo is one of our absolute favorite baby stores in the world, which is too bad because it's in Tokyo, and we haven't been for a while. Which means we missed the veritable Nakabanpalooza they held last November. I...
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January 27, 2009
Sweet, Cheap & Available: amnh By Joseph O. Holmes
I don't check out the usually awesome, always affordable art at Jen Bekman's online gallery 20x200.com enough. And it seems I'm not alone, because even though it was released a couple of months ago, there are still 39 of...
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January 24, 2009
Pudding Khaaaaann!
Suh-weet. What started last fall as a dad putting an offhand doodle on his kids' lunch bags [above] has become true art. Lunch Bag Artist Dad has already broken major new ground in the medium of lunch bag, and...
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[read the full post...]
3-D Printing Of 4-D Ultrasounds
It's the kind of thing I'd expect to see first in Make Magazine, not the Daily Mail: a London ultrasound imaging center centre is supposedly offering to make 3-D prints of stills from 4-D ultrasound scans. I say supposedly,...
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[read the full post...]
January 22, 2009
On The Baby In Contemporary Art
Art blogger Paddy Johnson put out the call for examples of contemporary art with babies in it. She has posted a fine selection that is led--as it should be--by photographer Catherine Opie's glorious Self-Portrait, Nursing, from 2004, which was recently...
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And Neo-Nazi Parents In New Jersey Starting To Pick It Up
Anne Geddes Starting To Lose It [theo nion, c. 2001 via afc]...
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January 19, 2009
Betty Thomson's Multiplications Got Spanked By The Yoshimoto Cube
90% of dadblogging is just what shows up. Just a few hours after I stumbled across Multiplications, I stumbled across the Yoshitomo Cube. Here's the deal: In 1969, The Museum of Modern Art commissioned artists and designers to create some...
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January 15, 2009
Dude Made A Coffee Table From A Stroller!
And by dude, I mean Dutch artist Tina Pireira Filipe. And by stroller, I mean the chassis of a big old pram. And by coffee table, I mean glass-topped coffee table of death for any kid that gets near...
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January 13, 2009
Première Heure by Thierry Bouët
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Samaritaine Paris. Photo's by Thierry Bouët., originally uploaded by fotorené. The giant babies that have...
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A Book Of Snails [Photographed By Martin Iger]
I'm a sucker for a good photographic picture book. And Three Potato Four has one. It's A Book of Snails, by Sally Moffet Kellin, with photographs by Martin Iger, published in 1968. Following the not-slimy trail backward, I see...
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Park Slope Parent: Is It OK To Take A 2yo To MoMA?
Because this one time, someone's bubbie complained about the parents chatting up their toddler at every painting, a Park Slope parent is a bit worried about taking her 22-month old kid to the Museum of Modern Art:A childless friend with...
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January 11, 2009
Placenta Jars? Somebody Korean's Got Some 'Splainin' To Do!
So the eyebrow-raising Korean birth customs didn't start with gold-plating umbilical cords or turning them into personal seals. Korean royalty used to [still does? I don't know] place a prince or princess's placenta in a placenta jar, then bury...
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January 9, 2009
Awesome OG Illustrator: Taniuchi Rokuro
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Rokuro Taniuchi 11, originally uploaded by A Journey Round My Skull. For nearly 26 years...
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January 6, 2009
Ausgezeichnet! Die Drei Soldaten, Bertolt Brecht's Children's Book
Johnny Cash's one-armed man who can't cry and his laughing whore might have to move to the back of the Depressing Children's Book Bus. Because here comes Bertolt Brecht's The Three Soldiers who can't laugh--until they're lined up against a...
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January 1, 2009
Russian Auto Factory Nursery, By Margaret Bourke-White
For all the enlightening fun the archive is providing, I haven't found many images from LIFE Magazine I'd actually want to buy. But Margaret Bourke-White's incredible 1931 photograph of the nursery [sic] in a Moscow auto plant makes the...
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Bambino, Nulla
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Gianni Franzoni, Child, Nothing, originally uploaded by A Journey Round My Skull. Add me to...
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Playing For Kepes
So far, I haven't been able to get the LIFE Magazine photo archive on Google to return more than 200 images at a time. So who knows how many photos Ralph Morse actually took of the awesome nursery Juliet...
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[read the full post...]
December 27, 2008
Ladislav Sutnar, Vik Muniz. Vik Muniz, Ladislav Sutnar
That's how I like to see my favorite Ladislav Sutnar prototype blocks: in a giant photo in the New York Times, accompanying an excellent review of Vik Muniz's awesome "Rebus" exhibition at MoMA. Roberta Smith says "Rebus" is fantastic...
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December 21, 2008
Freaky Tomi Ungerer Books Are Coming Back In Print
From the late 1950's to around 1970 when his self-published collections of erotica kind of pushed his editors over the edge, Tomi Ungerer was an edgy, awesome, dominant influence in the children's book world. Even if the US market couldn't...
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December 19, 2008
Good For The Poohs
The rest of the economy may be tanking, but people who have their money tied up in original EH Shepard artwork for Winnie-the-Pooh books can take comfort from the results of the big sale at Sotheby's Wednesday. The results...
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December 10, 2008
A Quick Study Of Albanian Lego Sub-Machine Guns
We're not hippie freaks about it, but we don't let the kid have toy guns, play with toy guns, or pretend that she's playing with a gun. When she started pointing sticks and Lego structures at us and looking...
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[read the full post...]
December 7, 2008
Hmm, It's Not Titled, Nursery Decor (Doll With Mask)
You know what you never hear about? Cindy Sherman-themed nurseries. Why is that, I wonder? It's not for lack of appropriate--or should I say relevant--imagery. At least a couple of works from her 1989-90 History Portraits series, Untitled #205 [l]...
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Let's Meet Renowned Baby Body Part Ceramist Susan Kniffin Davidson
Even though it's the best option I've seen for eating out of a head since the monkey Jell-o from Temple of Doom, Susan Kniffin Davidson's upside down baby head bowl with the bubbly red glaze on the inside has...
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[read the full post...]
December 5, 2008
Ooh, Pretty Pictures For The Nursery! Original Art Editions At New Editions
New Editions was founded by artists to provide new families with [more] affordable, original artwork to inspire their children. There are themes, styles, concepts, and prices to suit everyone but the poor and/or unemployed. But then, if you're poor...
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December 4, 2008
My First Murakami Chibi Kinoko
Chibi Kinoko, aka Little Mushroom, is an adorable little character Takashi Murakami introduced on his line of exclusive Louis Vuitton bags and accessories. And there's a 9-inch plush version available, too, because as anyone who loaded up at Murakami's in-museum...
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Remarkably Unscary Louise Bourgeois Romper @ MoCA
I was just following up on the last place you could buy giant, flowery Takashi Murakami furniture in the US, the MoCA gist shop in Los Angeles. Looks like they finally moved the last of their 6-foot flower-shaped tuffets,...
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Takashi Murakami's Giant, Furry Balls
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Artist Takashi Murakami with NYC designer Sebastian Errazuriz, originally uploaded by maayanpearl. We're not at...
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December 1, 2008
Dallas Clayton On Dallas Clayton's An Awesome Book: "Awesome"
"Hi. I'm Dallas Clayton. This is my place. You're obviously here because you want to know more about me. I wrote a book. It's called, An Awesome Book. It's awesome. It's better than any book that's ever...existed. I don't...
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November 30, 2008
Untitled (Baby), 1973, Paul Thek
Sunday night is not a good time to have questions that Google can't answer. Like what is the deal with this sculpture by Paul Thek? Or even, where is it? According to the Paul Thek Project website, which is...
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Auction At Pooh Corner: Original EH Shepard Artwork At Sotheby's
Stanley Seeger and Christopher Cone have amassed and divested themselves of several major collections over the years: Picassos, early and mid-20th century art, and now Ernest Howard Shepard. In London December 17th, Sotheby's will auction off the couple's incredible...
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November 28, 2008
No W And X, Y, Z. And Å. And Ä. And Ö: Edholm Ullenius Posters For The Domestic Market
You may know Edholm Ullenius from such fabric patterns as all the bright ones you almost got at Ikea last year and the fallopian tube print they made for some ad agency's fertility medicine client. The Stockholm design duo...
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November 24, 2008
The Mystery Of Life: Who Designed This "Modern Playground Equipment"?
The search results for "playground" at Life magazine's photo archive are dominated by one series of images: nearly 200 photos of surrealist bent steel playground equipment from 1951-2 created by an unidentified female sculptor. The stuff is awesome: creatures...
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November 22, 2008
Quirky Canada Has Own Laws, Crazy, Calder-Inspired Sideways Circus
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } circus, originally uploaded by Rob Cruickshank. If it weren't in Canada, and thus even colder...
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November 20, 2008
Aung San Stokke? Guy Delisle's Burma Chronicles
If you are a journalist who followed his wife to Burma for her Medecins sans Frontieres gig, and so you ended up being the one who took care of your infant son most of the time, and you ended...
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November 12, 2008
Onfim's Dad Has Like 14 Fingers
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } BBL 210, originally uploaded by quinn.anya. Actually, I'm not sure if this is Onfim or...
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Suddenly I Want 1,700 Japanese Babies [By Reiji Esaki]
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } 1700 JAPANESE BABIES -- Back in the Days When the Japanese Were Actually Having SEX,...
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November 11, 2008
Hey, Little Buddy! Mingei Bamboo Stool/High Chair
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, A tale of a shopping trip Involving Euro Modernists and architects--so hip. The greatest: Charlotte Perriand, Designed Corb's furniture. Bruno Taut also sailed that way For an East Asian tour,...
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[read the full post...]
November 9, 2008
DTQ&A: Gary Panter On His Classic Paramount Hotel Playroom
Gary Panter was creative director of one of the most groundbreaking children's TV shows in a generation PeeWee's Playhouse. On the heels of that success, he also designed a children's playroom for Ian Schrager & Philippe Starck's Paramount Hotel...
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[read the full post...]
November 7, 2008
With Old Navy T-Shirts, Charley Harper Is The New Morgan Fairchild
Seriously, what Charley Harper this prolific when he was still alive? Charley Harper's ABC Boardbook is consistently the most popular item purchased at Amazon by Daddy Types readers. Now DT secret shopper Katy sends word that Harper's trademark stylized...
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[read the full post...]
November 3, 2008
Parental Advisory: Red Hot Chili Peppers Album Art By Gary Panter
Dude, guess what. You're on the other side of those Parental Advisory warning stickers now. I can't quite tell if Christie's upcoming sale of punk memorabilia is awesome or a bust, but it doesn't feel monumental. If, on the...
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[read the full post...]
Mumbleboy Papier Mache Awesomeness
The artist Kinya Hanada, who works as Mumbleboy, was into trippy indie plush before trippy indie plush was cool. Which may or may not mean that papier mache is the next plush; for all its clean, simple, aesthetic pleasure,...
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[read the full post...]
November 1, 2008
"Panel No. 59: In the North, the Negro had freedom to vote."
Sunday afternoon, the kid was kind of high, and she'd been acting up all day, putting herself at repeated risk of not being allowed to go to the big Boo at the Zoo party last night if she kept it...
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[read the full post...]
October 31, 2008
Discovery: We Read: A to Z
At the library the other day, I flipped through the children's books for sale, a usually motley shelful of discards, donated books, and junk. This time, though, there was a great old copy of Leo Lionni's Frederick; a nice...
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[read the full post...]
October 25, 2008
Luke, You're My Uncle: Sweet Nursery Mural By Luke Ramsey
Luke Ramsey is an artist, illustrator, and co-founder of Island Folds, the indie Canadian art publishing company I just posted about. He's also a kind-of uncle to his friends' son Sam, who scored this sweet mural for his first...
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[read the full post...]
Babywearer On Elm Street
We're not in the city this weekend, so I am very bummed to be missing the New York Art Book Fair. Thankfully, Paddy Johnson is taking some inspirational photos of the event, which is how I found this. It's...
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WillDrawAnything.com Will Draw Anything Like, Say, A Nerdy Birth Announcement
That's what new dad Ryan Parr got for his two bucks. Here's hoping he also gets a hefty chunk of equity in the social networking site his daughter just launched. Will Draw Anything 458: New Born starts social network [yirmumah...
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[read the full post...]
October 24, 2008
Mary Heilmann's Clubchairs, Kid-Size, At The New Museum
I first came to know Mary Heilmann's pop-infused minimalist paintings after collecting the work of Ruth Root, a friend who took inspiration from them for her own colorful abstractions. The retrospective of Heilmann's work which just opened at the...
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[read the full post...]
October 23, 2008
Mots Animaux By Jean Réal
I can't quite figure out what Jean Réal's new book, Mots Animaux, actually contains. And though I get that it has something to do with animals, this artsy animated trailer of abstracted animals in reverse alphabetical order doesn't help...
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[read the full post...]
October 18, 2008
Mesdames Et Messieurs, Je Vous Presente Calder's Circus At The Whitney
For years, Alexander Calder's awesome theatre/performance art/toy/sculpture Circus has been in the lobby of the Whitney Museum, entertaining its way into the psyches of generations of city-dwelling kids. It's made of dozens of little articulated toy figures, which the...
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[read the full post...]
October 17, 2008
What's The Story With The Four-Armed Swami Counting To Twenty?
Alright, so I'm a little obsessed with what is admittedly my favorite old school Sesame Street animation ever: the four-armed swami counting to 20. But what can I do? To this day, I don't say "Once, doce, trece, catorce"...
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[read the full post...]
October 16, 2008
The Straws Are Rockets Firing Up To Kill The Meteors
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Someone's Been Playing With My Missile Command..., originally uploaded by daddytypes. See, that's the grass...
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October 13, 2008
That's Eye Candy We Can Believe In
I like context, backstory, credits, and yes, the occasional "put in shopping basket" link, so I don't like random web collections of sheer eye candy. But for this 500 image-and-counting flickr pool, I'll make an exception: This artist, Ric Hugo,...
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[read the full post...]
October 11, 2008
A Peaceable Kingdom, The Shaker Abecedarius By The Provensens
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } A Peaceable Kingdom, The Shaker Abecedarius, originally uploaded by Hillary Lang. I backed into this...
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October 10, 2008
KidsLab Successful Belgian Experiments For Wall And Floor
I was not really aware that kids had lifestyles, but that's just one of the little differences revealed by the happy existence of KidsLab, a Belgian lifestyle brand for children and their imaginations. KidsLab encourages children to be themselves...
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[read the full post...]
October 7, 2008
Homebrew Star Wars Alphabet
More oblique Star Wars alphabet goodness, this time from artist Michael Fleming, who put something close to a year of spare time into creating the artwork for his alphabet of decidedly minor Star Wars characters. A female Yoda named...
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[read the full post...]
October 6, 2008
Pay No Attention To The Mother Under The Blanket
The things people collect. In order to get 19th century kids to sit still long enough to take a photograph, moms would hold the baby on their laps--while being completely covered by a blanket. The effect: a baby all...
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[read the full post...]
October 5, 2008
Bet Your Kid Don't Have A Hitler Chair This Fancy
Yeah, his Hitler chair is probably from Wal-Mart, made outta plastic. It ain't handcarved and handpainted by Dow Pugh. Why, he's the finest children's Hitler chairmaker in all a Cumberland County. Lot 656: Dow Pugh, Hitler Child's Chair, est....
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[read the full post...]
October 4, 2008
Seriously, Who Wrote The Music For That Sesame Street Crayon Movie?
PBS has been advertising on Daddy Types lately, for which I am grateful. But Sesame Workshop's media office has not responded to several requests for production information about the classic "How Crayons Are Made" movie. The Muppet Wiki information is...
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[read the full post...]
September 23, 2008
Guantanamo Bay Bouncy Cell, By Phillip Toledano
It's been a while since we've checked in with artist/photographer/awesome BabySuit maker Phillip Toledano around these parts, but he's been busy. Busy creating merchandise for his latest retail-esque project: America: The Gift Shop. While some might say the products...
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[read the full post...]
September 22, 2008
Tommy Lee And Family
This photograph by noted crazyman David Lachapelle titled, Tommy Lee and Family, Los Angeles, 1999, is 36.5 x 57 inches. This edition, signed and numbered, 4/12, was printed in 2002. It will be auctioned at Christie's in New York...
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[read the full post...]
September 18, 2008
Babar And The French Colonialist Hermeneutics Of Blah Blah Blah
Has is been four years already? Then it must be time for a long, brainy-seeming thinkpiece on the deeper cultural significance of Babar. In 2004 it was Alison Lurie in the New York Review of Books with the supposed evils...
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[read the full post...]
September 17, 2008
Thanks For Noticing My Ferrari Wagon, XOXO, The Sultan Of Brunei['s Brother]
Pininfarina: And how big shall we make Your Majesty's Ferrari station wagons, then? HM SoB: Big enough to bring a pickled shark home from Sotheby's, at least. Pininfarina: We'll see what we can do, Your Majesty. SPOTTED: THE INCREDIBLY...
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[read the full post...]
September 11, 2008
Little Tikes Demolition Derby, By Adam Haynes
While the awesomeness of Adam Haynes' imagined Little Tikes demolition derby is clear to see, many other things about the artwork, titled Kiddie Cars, are not clear to me. I don't see how it's printed, for one thing. Offset?...
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[read the full post...]
September 10, 2008
It's A Small Maoist World: Communist Children's Songs
Ho-ly Smokes. The cover of "I am a Sunflower - Children's Songs" is like Mao's Little Red Book of Verses illustrated by Comrade Mary Blair. Even if it didn't have the most incredible track list of any communist propaganda...
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[read the full post...]
September 5, 2008
Granddaddy Of Type: Lawrence Weiner's Children's Book
If there's an daddy who knows his way around type, it's conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner. Since the late 1960's, he's been using text--and language and actions and instructions, even punctuation--as a medium. He's best known for his wall installations,...
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[read the full post...]
August 30, 2008
Alphabet Truck By Eric Tabuchi
Awesome. Paris-based artist Eric Tabuchi spent four years collecting the photographs for his latest project, Alphabet Truck. He's exhibited them in combination to make words and phrases. [I don't know if there are signed editions of the individual prints...
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[read the full post...]
Hirst & Koons Kids T-Shirts I Can't Get Too Excited About, Frankly
Was it only last year that I actually looked into making a bootleg version of Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull printed on a black Onesie? Because now I can't think of anything more played out and boring. Though if your...
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[read the full post...]
August 28, 2008
Wise Australia Keeps Fantasies Of Bush & Naked Children To Themselves
After her bush baby characters appeared on the cover of another author's book, and in a series of popular booklets, Australian illustrator May Gibbs published The Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in 1918, during the country's Armistice celebrations. For...
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[read the full post...]
August 26, 2008
Matte Black, Raindrops, Penguins In The Forest, Spinners! Holy Smokes, It's Quinny X Henrik Vibskov!
Dude. They have Blackout aluminum frames! Rainbow hoods and linings. Penguin sleepsacs! Wooden dangly toys that look like the venison drying rack in a Dali print, or the display window of an Icelandic puffin butcher shop. Spinners that look...
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[read the full post...]
August 19, 2008
Uh-Oh, Rachel Whiteread Got All The Doll House Furniture, Too
Seems that at least a few of the hundreds of vintage dollhouses sculptor Rachel Whiteread has been hoarding over the last couple of decades had some furniture in them. And when she could no longer resist its miniature charms,...
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Abject British Dollhouse Collectors Now Know Who To Blame: Rachel Whiteread
Pity the lot of the East End collector of old doll houses who, o'er these past twenty-odd years, has been thwarted at every junk shoppe and antique store in his quest. Too late, too slow, too pricey, has been...
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[read the full post...]
Kippenberger Greifbar: Martin Kippenberger's Dollhouse
I can't find any references to it online beyond the auction sites, but this 1990 sculpture by Martin Kippenberger, titled Kippenberger Greifbar, will be sold at Sotheby's in New York in a few weeks. It's from an edition of...
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[read the full post...]
August 13, 2008
Karmazing! Little India Kali Plush Doll By Leeanna Butcher
See? Not everyone riffing on Sanjay Patel's awesome little Little India Hindu deities is knocking them off. Plush artist Leeanna Butcher went to art school with Patel, and he recently asked her to create this plush incarnation of Kali,...
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[read the full post...]
August 12, 2008
My Little Pony Of The Apocalypse
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } My Little Zombie Pony, originally uploaded by dbx1. This is only the second artist-modded My...
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[read the full post...]
August 9, 2008
Look, I'm Your Father's Darth Vader Stained Glass Window
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Darth Vader Stained Glass Window, originally uploaded by axoplasm. Finally, a decades-later Star Wars sequel...
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[read the full post...]
August 5, 2008
Jack Spade, 56 Greene St Between Spring & Broome - NO
And no, the burglar hiding in the restroom didn't steal it, or Jason Polan would have included it in the comic book retelling of the burglary. "Breaking And Entering: Jack Spade Comic Book by Jason Polan [racked]...
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[read the full post...]
July 29, 2008
Kids These Days And Their Spiral Jetty Roadtrips
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Bugaboo @ Spiral Jetty, originally uploaded by daddytypes. Hey, it's not sparkly white crystals surrounded...
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[read the full post...]
July 21, 2008
Kali Whoa! Take The Hindu Deities, Leave The Karma
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Brahma, Kali, Ganesha, originally uploaded by daddytypes. So we were driving around Salt Lake City...
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[read the full post...]
July 9, 2008
Vietnamese Dad, Sling, Tattoo By Pratchaya Phinthong
Thai photographer Pratchaya Phinthong took this photo in a mountain village in centrsl Vietnam, where he traveled with the artist Danh Vo and Dominic Eichler, who wrote about the trip in the Summer issue of frieze magazine. Travels with...
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[read the full post...]
July 7, 2008
Olan Olafur Mills
Unless I can rally the troops into some late '70s Sunday Best, and can find an Olan Mills or Sears Portrait Studio with one of those bookcase backgrounds, this snapshot, taken at Olafur Eliasson's show at P.S.1 one Sunday...
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[read the full post...]
July 5, 2008
Christoph Niemann's "The Boys And The Subway"
I'm glad he resisted the urge to send each of these anecdotes piecemeal into Metropolitan Diary, because put all together with his own illustrations, Christoph Niemann's story of his sons' obession with the New York City subway system is...
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[read the full post...]
June 30, 2008
Feeling Pretty Good At The End Of The Day
We were at MoMA the other day, the kids and I, and when we'd had our fill of watching Spiral Jetty--the kids' first visit is in a couple of weeks--we got up, turned the corner, where another dark, grainy...
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[read the full post...]
June 29, 2008
Ay Caramba! Baby Cabezas Gigantes
Brought to you by Antonio Lopez Garcia, not Goya....
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[read the full post...]
June 27, 2008
Alec Soth's Dog Days, Bogota
Alec Soth is a photographer of the studied mundane, a Minnesotan inspired by folks like Robert Frank or William Eggleston, whose images create a sense of overlooked place. When he and his wife went to Bogota, Colombia to pick...
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[read the full post...]
June 23, 2008
Ben Bernanke, Ben Bernanke, What Do I See? Philip Anderson Illustrates The Fed
I saw this in the paper this weekend, illustrating an article about the Federal Reserve. It's awesome, as if Eric Carle illustrated The Economist. The actual artist, Philip Anderson, has a very nice-looking portfolio, but I can't find any...
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[read the full post...]
June 11, 2008
Daddy, Where To Cartoons Come From?
Over the weekend, two major comic artists, Art Spiegelman and Gary Panter, discussed their inspiration at a symposium organized by NYU and The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Via Artforum's report:The letters L, S, and D rolled off their...
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[read the full post...]
June 9, 2008
Marcus Walters' More Deluxe Alphabet Poster
Last summer, artist Marcus Walters created an alphabet in anticipation of his daughter's birth. Now that he's a seasoned dad, he knows what kids really want is to see the alphabet on the walls of their nurseries, preferably as...
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[read the full post...]
Chris Burden's Massive Erector
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Rockefeller Center, originally uploaded by peterjr1961. What My Dad Gave Me by Chris Burden is...
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[read the full post...]
June 8, 2008
DT Friday Freaked Out: Extra Art Edition
Whoa, Azerbaijani dad-to-be working as a museum guard who should have been talking to someone instead of slashing a painting by one of my favorite artists with his keys:A former Carnegie Museum of Art guard charged with vandalizing a...
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[read the full post...]
June 5, 2008
Knit Snakes. Why'd It Have To Be Knit Snakes?
From the introduction to Nina Braun's exhibition at Helium Cowboy Gallery in Hamburg:Nina Braun has always cut her own path, irrespective of social guidelines or standards. Through self-teaching, experiences and experiments, she has built the fundament she needs to...
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[read the full post...]
June 3, 2008
Wow, Charley Harper's ABC's Boardbook
If you're a fan of Charley Harper's trademark 'minimal realism,' but you're not itching to drop a thousand dollars for a vintage copy of his magnum illustratus, the 1961 Giant Golden Book of Biology - An Introduction to the...
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[read the full post...]
William Wegman Alphabet Wallpaper Border
See, the dogs not only sit still while the artist dresses them up in little outfits, they also sit still while he poses them in the shapes of all the letters of the alphabet. Then the images are turned...
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[read the full post...]
June 1, 2008
Peter Simensky's Plywood Milk Crates For Artware
I forgot another great find from ICFF, but then catching up with the latest from the premier milkcrate lifestyle blog, Milkcrate Digest, reminded me. Pittsburgh artist Lacey Volk had made a plywood version of a milkcrate, which was nice....
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[read the full post...]
May 29, 2008
Filmmaker x Beavers Colabo Chair For Grey Rabbit
"The chair, created from beaver-gnawed wood, was made by Bruce Gundersen, a filmmaker and furniture designer, to mark the birth of Ms. Puett’s son, Grey Rabbit." Ms Puett is J. Morgan Puett, and her baby daddy is the artist...
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[read the full post...]
May 21, 2008
Yoshitomo Nara's Children's Book, The Lonesome Puppy
Now I love me some Yoshitomo Nara. Maybe not as much as Takashi Murakami loves him, but still. I just wonder if the mischievous-bordering-on-evil-looking little kids he paints are really appropriate for children. If you want to find out,...
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[read the full post...]
May 15, 2008
Handknit Dissected Frog On Etsy, 100% Formaldehyde-Free
It's made with wool, not formaldehyde and that weird, snappy blood vessel rubber, so this dissected frog is totally safe for the the kid's room. And when she becomes a little animal rights activist, she'll have an unassailable argument...
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[read the full post...]
May 10, 2008
Fantastique! Bronze Bassinet By Philippe Hiquily
After debuting as an organic modernist sculptor in the 1950's, Philippe Hiquily became the Surrealist Metal Furnituremaker To The Stars [of the French aristo jet set] in the 1960's and 1970's. For example, the limited edition coffee table, "Poupouce,"...
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[read the full post...]
May 1, 2008
Sweet Juniper + Etsy = Sweeter Juniper
At the end of the day, none of us has that much control over when we become famous; Jim's awesome photos of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository were like the 4,711th thing in his flickr stream when they...
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[read the full post...]
April 29, 2008
Our Children's Gorilla's Wonderwall's Fellows
The folks at Our Children's Gorilla, Sweden's great indie toy and design company [who have advertised on DT] have created a limited edition suite of prints for Wonderwall, Sweden's great indie wall decorating company [who have not]. Called "Fellows,"...
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[read the full post...]
April 21, 2008
I'm Kenny Scharf's Kid-Sized Gumby Chair, Dammit!
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Keith Haring, originally uploaded by mario.mc. So obviously, I found this photo of Keith Haring...
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Thanks, Uncle Keith! The Haring Crib
In the downtown New York art world of the early 1980's, Keith Haring was a rising star, but he was only one of a number of artists who took drawing more seriously than Art, and who insisted on breaking...
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[read the full post...]
April 20, 2008
Jamie Hayon: Hey, Look! I Have Carte Blanche At Lladro!
Lladro hasn't crossed my mind more than twice in the twenty years I've walked past their store on 57th street. There was one radio report after the Northridge earthquake where a lady was talking about saving all her Lladro,...
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[read the full post...]
April 11, 2008
Parisian Baby Photographer Sks Free NYC Pool For Fun, Mostly Profit
Let me get this straight. You're an underwater maternity photographer who charges $1,000 for a 30-minute shoot with each pregnant woman and/or newborn baby. Your currency has never been stronger, and now you want to come to New York...
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[read the full post...]
April 9, 2008
Embrace The Butterfly
All your kid talks about is butterflies? Fine. Just run with it. They're just dinosaurs for girls. With the Butterflies of the World poster, your kid'll be the best damn lepidopterist this side of Vladimir Nabokov. Rainbows? All you...
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[read the full post...]
April 3, 2008
Terry Fox's Children's Tapes At The Getty
Though he lies in Germany now, when he was living in the Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Terry Fox "was a central participant in the West Coast performance art, video and Conceptual Art movements." In...
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[read the full post...]
March 27, 2008
Awesome: Lower Back Tattoos By Toys R Us
What's this? Tramp stamps for sale in the Stickers R Us machine at Toys R Us? I smell a comprehensive cross-platform blitzertunity! Apparently, so does Disney. That other options I can make out are Hannah Montana, Clubhouse Disney, and...
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[read the full post...]
March 24, 2008
Plush Surveillance Camera By Jennifer Lew
Given her creative genius and mad sewing skillz, I don't doubt that plushmaster artist Jennifer Lew would have created a soft, cuddly surveillance camera/computer keyboard mashup eventually. I just thank the New York Times for commissioning it now, to...
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[read the full post...]
March 21, 2008
How Big Is It? How Big You Want It? Awesome Clifford Richards Noah's Ark
When Jenn posted photos of her daughter's room on Minor Details, I tried to break my gaze away from the cool vintage schooldesk to figure who made the sweet rainbow creature painting on the wall. I had no idea...
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[read the full post...]
March 18, 2008
Sugoi: Japanese Folk Toy Design Database
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } halloweenesque octopus, originally uploaded by peacay. FYI, "sugoi" means "great!" and is used sort of...
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[read the full post...]
March 14, 2008
The Other Cradle Of The King Of Rome
Of the over 14,000 vintage color slides donated by Charles W. Cushman to the Indiana University library, this 1960 photo of a cradle at Fontainebleau is the only one with a "children's furniture" tag. I did some searching, and...
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[read the full post...]
The Poster You May Not Want To See In The Nursery
If your name's James, that is. This poster by Ben Hribar was made for some hippie dippie, peace love & understanding exhibition in 2006. It "addresses the disconnect and apathy of the general public towords [sic] their fellow brothers...
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[read the full post...]
March 13, 2008
Imagineers Set To Screw Up Mary Blair's It's A Small World Ride
When I was little, Mary Blair's animatronic masterpiece, the Disneyland version of It's A Small World, made me want to become an Imagineer so bad, I sent off for the brochure. Instead, I ended up becoming what no kid in...
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[read the full post...]
March 11, 2008
That's WACK! Lea Lublin And Niki de Saint Phalle's Feminist Baby Art At PS1
"WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution," is an exhibition at P.S. 1 that takes a historical, international perspective on artists working in the late 1960's and 1970's who were either involved in or impacted by feminist activism. I'm itching to...
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[read the full post...]
Freaking Out Children Since The 1930's: The Land Of Make-Believe Map By Jaro Hess
In 1930, Czech artist Jaro Hess' painting, "Adventure in Storyland," which offered a dazzling Grand Unifying Theory of the world's fairy tales, was turned into a poster by The Child's Wonderland Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's been reissued...
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[read the full post...]
March 6, 2008
Davy Lauterbach's Paintings Are Thursday's Child
Balk may be right that he left his interviewing A-game home, but then, Radar's not the likeliest place to be breaking news of new painters. Especially ones whose "gallery reps" are actually fashion stylists. Who've worked for Radar. Still,...
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[read the full post...]
March 5, 2008
Orange County, CA: Stultifying Suburban Idiocy Producing Rebellious Teenagers Since 1981
"Is Your Child A Tagger?"Your child has large quantities of magic markers in various colors, types and sizes, spray-paint cans, shoe polish containers, or dot markers used to mark bingo cards. ... Your child has or carries a black...
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[read the full post...]
They're There! Serena Kuhl's Poltergeist Stuffed Toys
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } poltergrab, originally uploaded by serenakuhl. Freaking Awesome. I KNEW I shouldn't have blown off last...
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[read the full post...]
March 1, 2008
Gravitation, The Work-Family Video Game, By Jason Rohrer
I am so glad stuff like this exists; it's really spectacular, in a quiet, off guard way that I never would have imagined. Jason Rohrer created Gravitation, his latest autobiographical video game [?!] out of the sudden, overwhelming response...
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[read the full post...]
February 28, 2008
Tattfoo Tan's Nature Matching System Placemat, Mural
Tattfoo Tan's Nature Matching System mural has been getting a lot of attention lately. He made it in collaboration with elementary school children in Brooklyn [it's installed Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass], based on his first incarnation of...
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[read the full post...]
February 25, 2008
What, Me Worry? Plastic Bozart Dollhouse Market Is Meltdown-Proof!
I don't care if they're New In Box. If you buy these two Bozart Kaleidoscope dollhouses for $3200 or more, we need to talk. Well, let me qualify that: we need to talk if you have some unique and...
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[read the full post...]
February 16, 2008
Flora You Didn't Miss Yet: Primer For Prophets Alphabet
While poking around the Jim Flora Store on eBay, I found another interesting, new release that's worth a mention in these here nursery-friendly parts: modern silkscreen editions of a rare promotional booklet that Flora did in 1954 for CBS...
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[read the full post...]
D'oh, I Missed Manhattan: Suh-Weet Reissued Jim Flora Print
Gotta figure out a way to break into the cabal of illustrators who got early word on this incredible print by the late, great Jim Flora. It's an archival reissue of an original multicolor woodblock print of Manhattan from...
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[read the full post...]
In NYC? Go See Guy Ben-Ner's Videos At Postmasters TODAY
We'll talk about it later, but today, Saturday, is the last day to see Guy Ben-Ner's show at Postmasters Gallery, 459 West 19th Street [near 10th Ave.] So hustle. Ben-Ner's an at-home dad who makes his art with his...
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[read the full post...]
February 15, 2008
Kirsten Stoltmann And Amanda Ross-Ho's Artwork Would Indeed Make Quite A Poster
This Kirsten Stoltmann collage, "I'm Pregnant," was shown a couple of years ago at Wallspace Gallery in Chelsea. It is not the Kirsten Stoltmann pregnant image that NY Times critic Roberta Smith wants to see turned into a poster...
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[read the full post...]
February 13, 2008
Helen Levitt's Photos Of Kids And Their Street Art
Lifelong New Yorker Helen Levitt is one of the masters of street photography, the kind of candid, revelatory imagemaking that, as a NYT reviewer once wrote, "combine[s] intuition and intellect to forge sophisticated, lyrical compositions from commonplace events." If...
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[read the full post...]
February 11, 2008
I Think I Know Where One Of Those Sumi Ink Club Mobiles Is
Warning: convoluted, punk hipster ramble, combined with 80's and 90's flashbacks, ending with very slightly relevant payoff but realistically, probably none at all ahead: So there was an outlaw outdoor concert on the banks of the LA River last November...
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[read the full post...]
February 1, 2008
Other Graffiti Coloring Book, Er, Colouring Book
The Graffiti Coloring Book featured here last fall, which was put out by the Fakeproject Corporation of America, has its strengths. It provides eager young taggers with truck- and mailbox-shaped tabulae rasae on which to practice their craft. But...
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[read the full post...]
January 31, 2008
Freaky Awesome Spooky Daddy
[via] Seriously, it's freaking me out right now how awesome Spooky Daddy's plush toys and creatures and whatevers are. Actually, thanks to his awesome Flickr photostream, it's been gnawing at me for months now, like a plush Prometheus getting...
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[read the full post...]
January 30, 2008
Crafty Rec Room Masterpiece: Atari Breakout Pillow
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Crafting 365 Day 010, originally uploaded by jackrabbit.etsy.com. Holy smokes, It's like I'm eight years...
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[read the full post...]
January 29, 2008
Melinda Beck Did The Awesome Animations For Noggin
My old company used to create TV identity spots and animations, so I may be a little more attuned to them than the average guy, but DAY-UM, Nickelodeon's Noggin channel has some of the greatest animations and interstitial programming of...
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[read the full post...]
January 26, 2008
On Etsy, Pacman, And The Law Of Comparative Advantage
As a free market economy develops and becomes more efficient, participants begin to specialize, providing those inputs to which they are most optimally suited, relatively speaking. To update an example of the great neoclassical economist Paul Samuelson, you probably could...
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[read the full post...]
January 23, 2008
There Will Be Poo: Floating Booga Mobiles By Sumi Ink Club
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } floating booga, originally uploaded by lukey dargons. The LA artist collaborative known as Sumi Ink...
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[read the full post...]
January 22, 2008
Bozart Kaleidoscope Doll Houses Will Certainly Be More Expensive Tomorrow
Real estate crisis? What real estate crisis? The market for seven-year-old plastic doll houses has NEVER BEEN HOTTER! If you don't buy today, prices will absolutely be higher tomorrow! And the next day! 100% financing available! Foreign investors are...
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[read the full post...]
"A Working Man And His Adorable Twins," By Seydou Keita
Seydou Keita was the retrospective godfather of African photography. He took his modest portraits of the citizens of Bamako, Mali, in his streetfront photo studio until the country's independence in 1960. Rather than risk confrontation with the government, he...
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[read the full post...]
January 21, 2008
Insane Penna. Antique Crib Quilt Would've Cost You $25,000+ Last Summer
Unless, of course, Boston folk art dealer Stephen Score had planned on bidding more. The 40-in. crib quilt is from around 1875, and was apparently never used; it was found in the bottom of a dower chest. It was...
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[read the full post...]
January 19, 2008
Lennart Nilsson's Portrait Of An Aka Tribesdad Tribesmom In The Family Of Man
There were some exceptions, but in the photos in Edward Steichen's massive 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man, they liked their women nursing or pregnant, and they liked their black people naked, maybe holding a spear. As Louis Kaplan...
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[read the full post...]
January 18, 2008
When Hulk Get Chewed, Hulk Get Choke Hazardy: Stan Lee Tribute Art Exhibition
Gallery1988 is hosting an exhibition of Stan Lee tribute art by some of their indie artist friends. There's lots of mopey goth riffs on Spidey and plenty of Scarlet Witch and Ororo Munroe pin-up fantasies. But there's some sweet,...
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[read the full post...]
January 16, 2008
The Moral Of The Story: Don't Turn Your Back On The eBay
Seriously, do you need any starker proof that you can't let your eyes off the eBay even for one second? Even if it's Christmas?? Even if your wife just gave birth??? Check this out: eBay seller id.london had a truly...
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[read the full post...]
Awesome Ikea Quilt Hack
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Numbers quilt, originally uploaded by stitchindye. I've always liked this Ikea numbers fabric, except that...
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[read the full post...]
January 14, 2008
Elle, Yeah! Vik Muniz Knows From Jennifer Delonge
So I was waiting at the 24-hr pharmacy last night filling a codeine prescription [interesting crowd, a lot of people with empty bottles, who apparently believe "no-refill" means "no refill without asking for a refill 600 times"], where I...
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[read the full post...]
January 11, 2008
So About That Juddy Plywood Crib...
When we last saw the Donald Judd daybed-inspired plywood toddler bed I was trying to get made, it looked like this: Just out of sight to the left is the meter, ticking away as I contemplated the invisibility of various...
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[read the full post...]
Family Man From "The Family Of Man," By Dorothea Lange
From Edward Steichen's exhibition, "The Family of Man," this photo of a dad holding his newborn baby is by Dorothea Lange, which I would not have guessed. Lange's Google Image search results were overwhelmed long ago by her photo,...
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[read the full post...]
January 10, 2008
My Mom Made This Rather Awesome Quilt For The New Kid
My mom likes to make a quilt for each grandchild. As we were sweating over what design to go with and our--ok, my--ingracious inability to get enthused about the traditional quilty patterns was probably getting on her nerves, I...
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[read the full post...]
January 9, 2008
Alright, Great Ironies Of Life, You Win. 150 Wooster Now A Maclaren Showroom
When I moved to New York, 150 Wooster was the glowing hot sun of the celebrity restaurant scene. People were almost freaked out by how instantly hot it was. [We mostly went to Odeon, Brian McNally's other restaurant, but still.]...
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[read the full post...]
January 8, 2008
Mommy, Where Do Jean De Brunhoff Lithographs Come From?
Something's been bugging me since visiting the otherwise over-the-top awesome baby department at Takashimaya [remember the $50,000 white lacquer Richard Meier-ian playhouse?] In a corner, there was a little stack of framed "vintage Babar lithographs, c. 1930's, by Jean...
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[read the full post...]
January 7, 2008
Original Richard Scarry Art
He was a crazy dude, but I love me some Richard Scarry illustration, both his cartoony Cars and Trucks and Things That Go style and his more traditionally watercolor style, like his wonderful paintings for Ole Risom's I Am...
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[read the full post...]
Wayne Miller's Family In The Family Of Man
I made a mental note a couple of months ago to look up Toni Frissell's photos in The Family Of Man, the landmark photography exhibition Edward Steichen curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. The show featured...
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[read the full post...]
January 3, 2008
Baby Carriage, 1964 By Yayoi Kusama
You know what they say: sometimes a stuffed fabric phallus-covered baby carriage spraypainted silver a couple of years later is just a stuffed fabric phallus-covered baby carriage spraypainted silver a couple of years later. Yayoi Kusama rapidly became a...
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[read the full post...]
December 30, 2007
Awesome Ndebele Cardboard House From Driade
The men of the south Ndebele tribe of South Africa are responsible for building dried mud house compounds for their families, while the women are charged with decorating it with the tribe's distinctive, bold geometric patterns. Inspired by this...
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[read the full post...]
December 28, 2007
Jacob Lawrence's The Migration Of The Negro
The kid is familiar with the work of Jacob Lawrence. He's the rectangle guy, duh. And Ellsworth Kelly is the square guy, and Jenny Holzer is the diamond girl... One of the 60 paintings in Jacob Lawrence's masterpiece, The...
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[read the full post...]
Words Of Wisdom, Rugs From Mark Mothersbaugh
Archinect did a pretty fanboyish interview with Mark Mothersbaugh on the occasion of his rug exhibition at the Scion Gallery, and though there's no mention his Yo Gabba Gabba! appearances, Mothersbaugh shared this profound insight on the preference for subversion...
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[read the full post...]
December 27, 2007
Christmas Cards From Socialites, Also Joan Collins
It's no "children afraid of Santa" photo album, but David Patrick Columbia's collection of Christmas Cards from his subjects at New York Social Diary has a delight all its own. Obviously, for the rich, socially aspirant, and merely affluent alike,...
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[read the full post...]
It's The Circle Squared Of Life By Todd St. John
I was a little wary about showing the kid Circle Squared, Todd St. John's stop-action animated short commissioned by The New York Times Style Magazine. When is a kid ready for the whole life-and-death, food-chain, circle of life thing,...
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[read the full post...]
December 26, 2007
JeongMee Yoon's Blue & Pink Projects
Somewhere along the way, South Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon noticed that her 8-year-old daughter refused to play with or wear anything that wasn't pink [ya think?!], and so she began the Pink Project and the Blue Project, in which...
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[read the full post...]
December 25, 2007
Are The Stores In The Soft City Open Or Closed On Boxing Day?
The Soft City is a Toronto-based artists' collective who have charged themselves with creating and managing a cuddly plush city in miniature. Sort of a Sim City with sewing machines instead of computers:We recognize the mutually defining relationship between the...
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[read the full post...]
December 20, 2007
Saks To Be You: Club Libby Lu Exec Discovers Joys Of Online Sock Puppetry
Well, if a "concerned" mom who was interested in the tween skankover mall chain Club Libby Lu because her daughter "was considering working there," and who had "read some horrible things online" took time during the busy holiday season to...
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[read the full post...]
La La La La Lenin: Kevin Skinner's Artwork On eBay
Michigan illustrator Kevin Skinner has been selling original artwork on eBay to help out his brother Michael, a father of seven [!] who recently had a heart attack. 35 years old [!!]. There's none up right now, but keep...
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[read the full post...]
December 19, 2007
Brit Crit Makes Your Kid's Artwork Into His Artwork, Sells It Back To You For $260
There's a populist sentiment afoot in Great Britain that considers the entire contemporary art world to be a giant joke perpetrated on culture generally and rich people with more money than sense in particular. Without that setting, artist/writer Dan Crowe's...
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[read the full post...]
December 13, 2007
This Is One Of The Houses That The Hungry Caterpillar Built
And this is the Audi TT Roadster that Eric drove from Miami to extensively remodel the house that The Hungry Caterpillar built. And these are the abstract acrylic collages which replaced the white paper on the Ingo Maurer chandelier...
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[read the full post...]
December 12, 2007
Ted Sears' Awesome Homemade Christmas Cards
Wow. Ted Sears was an animator and the first head of the story department at Walt Disney Studios. According to his IMDb bio, he was very influential in the adoption by the film industry of storyboards. He wrote the...
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[read the full post...]
I Count Only Ten Naked Folks In eBoy's Awesome New Tokyo-Themed Nursery Poster
Actually, it'd probably be the couple of lewds rather than the run-of-the-mill nudes that'd make the Tokyo eCity poster NSFN [Not Suitable For Nursery], even though they're less than an inch high. It adds an air of realism that...
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[read the full post...]
December 10, 2007
Monster Dice By Geoff McFetridge
This is awesome. I love the idea of telling stories with something other than a book. Los Angeles-based artist Geoff McFetridge and his daughter made up a story about a boy who draws monsters which start making other monsters....
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[read the full post...]
Rad Kid-Style Mural By Someone Named Matthew Austin
A couple of dads in a Philadelphia suburb had artist Matthew Austin do some murals in their 17th-19th century house. For the kid's room, he did a bunch of classic kid stories--plus robots [they're everywhere!!], all kid-style: "To get...
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[read the full post...]
December 6, 2007
Are You Not Mark Mothersbaugh? You Are The Rug Artist From Yo Gabba Gabba.
Wow, LA Weekly's got a 150,000-word [give or take] article about Mark Mothersbaugh, one of the members of Devo, who has continued his creative pursuits by 1) opening a music studio that composes like every song on TV, film,...
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[read the full post...]
Merry Krishna! Ghee Happy T-Shirts Make The Perfect Holiday Gift
I've been a fan of animation artist Sanjay Patel's take on Hindu's greatest deities and heroes since he first published his book, Little India, in 2005. [The book was greatly expanded last year and published by Penguin as The...
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[read the full post...]
December 4, 2007
The Boyms Put The Babel Blocks New Yorker Dolls On The MySpace, The YouTube
Babel Blocks are New Yorkers, each unique in his or her religious and cultural affiliations, but underneath, they're all the same: i.e., made from wooden blocks. Get it? Just like we're all the-- Also, they all have a MySpace,...
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[read the full post...]
November 30, 2007
Hell, Yes! The View Of, From The New The New Museum
The kid and I were stuck at the DMV yesterday, so I missed the press preview of The New Museum. [I was just there last week, though, because I had to pick up a new counter for our steel...
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[read the full post...]
November 29, 2007
Haircuts By Children
I can't believe I missed Canadian artist Darren O’Donnell's contribution to Performa07, the performance art biennial that just ended in NYC. Titled Haircuts by Children, it was sponsored by Art In General, which arranged for children ages 8-12 to...
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[read the full post...]
November 23, 2007
H Is For Holy Crap, By Marc Johns
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Post-it note drawing: H is for holycrap, originally uploaded by Marc Johns. After he made...
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[read the full post...]
Ant Farm Helps Babyplus Technology Break On Through To The Other Side
One title that's been on my "must find" list for a long time is Inflatocookbook, a 1971 self-published manifesto and how-to manual for inflatable architecture by the San Francisco-based art collective known as Ant Farm. I just found a...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
November 19, 2007
In Greece They Do Potty Training The Old-Fashioned Way
They urn it. [Sorry, long weekend.] Tech exec Bill Bliss snapped this at the Agora museum in Athens. My question: is that image of mom & kid for real? Because it looks made up. Boingboing has a larger version. Of...
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[read the full post...]
November 11, 2007
Hopscotch & Bugs: From The Awesome Carpet Files Of Ms. Karin Mannerstal
The kid's been learning to hop on one foot at pre-pre-school this year. So this sweet Hopscotch carpet by Karin Mannerstall, uh, really jumped out at me on swissmiss. It's part of the Play series Mannerstall did for the...
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[read the full post...]
November 6, 2007
If You Were Still Wondering Why To Take Your Son To The Museum
Because your dad might have picked up your mom there after listening to the sixth track on Eric Weber's 1975 album, Picking Up Girls Made Easy!: "Van Gogh? Who's that? You see, I don't know much about the Impressionists; I'm...
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[read the full post...]
November 5, 2007
"Like Zoids Or Transformers Or Maybe Even Bigger"
That Mr. T mention got me itching to see Nizlopi's JCB Song video again, which still makes me cry, 2.5 years later. It also reminds me that Michael Bay is not worthy to scrub the road grime off of...
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[read the full post...]
November 3, 2007
Still, Pissed At The National Gallery
I've got a ton of things to do and write, but I can't, because I've got this really depressing incident I saw the National Gallery of Art yesterday lodged in my brain. I'm not a big believer of writing-as-catharsis,...
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[read the full post...]
November 1, 2007
Holy Crap, Takashi Murakami Furniture!
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } 1000dollarcushion, originally uploaded by accd_STU. When we spent the summer in Tokyo a couple of...
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[read the full post...]
October 31, 2007
The Night Some Kid Wore His Wolf Suit: Etsy/Babble Halloween Costume Contest Winners
Babble was a sponsor of the baby & kid's division of etsy's homemade Halloween costume contest. The winners were announced today, too late for you to steal an idea for your own kid, sorry. The winner's on the left....
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[read the full post...]
October 27, 2007
Unaru No Tomo: Awesome Old Old Japanese Toys
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Japanese toy designs k, originally uploaded by peacay. From the always spectacular BibliOdyssey comes Unaru...
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[read the full post...]
October 26, 2007
Graffiti Coloring Book
It's one of the things that bugs me most about DC: the graffiti in our neighborhood just plain sucks. No style at all, just one nervous hoodlum's crappy black spraypainted tag on every newspaper box. If I thought it'd...
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[read the full post...]
October 24, 2007
Ari & Mario: Warhol's Drag Queen Babysitter Movie
It's like learning a new word; suddenly you hear it everywhere. I'd never given a second's thought to look for kid-related Andy Warhol art, and now it's popping up everywhere. Last week, it was the story of Penelope Palmer,...
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[read the full post...]
October 23, 2007
William Wegman's [And His Dogs'] Alphabet Soup DVD
One day I may figure out the art world appeal that William Wegman holds. But for now, all I can see is an endless array of amusing, pose-y, and ultimately pointless photographs involving his incredibly patient Weimaraners. I stopped wondering...
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[read the full post...]
October 20, 2007
DT flickrfind: Parisian Dad Watching Tirailleurs Drives A Maclaren!
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } army and papa, originally uploaded by toog. The blue, red & gold kepis on these...
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[read the full post...]
October 19, 2007
Suh-Weeet. Modern Design Alphabet By Blue Ant Studio
This is so great. Joel created it for his daughter Isabella. Though I could get nitpicky about why G is for Gehry when K is for Konstantin, the truth is, I don't know how to pronounce Grcic, either. And...
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[read the full post...]
October 16, 2007
Playdate At The Mall: Friends With You's Rainbow Valley Playground
When I explained to the kid that I was going to Miami for a couple of days, she drew a blank. Then when I told her it was where the Malfi Playground was, she freaked out. And now I...
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[read the full post...]
October 15, 2007
I Was Shot By Andy Warhol: The Baby In Warhol's Screen Test
Penelope Palmer, Warhol Screen Test, 1966, image: The Warhol Film Project Andy Warhol's films--particularly his Screen Tests--are some of the greatest and least appreciated of all his work. Between 1964 and 1966, Warhol shot 472 individual tests, each consisting of...
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[read the full post...]
October 13, 2007
In The Nursery Of Good And Evil: Antonio Rubino At The Wolfsoniana
image: wolfsoniana.it Antonio Rubino was a leading comic artist and illustrator in Italy from between the wars until his death in the 1960's. He drew and edited some early Disney magazines [Topolino ring any bells?] and founded the kid's...
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[read the full post...]
October 10, 2007
Sliced-Through Predator Plush, This Time As Slovenian Performance Art
Wherever there's video of plush bunnies being extracted from a giant plush predator, I am there. Regine posted about a recent performance/sculpture installation in Ljublana, Slovenia which eerily--and kind of hilariously--echoes Lizette Greco's adorable See-Through Predator video just featured on...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
October 9, 2007
Vik Muniz Will Make A Chocolate Syrup Portrait Of Your Kid Or Whoever
Now I love me some Vik Muniz, and I love commissioning me some portraits of the kid by artists whose work we love and collect already. So how can I be anything but thrilled at the chance of getting...
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[read the full post...]
October 5, 2007
Eames Elephants On Parade
In the family tradition, professional grandson/filmmaker Eames Demetrios has made A Gathering of Elephants, a stop-action animated short film to commemorate the going on sale of the 1,000-limited edition plywood elephants Vitra made to commemorate the 100th birthday of...
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[read the full post...]
Toilet Ink
"Jeckida's groundbreaking Toilet Ink [TM], makes it incredibly simple to tattoo your toilet." Their videos are still the best in the entire toilet decorating industry. Toilet Ink videos [toiletink.com] Previously: We're No. 2! We're No. 2! DT reports from the...
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[read the full post...]
October 1, 2007
Crayons That Don't Roll Off The Table
I guess the owner of the Mexican restaurant down the street went to a big restaurant expo recently, because the other night, the kid got a little coloring placemat and a pack of triangular crayons called Crayangles. Frankly, we...
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[read the full post...]
September 27, 2007
Whoa. Acona Biconbi By Bruno Munari
Artist and designer Bruno Munari may be best known for the beautiful children's books he published with Edizioni Corraini [He began making children's books for his son Alberto.] But Munari also created furniture and lighting designs and art. This...
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[read the full post...]
September 26, 2007
Copyright Cluster*@&#: Sweet Vintage Noguchi Playground Scans On Flickr
I don't know about you, but all this copyrighted image outrage just wears me out! Let's take a funbreak--and look at these sweet archival images of Isamu Noguchi's various playground designs which archiblogger Andrew Raimist uploaded to flickr. They were...
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[read the full post...]
Robert Wilson Had A Lot Of Children's Chairs
The artist/playwright/whatever Robert Wilson is apparently moving out to the Hamptons for good, or at least he's emptying out his fabled loft, the site of many a 70's-era SoHo surrealist theater premiere and smokeout. From the look of the...
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[read the full post...]
September 25, 2007
As Seen In Cookie Magazine!
Anyone know a good nanny service in Eurobad? TIA Eurobad '74: an exhibition of Europe's worst interiors of 1974. [omodern via dt reader judy]...
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[read the full post...]
Urchin Rock: The Underwater Baby Photographers Of Britain
I can't quite tell if the underwater baby photographers are riding the trend of Aquababy/water acclimatization classes, or if the desire for a picture of your own kid on the cover of a Nirvana album is so strong, you'll...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 24, 2007
Richard Bailey's To Be A Dad
The Photography Annual issue of Creative Review was published with six different covers, including this goofy-cool image by British photographer Richard Bailey. Titled To Be A Dad it looks similar to a series of ads he shot for A&E...
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[read the full post...]
September 22, 2007
The Alphabet For Jack, By Standard Motion
Another nice example of artist dads making stuff for their kids: John Setzen created "The Alphabet for Jack" for his and his wife Mindy's son-on-the-way. Setzen's innocently styled drawings are familiar to his fellow Brooklynians from the band posters...
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[read the full post...]
September 21, 2007
Wow, Undoboy Mega-Blik Installation Video
Sheesh, I sure love the way the vinyl wall decal thing has taken off. But watching this 2-hour installation of a massive Blik decalscape condensed to 1-minute, I just can't imagine not totally screwing this up somehow. [Not that...
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[read the full post...]
A Joan Crawford Alphabet, By Donald Urquhart
In 2004, London artist Donald Urquhart got a lot of attention for An Alphabet of Bad Luck, Doom and Horror, which filled an entire wall at Maureen Paley gallery with a childlike cataloging of universal woe, some of which...
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[read the full post...]
September 20, 2007
Blue Man Preschool: Bang On A Paint-Covered Drum
Look, I'm the first, second, and third dad to be stoked to learn that two founders of the Blue Man Group have opened a pre-school. And not just because it's inspired by the play-and-creativity-based Reggio Emilia approach to child development,...
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[read the full post...]
H Is For Han Shot First
StarWars.com blogger Neil Baker made a Star Wars Alphabet for fellow Star Wars bloggers to put on Star Wars t-shirts to wear to the Celebration IV Star Wars anniversary commemoration a few months back. Then he turned his alphabet...
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[read the full post...]
September 18, 2007
Jojo The Robot In The Nursery
At what point do we stop thinking it's cute, all the robots in the nurseries, and we start worrying about The Matrix and The Rise Of The Machines? Eh, not yet! Just look at how cute this giant robot...
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[read the full post...]
Macrametastic Patchwork Wall From 1975
Heath and the BLT Boys are scanning in pages from the 1975 magnum opus, The Complete Encyclopedia of Crafts. It's 24 full-color volumes of fantastic craft projects your parents never got around to finishing for you. This wall of...
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[read the full post...]
Robots In The Nursery
Artist/illustrator Patrick Lau started with a painting of a robot for his kid's nursery, which began, as his wife Maya put it, "to slightly have a theme." He added giant gears to the walls, and there's a shelf full...
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[read the full post...]
September 16, 2007
Paul Rand, Punk. Punk, Paul Rand: "Graphics Incognito" By Mark Owens
The kid's sick, the laptop battery was dead, so when I curled up with her [the kid, that is, not the laptop] for a little Sesame Street Therapy this morning, I grabbed a copy of the Dutch/LES design journal/zine...
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[read the full post...]
September 15, 2007
'You Won't Remember This': Jeff Scher's 0-4 Animations
Artist and animator Jeff Scher has a pretty sweet gig. He's, I guess, an animation columnist on the NY Times website, and his short features are part of a series called Sightlines on the Times Select section of the...
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[read the full post...]
September 14, 2007
No One Puts Baby In The Stroller: Deborah Kass @ Paul Kamsin
Daddy, 2007, image: paul kamsin gallery The Chelsea gallery crawl may get so crowded, they'll have to declare a No-Bugaboo zone soon. So go early, and make sure to see Deborah Kass's show at Paul Kamsin, "feel good paintings for...
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[read the full post...]
September 12, 2007
Playmobil Disaster At Times Square Toys R Us
My rather short-notice trip to the Times Square Toys R Us yesterday was not a total cultural disaster [though I'm glad the kid didn't tag along; the suddenly animated animatronic T-Rex would've freaked her action out, let me tell...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
September 3, 2007
William Hunter's Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi, 1774
William Hunter became one of the most famous anatomists and obstetricians in 18th century Europe. Over the courser of 30-odd years, he worked with the artist Jan van Rymsdyk to produce what's considered one of the greatest achievements in...
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[read the full post...]
August 27, 2007
Whoa. Mary Blair's Disney's Cinderella??
Our approach to thwarting the Disney Princess Industrial Complex is simple. I think. Oh, who'm I fooling? They're complicated and doomed to failure as soon as the kid has a sleepover party, but whatryagonnado? Here's the plan: The movies...
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[read the full post...]
Henry Hill: Wiseguy, Artist, Parent, Circumcision Fan
You may know Henry Hill--the original Wiseguy who informed [sic] Nick Pileggi's book which became Scorsese's and Liotta's Goodfellas--from a question in the Movies Edition of Trivial Pursuit that you bought at a garage sale for a quarter and...
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[read the full post...]
August 24, 2007
Elaine Kaufmann's Minivan
It's kind of wild to think that the first generation of adults to grow up in minivans are walking the streets right now. Actually, the first generation of Americans conceived in minivans just graduated from college. Let's do the math:...
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[read the full post...]
DT Cute-Out: Kindra Murphy And Her Magical Estonian Stickerforms
Kindra Murphy spent a good chunk of last year in Estonia, soaking up design inspiration, and raiding the local office supply stores for the classic, Colorform-like stickers that she used to compose Estonian Village. It's just on butcher paper....
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[read the full post...]
DT Cute-Out: Tooth Fairy Pillows And Other Yo Gama-GOO-dness
You know what, it's been kinda grim around here lately, time for a cute-out. The fellas at Gama-Go are having a big Labor Day Sale next weekend. The first 200 people to order $150 or more of Gama-Go-Gear between 12:01AM...
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[read the full post...]
August 21, 2007
RIP Kato Ryo, AKA DJ Klock, AKA A Kid's Dad
The kid's bouncing around, and rather than turn on the TV, I thought we'd both mellow out for a few minutes by watching Kenji Hirata's chill animated felt video for the equally chill "Theme" by DJ Klock, which was...
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[read the full post...]
August 20, 2007
Bwahaha, Handknit Lemmings Plunging Off Handknit Cliff
[pet-killers: 1, peer-reviewed science: 0!] In the classic 1958 nature documentary White Wilderness, filmmakers for the Walt Disney Company faked a lemming migration and over-the-cliff suicide plunge using pet lemmings they bought from Inuit children. As a result, and...
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[read the full post...]
August 18, 2007
Marcus Walters' Pictographic Alphabet
London illustrator Marcus Walters created this sweet pictographic alphabet for his soon-to-be-born daughter. Check out his blog and his portfolio for more great work. Three years of reading Eric Carle and Leo Lionni have softened me up for interesting...
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[read the full post...]
August 17, 2007
"Emma" By Chuck Close
There was a time when getting my portrait painted by Chuck Close was a quiet aspiration in my life. Mostly because he doesn't take commissions; he only paints pictures of family and friends. And as one of the nicest,...
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[read the full post...]
August 16, 2007
Rauschenberg-ian Goodness On A Onesie* By Ooh La La Mama
You know what you used to see too much of at a contemporary art auction? Robert Rauschenberg prints. I swear, the dude was off the hook in the 70's and 80's with the indistinguishable collage-y silkscreened mish-mashes of pop...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
August 12, 2007
Louis Vuitton & Takashi Murakami Love The Little Children
Superflat Monogram [2003], Murakami Takashi's magical, animated tale of an adorable little girl named Aya and her keitai phone teaches us one of life's most important lessons: Louis Vuitton is a lovable, selfless panda with a heart of gold...
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[read the full post...]
August 10, 2007
Woo Hoo! Tokidoki + ducduc + Yoya Colabo Crib
Colabos are nothing new for the indie and art toy world, but products for actual kids are. The plush & vinyl toy boom is a bit weird in that it ignores the traditional toy customers--children--in favor of still-a-kid-on-the-inside twentysomethings...
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[read the full post...]
August 1, 2007
Between The Lines Artist Coloring Book For Charity By RxArt
When I wrote about artist coloring books last summer, the new RxArt compilation coloring book, Between The Lines, had been announced, but it wasn't actually ready until December. Now it's for sale to help raise money for the arts-in-hospitals...
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[read the full post...]
Peter's ABC Book By Chicago Artist Robert Amft
I swear, I can't believe this hasn't been on DT yet. Robert Amft graduated from the Art Institute in Chicago in 1940; he was from a family of commercial artists, but he also made his own art, photography, collage,...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 31, 2007
P Is For Peanut: The Alphabet Illustrated By The Getty Photo Collection
Discerning richly contrasting black-and-white visual stimuli is one of the most important characteristics of early childhood sensory development. One of The Getty Museum's greatest collecting strengths is photography. When considered together, the solution is obvious: put infants to work...
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[read the full post...]
Dash Snow's Children
Oil industry-and-art-world scion-turned-graffiti artist Dash Snow has always done his best work with semen. As he explained last January in a New York Magazine cover story titled, "Warhol's Children" [he's the tattooed one on the right]:“I’ve always been a big...
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[read the full post...]
July 30, 2007
Rocket Craft: Stunning Plush Rendition Of Your Car, Bike, Engine
Holy smokes, it's like Take-G, only with plush instead of wood, and your car and its engine instead of fantastical anime robots. Rocket Craft is an outfit in Sapporo who will create a plush replica of your car, precise...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
July 29, 2007
SDCCspotting: Coney Plush & Neighborwood DIY Kit
Here are a couple of interesting-looking SDCC finds from Kidrobot's photostream: Up top is a DIY version of Mike Burnett's awesome Neighborwood toy figure. When it comes to the preferred mediums of the indie toy scene, wood is a...
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[read the full post...]
July 25, 2007
I'm Not Enlightened Enough To Know What To Do With This Awesome, Buddha Stamp-Filled Pilgrim Scroll
It doesn't really matter, because it's already sold, but for some reason, this scroll just seems spectacular to me. Part of it's purely aesthetic, because the simple inkstamped cotton technique is so simple. Part of it's the content and...
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[read the full post...]
B Is For Be-Ins: The Silkscreened Alphabets Of Sister Mary Corita Kent
There's no chance one blog post can do justice to the silkscreen work of Sister Mary Corita Kent, an artist and nun who combined pop, modernism, collage and appropriated advertising, with poetry, inspirational and religious content, and social and...
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[read the full post...]
July 18, 2007
Rubber Duckie Gigantique Par Florentijn Hofman
Oh la la, ca c'est le freakin' plus grandest Rubber Duckie que j'ai jamais vu! You may know Florentijn Hofman from the Rotterdam housing block he painted electric blue. Or from the 50-foot-tall inflatable green bunny he installed on the...
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[read the full post...]
Keba Keba: Takashi Murakami's Children's Book
Haven't seen much coverage of this, even though it's been around since 2003. That's when Takashi Murakami illustrated a story by the Japanese musician Yujin Kitagawa about a kind, friendless creature named Keba Keba. The result was an exhibition,...
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[read the full post...]
July 17, 2007
Stranger Pregnancy: Seattle Writer On Wanting To Knock Her Boyfriend Up
Writer Jen Graves takes a long, circuitous, and self-involved look at pregnancy in the way that only someone writing for the Seattle indie paper The Stranger could. The gist of the piece: an unexpected pregnancy and an even more unexpected...
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[read the full post...]
July 16, 2007
Tako-no-Yama: The Itinerant Octopus Slide Builders Of Japan
In the 1960's in Japan, when the Maeda Outdoor Art Company unveiled a serpentine mound of polished concrete called "Play Sculpture: Stone Mountain," someone trying to be helpful told the artist, "If you'd just put a head on it,...
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[read the full post...]
July 8, 2007
"Family" By Saul Steinberg
I think this is from Steinberg's 1954 book, The Passport. Reminds me a bit of Framy, the Japanese square dog on NHK. via Andy's dadblog, Stork Bites Man...
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[read the full post...]
July 3, 2007
Marcel Wanders' Daughter's Rare Bead Necklace
Droog-and-beyond designer Marcel Wanders spent six months collecting rare and unusual beads, beads with stories, to make a necklace for his daughter, Joy. Now, whether he had enough beads left over, or he just replayed the concept, I'm not...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 28, 2007
Your Kid's Nursery Needs A "Dope 5-Headed Star Wars Themed Mural" ASAP
iPhones are yesterday's news; the drop you really want to make tomorrow is the Plasticgod Ningyo at SURU, the indie toy temple of dope on Melrose. In advance of the release party, reports Vinylpulse, Pgod "spent four days transforming...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 26, 2007
Ceci N'est Pas Un $100,000 Sock Monkey
So you have a teaching aid for helping the kid understand why Joseph Beuys whispered to a dead rabbit's ear. If only there was some cuddly way of explaining Mike Kelley's equally iconic 1989 sculpture, Estral Star [above], which...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 25, 2007
Beuys & Art Bunnies, Bunnies Dell'Arte
I've got so many tabs open in my browser it's dragging my whole [ancient backup] computer down. But I'm glad I waited a couple of days to post these sweet, Venetian crafty plush bunnies from Imegadito. Their stuff is...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 22, 2007
THWAK! This Comic Book Store Poster Belongs Over A Crib
This is spectacular. Chicago designer and photoblogger Nick Campbell took this picture last year in a comic book store. Whether you're DC or Marvel, X-Men or Avengers, Stan Lee or Jack Kirby, Lichtenstein or Warhol, Gursky or Hofer, this...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 17, 2007
Art Bee-Powered Pregalyzer
Regine's in the throes of art-meets-technology sensory overload at the Royal College of Art graduate exhibition in London. That's where she saw Susana Soares' project, Bee's, which explores "how we might co-habit with natural biological systems and use their...
[read the full post...]
[read the full post...]
June 15, 2007
The Morrinho Project: My First Favela Playset
Spectacular. Morrinho ['little hill' in Portuguese] began in 1997 as the plaything of a 14-year-old boy in Pereirão, a hillside favela of Rio de Janiero. It's a toy model of the favela itself, constructed on an abandoned hill out...
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[read the full post...]
June 13, 2007
Damien Hirst's Caesarean Birth Paintings
Lost in the wilfully delusional hype over the 1,100 carat diamond-and-platinum skull sculpture that Damien Hirst is purporting to sell for $100 million is the rest of his exhibition at White Cube, his longtime gallery in London. The show,...
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[read the full post...]
June 12, 2007
Vik Muniz' Picture of Ink Looks Suspiciously Like Mr Rogers
The artist Vik Muniz is known for exploring the nature and techniques of photography and the way society reads and consumes photographic images. He does this by creating photography-inspired images using fleeting, unorthodox materials: chocolate syrup, dirt, paint chips,...
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[read the full post...]
June 11, 2007
Family Portrait By Google's Second Most Popular Phil Collins
A friend once wrote of artist Phil Collins' photographs, "his subjects speak volumes without giving too much away." He likes to use his camera as a pretext or catalyst for some kind of social micro-phenomenon. He has filmed auditions...
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[read the full post...]
June 9, 2007
L'Etat, C'est This Keith Haring Rocking Baby
image: haring.com I generally like my Keith Haring on a wall, preferably loadbearing. [Did you know the Boy's Club of NY building which had that Keith Haring mural, the one in that Sesame Street segment, was just torn down?...
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[read the full post...]
June 8, 2007
Abba To Zappa: Awesome Pop Star Alphabet By Craig Robinson
In 2004, the London ad agency Mother created "Abba to Zappa", a campaign for the Observer Music Magazine that featured a glorious, flashcard-style collection of pop star portraits. The images were made by the pixel-happy artist and illustrator Craig...
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[read the full post...]
June 7, 2007
Daddy Types Salutes Ms. Ruth Smithers Of New Canaan, Connecticut
Neighbors, friends, and acquaintances of the architect Philip Johnson, whose masterpiece, Glass House, has recently opened to the public for tours, reminisce in The New York Times. Among them, "longtime New Canaan resident" Ms. Ruth Smithers, who took her...
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June 5, 2007
And The Most Expensive Was Madeline
At the auction house on York, they were feeling just fine. Two hedge fund managers buzzing on some free wine. The estimate was just a bit over nine, but they both had daughters named Madeline. AMERICAN PAINTINGS, Sale No....
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Stunning Wood Toys By Take-G
These spectacular figures are Fujin and Raijin, Wind Guy and Rain Guy. They're by Nakagawa Takeji, a 32-year-old toymaker in Nagano, Japan. Nakagawa's Take-g Toys [though it's a spin on his first name, it's pronounced like English] specializes in...
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[read the full post...]
May 31, 2007
Missouri Toddler: 'I Will Tap Dance On Your Mandala, Buddha!'
Tibetan Buddhist monks create their elaborate mandala paintings out of sand to symbolize the impermanence of all things. After days of painstaking work, the monks destroy the mandala and release its sand into the nearest body of water as...
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[read the full post...]
May 30, 2007
Oh, Don't Mind Hari & Parker, They're Just Hanging Out. And Watching You.
What's that, you didn't get the memo that it's Onkar Singh Kular Week here at Daddy Types? Don't sweat it, neither did I. image via wmmna Truth be told, it was the adorable little eyes of Hari & Parker peeking...
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Jack The Dripper & World Cup Rattle: PSP Toy Concepts By Onkar Singh Kular
Last summer, Royal College of Art research fellow Onkar Singh Kular exhibited two proposals for PSP video games and tie-in merchandise at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London. For The End Of The Road, a driving game where "players...
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[read the full post...]
May 28, 2007
The Wrong Store, Wrong Artist & Wrong Toy Car
One of the "you had to be there" events during New York Design Week last week was the opening party for The Wrong Store, a closed up, curated display window/concept store which was inspired by Maurizio Cattelan & co's...
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[read the full post...]
May 24, 2007
Road Trip! Rainbow Valley Mall Playground By Friends With You
So apparently, last December while I was busy staring at Skywalkers, their insane beachfront art blimp parade in Miami Beach, the art/toy/play collective Friends With You was busy opening Rainbow Valley, their first indoor playground--right in front of Sears...
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[read the full post...]
May 15, 2007
Studio: Slot-Together Plywood Art By Tobias Putrih
I love Studio, the new furniture-like sculpture installation by Slovenian New York artist Tobias Putrih even more than the last work of his I saw, and I loved those pieces a lot. In 2005, Putrih's geologically inspired columns of...
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[read the full post...]
May 11, 2007
The Father, The Kid & The Holy Spirit
I took the kid to the press preview of Wolfgang Tillmans' retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum the other morning; she's really good at openings and stuff, always has been. But we got there while the curators were addressing the audience...
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[read the full post...]
May 8, 2007
Fine Doll Art By Debra Lynn
Fine Doll Artist Debra Lynn:I am driven by my imagination and want my work to express whimsical character, personality and emotion. I use only the finest materials, new and vintage fabrics, angora mohair and crystal eyes. All details are...
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[read the full post...]
May 7, 2007
Dieter Roth's Kinderbuch
In 1954, the German-Swiss artist Dieter Roth created a book for the son of Claus Bremer, the German dramatist and concrete poet. Known as Kinderbuch, the book consisted of op-art-y geometric shapes and patterns rippling across 28 letterpressed cardboard...
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[read the full post...]
May 1, 2007
David Horvath Writes Book! Reads Daddy Types!! Enters Demo!!!
OK, last things first: Ugly Dolls is now being moved to the Parent Company category with the news that David Horvath and Sun Min Kim are expecting a baby girl, apparently just in time to muck up their schedule for...
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[read the full post...]
April 30, 2007
The Concrete Jungle: Toy-On-Street Art By Alexis Lloyd
Though she's not the one who gutted the praying plush Christian sheep [nice segue, right?], Parsons grad student Alexis Lloyd was in the school's awesome electronic toy hacking class last fall. But today it's her final project, titled "The...
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[read the full post...]
Welcome To The Desert Of The Playmobil
You know, I was wondering: What if you, me, this whole planet, the solar system, were just like dust under the fingernail of a giant? Or what if, you know, all of human civilization is not our own, but...
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[read the full post...]
April 27, 2007
Say Hello To Mike Kelley's Little Friend
Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites, 1991-9, via LA-based artist Mike Kelley has been selling plush toys for a long time. The only problem, at least from a kidsplay standpoint, is that he uses them as elements in his sculptures...
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[read the full post...]
April 24, 2007
Insane Katamari Damacy Wallpapers Collection
Detail: Katamari turtle, baby, and keyholder Day-um, it's as if Namco rolled a giant ball across the art world, and every cool artist stuck to it. Back in the day, Namco apparently published 82 Katamari Damacy wallpapers [for your...
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[read the full post...]
P Is For Persona Urbanae: Sweet Juniper's Street Art Alphabet
Great Caesar's Ghost, where was I February 1st? That's the day Dutch published the digital images for the latest of his growing oeuvre of beyond-awesome children's books. This time it's a stunning alphabet book composed of street art, which he...
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[read the full post...]
April 20, 2007
Vintage Mr. T Cabbage Patch-y Dolls
From now on, I pity the fool who tries to tell me pop craftiness is a 21st century trend. In 1984, "Miss Martha Originals, through a license with Big T Enterprises, (Mr. T’s licensing company) created a pattern book,...
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[read the full post...]
April 19, 2007
David Askevold's Enlightened Symbols
The kid's favorite magazine is actually "the airplane magazine," the safety information card that she pores over and demands to have read to her repeatedly, with a fervor that would probably startle even the most jaded-but-secretly-attention-starved flight attendant. Her fascination...
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[read the full post...]
April 18, 2007
Long Live The Glorious Chinese Propaganda Poster-Themed Nursery!
I don't remember exactly how I got on this Chinese kick, but now I feel like I'm on a long march to a cultural revolution in kidspace design. DT reader Mark pointed me to 1930 Shanghai and More, a hotbed...
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[read the full post...]
Chinese New Year Chubby Baby Posters
It's not just for space programs anymore. Stefan Landsberger has a great collection and a bit of history of the New Year picture, nianhua, which was a Chinese folk tradition co-opted by the Communist Party for its own propaganda...
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[read the full post...]
April 17, 2007
Chinese Space Program Promoganda Posters
Stefan Landsberger has a collection of posters promoting the Chinese space program, which is relatively young. Which makes the visual style of these things all the more remarkable; for all China's capitalist transformation, fantastical social realism still rules the...
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April 16, 2007
The Red Balloon @ Wooster Collective
Awesome. [woostercollective.com]...
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April 13, 2007
Harvey Kurtzman, Josef Schneider, And The Art Of Child Photography
After he founded and left Mad! magazine, Harvey Kurtzman edited Help!. Suck.com co-founder Joey Anuff posted a collection of Kurtzman art, including the layout notes for the Feb. 1964 cover above, which tell a bit about how they got...
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[read the full post...]
April 12, 2007
Kohoutek: The Dollhouse Of The Future, By Ant Farm
One of the first of [way too] many [I'm sure] warnings I started giving the kid, even before her vision focused more than 3 feet away, was, "Plastic bags, not a toy." Which is funny, because in the late...
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[read the full post...]
April 9, 2007
Skoal! Swedish Illustrator Ingela Peterson Arrhenius
There's nothing nicer than finding a great illustrator with a packed portfolio. Ingela Peterson Arrhenius's work at Stockholm Illustration makes me wish I had some gigs that needed illustrating. This one is from "an article about that you decorate...
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[read the full post...]
April 8, 2007
Oops. The Kid Loved This Maria Marshall Video At The Met
A couple of Sundays ago, I got a chance to meet a couple of DT readers, Col and Aubrey, who were visiting NYC from America's Capital of Leaving Your Kid With The Valet Parking Guy, Scottsdale. We went wandering through...
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[read the full post...]
April 6, 2007
Holy Cow, Bozart Kaleidoscope Dollhouse, Still In The Box
Even though I was never a diehard fan of Bozart's Kaleidoscope House, it always felt like the one that got away. I knew one of the investors behind Bozart from Philadelphia. A bunch of art world people I knew...
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[read the full post...]
April 2, 2007
Awesome ABC's Made From Mutilated Toy Soldiers
DC artist Oliver Munday made this sweet-looking alphabet from plastic toy soldiers. I'd go into details about how he did it, but everyone who isn't suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder is under a gag order at Walter Reed. Fire...
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[read the full post...]
"Silly Adults" At Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen
To commemorate the birth of his newest son last month, Copenhagen art dealer Nicolai Wallner invited the artists he represents "to do an exhibition celebrating the spirit of life." Pretty open-ended, and the results are on the gallery's website....
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[read the full post...]
March 22, 2007
Plush Squid Is Bigger Than All Y'all
As we learned with giant Ugly Dolls, the line between plush toy and plush furniture is somewhere around six feet. And as this giant squid shows us, the line between plush furniture and total plush domination is about 15...
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[read the full post...]
March 20, 2007
Yes, Bears Were Harmed In The Making Of These Photographs
Brooklyn artist [redundant, I know] Kent Rogowski flayed some helpless teddy bears, turned them inside out, and then restuffed them, sending his creations back out into the world as hideous, mutilated mutants. But not before photographing them and binding...
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[read the full post...]
March 18, 2007
Japan's Favorite Out&Proud Elephant Has Art Exhibition, Goods Sale
Elmer is definitely, 100% not gray. He's not quite flamboyant, but he is as rainbow-colored as the bumper sticker on any Subaru, and just as proud. He's so cute, you'd have to be a cranky, old ogre from Minnesota...
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[read the full post...]
March 15, 2007
KFed's A Poet And He Didn't Know It
Nothing against the fine, whimsical work coming out of MaryJack Studios, mind you, which is perfect for nurseries of every type and decor. But I gotta say, I'm baffled by the very notion that having your product appear in...
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[read the full post...]
March 13, 2007
Berlin Hipsters Transform Playground Equipment Into Musical Instruments
For his thesis project at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Richard The created Playful Parasites, a set of Bluetooth-enabled sensors that transform traditional playground equipment--slides, swings, climbing toys, bouncy ride-ons--into an data-transmitting interface:The system is designed to...
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[read the full post...]
March 9, 2007
Strollers, High Art & HiArt
One of the shows the kid and I saw yesterday was by the German sculptor Isa Genzken at David Zwirner Gallery. Genzken has something of a signature style, which involves using deliberately artless-seeming techniques on commercial/industrial/pre-existing materials. The result's...
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[read the full post...]
March 8, 2007
Get Into My Belly: New Baby Cake By Michelle
Michelle Christian is an award-winning cake and sugar artist located in Burgess Hill, a small town between London and Brighton. And she made a cake in the shape of a newborn baby. Also in the shape of the Millennium...
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[read the full post...]
March 6, 2007
Strollers In White Satin, Never Reaching The Minimum Bid
It's hard to have an auction when one of the most likely bidders was just buried in the Bahamas. Are you the other? This "standard Evenflo" stroller has been customized "using creme satin and gold lame...but you can customize...
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[read the full post...]
March 4, 2007
Sweet Tibetan Sheepskin Yakskin Baby Sling--And Birthing Center Vs. Delivery Room
This shot, titled "Father & Son," was taken in Amdo, Tibet, by Brooklyn photographer Raul Gutierrez, and it shows, among other things, an awesome sheepskin baby sling a yakskin robe being used as a baby sling [thanks for the...
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[read the full post...]
March 2, 2007
Skywalkers Art Blimp Parade Phollow-up
I don't need anything! All I need is this modded Scion. And this art blimp parade. This Scion, and this art blimip parade. And this Bugaboo. This Scion, this art blimp parade, this Bugaboo, And a week at the...
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[read the full post...]
March 1, 2007
Mister Burnett's Neighborwood
Forget the design implications for a moment; one of the things that blows me away about the designer toy phenomenon is the blanks business model, where instead of just putting out a character doll, you put out a blank,...
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[read the full post...]
February 28, 2007
Quick, See Neo-Mickey Before His Lawyers Do
Come To Daddy, indeed. The DT jury may be out on the Disney plush toy sofas, but this sweet, little remixing of Mickey as a trance-happy space alien from the planet Murakami is AWESOME. Not clear what the impetus...
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[read the full post...]
The Pinstriped Bugaboo, Part 2: The Driver
After spotting the pinstriped Bugaboo Gecko online a few days ago, I tracked down the owners to hear their story. They turn out to be friends of Vanessa, who had published the rig and a link to the annual Blessing...
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[read the full post...]
Finally, Yoshitomo Nara Rompers At MoCA
Don't cut up your adult-sized t-shirt just yet. After a DT reader reported seeing them at the gift shop of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, a few rounds of email has led back to Los Angeles. Their Museum of...
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[read the full post...]
February 27, 2007
The Kid: The Anime Version
Early on, we made a decision not to publish the kid's name or photo on Daddy Types. Then as she started pre-pre-school, I kind of pulled a curtain around her and her classmates, too. But as soon as Sylvia emailed...
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[read the full post...]
All Hail The Kustomized Bugaboo, Part 1
A customized Bugaboo has been a backburner obsession of mine almost since the beginning of the stroller era. There was a time when I wanted to get the Bugaboo engraved, like a trophy or a piece of jewelry. But the...
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[read the full post...]
February 23, 2007
Yoshitomo Nara Plush Doll Rarer Than You Think
I know there are some pull toys out there, but I'm still surprised that Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara's malevolent-looking little kids or sleepy-eyed puppies haven't made it onto actual kid-sized t-shirts or Onesies yet. Still, when I was trying...
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[read the full post...]
February 21, 2007
Crochet+Atari Mash-Up: Now That's A TV For The Kid's Room
Artist Christine Domanic made this sweet, sweet crocheted TV with Pitfall playing on it under her etsy handle, JackRabbit. Which does not, unfortunately, mean it is for sale. Of course, it doesn't matter for you, because if it had...
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[read the full post...]
February 20, 2007
Soft, Smooth, Stop-Action Felt Video For DJ Klock
If you're ever in need of a five-minute music video to mellow the kid out a bit, there's always DJ Klock's "Theme." Klock is a hard-to-classify turntablist with a slight jazz overtone and an appreciation for the offbeat and...
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[read the full post...]
Interpreting Kids' Drawings For Fun And Profit
The artist Yeondoo Jung began staging and photographing elaborate re-enactments of children's drawings in 2001. New Museum curator Yukie Kamiya sees the project as an attempt to clarify the "terrible freedom of a child's unbridled ideas." And really, is...
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[read the full post...]
RIP: Mice Twice Illustrator Joseph Low, 95
This is one well-packed sentence, from Steven Heller's obituary for Joseph Low, author of Mice Twice, which won the Caldecott Honor award in 1981, and who just passed away last week at 95:In the 1950s Mr. Low was known for...
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[read the full post...]
February 16, 2007
What I Got From Katsucon13: Day 1
I stopped by Katsucon 13 this morning, the big anime convention that happens to be down the street from our joint in DC. [Yes, I just called our house a joint. But after chilling at the con, my nerdmeter is...
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[read the full post...]
Sweetness In Seattle: CalderEagle Now A Parent
Someone abandoned these little baby sculptures under the Alexander Calder sculpture, Eagle, in Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park. Says Belltown: The eaglets' birth parent(s) - we'll assume father(s) - were nowhere to be found, leaving behind only a small sign...
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[read the full post...]
February 15, 2007
Holy Smokes, Actual Gerhard Richter Carpet
Rugs by artists are not new, but there are a couple of outfits now commissioning contemporary artists to design rugs and carpets. This Gerhard Richter carpet, though, I gotta say, I wouldn't have thought it. But sure enough, there...
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[read the full post...]
Reckon Shirts I Reckon I'd Buy
[02/08 update: check the comments below; unfortunately, a number of people over an extended period of time have complained about problems or delays completing their orders from Reckon. Lead time on orders not-in-stock have stated leadtimes of up to 3...
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[read the full post...]
February 14, 2007
Pampers Chairs, Recycled
In the early 1990's, the German artists Beata and Gerhard Bär and Hartmut Knell began developing techniques to reuse consumer plastics, not as ground up, grey park benches, but in a way that underscored their past lives. It was...
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[read the full post...]
February 10, 2007
C&C Custom-Painted Eames Shells
Cynthia & Chris are husband & wife designers who salvaged a store of vintage Eames shells from an auditorium fire and set to refinish them by hand. Rather than just return them to an impractical and ultimately inauthentic "vintage"...
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[read the full post...]
February 9, 2007
Isamu Noguchi Slide Mantra Sculptures
Reading through the timeline of sculptor Isamu Noguchi's projects is like a smack on the back of the head; there are so many playgrounds that never made it out of the maquette stage. They range back over fifty years...
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[read the full post...]
February 6, 2007
Punk Love: Photos Of The Early Hardcore Scene By Susie Horgan
Susie Horgan needed subjects for her photography class at American University, so she took a job at the Haagen-Dazs store in Georgetown, and started photographing a couple of punks who worked there: Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye. Here's a picture...
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[read the full post...]
February 2, 2007
Hey, My Kid Could Do That
The kid and the wife built MoMA this morning out of blocks. As she gave us the tour, she pointed out that it has a tower, an atrium, some sculptures, and a garden--with trees and a bridge. And some...
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[read the full post...]
January 29, 2007
Kid-Sized PJ/Miesian Playhouse By Rirkrit Tiravanija
It's funny the things that get lodged in our brains. In 1997, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija [Don't worry, the art world has one-name brand stars, too. Did you know Iman's last name is Abdulmajid? True. Our waiter showed us...
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[read the full post...]
January 25, 2007
Computer-Generated 'Reading Cocoon/Bookcase' By Studio Roosegaarde
I'd seen Rotterdam artist Daan Roosegaarde's Variants series of space-creating bookcases a few months ago, and then I lost my reference for it until just now. They're several kinds of awesome all at once. Variants are functional sculptures that...
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[read the full post...]
January 24, 2007
Testing Your Meddle
Some news links that almost warrant their own posts. If you need a theme here, how about meddling? If you want to keep believing that it's not her parents, no way, Marla Olmstead has been a genius painter since she...
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[read the full post...]
January 18, 2007
Tide Chandelier By Stuart Haygarth
A post about rubber ducks and plastic flotsam collectors. A post about laundry detergent. A post about a moon-shaped lamp. One never knows what the Information Ocean will wash up on the Daddy Types shore, does one? Artist Stuart...
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[read the full post...]
January 9, 2007
Sad Ghost Lamp, 2004, By Marcel Dzama
Like I said, I'm glad I don't have to compete with Ikea for anything. But I wonder if artist Marcel Dzama said the same thing back in 2003-2004 when CerealArt released his Sad Ghost Lamp. Made of ABS and...
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[read the full post...]
January 2, 2007
Arts & Crafts Auction To Benefit The James Kim Memorial Fund
Over 40 artists, designers and artisans from around the world have donated their works to an auction to benefit the James Kim Memorial Fund. Bidding begins tomorrow [Jan. 3rd] on eBay, and will continue through Jan. 7th. 100% of...
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[read the full post...]
December 30, 2006
VV Cute Thumbprint ABC Poster [sic]
Sarah Neuburger sells her art and designs on her site, The Small Object. Which I guess is a plausible explanation for why this achingly cute thumbprint ABC "poster" is only 8.5 x 11 inches. There are also a bunch...
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[read the full post...]
December 19, 2006
Belly Door By Elmgreen & Dragset
A few years back, some artist friends in Berlin, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, made a series of sculpture/installations that involved doors. Doors with two handles, doors two doors facing each other and chained together, etc. The idea seems...
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[read the full post...]
December 15, 2006
Toot Toot, Chugga Chugga, Small Faded Red Car
Last summer photoblogger extraordinaire David F. Gallagher snapped a picture of an abandoned amusement park car in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. If the carbon dating tests come back positive, the photo is definitive proof that The Wiggles are descended from those...
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[read the full post...]
December 13, 2006
Robert Mapplethorpe's Children's Portraits
I swear, I didn't plan for it to be art day, but there you go. The late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe is now best known for his minimalistic homoerotic and sadomasochistic nudes [OK, and maybe his sensual photos of orchids, but...
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[read the full post...]
Andrea Zittel Made This Hat For A Friend's Baby
Another artist I really like: Andrea Zittel. Her work explores the boundaries between art and design, modernism, minimalism, and manufactured personalization. I'd love to see what kind of baby/kid environments she'd come up with. She has also been making...
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[read the full post...]
Kids On Art: Felix Gonzalez-Torres
One of my favorite artists is Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose work I used to collect before it went stratospherically beyond my price range. We installed a sculpture of his, 180 pounds of wrapped candy dumped in the corner, a couple...
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[read the full post...]
December 12, 2006
Jim Lambie, The Olan Mills Of The 21st Century
There's almost no better backdrop for taking a photo of a kid than a floor installation by the Scottish artist Jim Lambie. I got some pics of the kid on the Lambie installation this summer at the Hirshhorn in...
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[read the full post...]
December 10, 2006
Antonio Vitali: Spielzeugdesigner
Swiss eBayer a.r. has just listed this very early and beautiful set of hand-carved wooden figures, dollhouse and furniture by Antonio Vitali. According to a.r., these were sold at the Swiss National Crafts Store (!) in the 1940s and...
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[read the full post...]
December 6, 2006
Vintage Toy Wooden Baby Carriage Kay Bojesen Denmark
Two weeks ago this sweet, little stroller designed by Kay Bojesen sold on eBay for $355 plus shipping. Forty-two years ago, you could get one in mint condition directly from Creative Playthings for $3.25. A 1964-65 catalog lists 11...
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[read the full post...]
December 5, 2006
Alone in the Wilderness
Am I the only one not convinced that a 529 savings plan is the only way to save money for future education expenses? I want to save as much as possible for the Kid's future—but what if her future...
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[read the full post...]
Iiwi: Japan's Most Incredible Baby & Dog Store
It's exactly the kind of serendipitous experience you hope for on a trip: you stumble across an utterly unique, mindblowing store that's obviously the product of passionate, discerning and very entertaining people. The kid and I were on our...
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[read the full post...]
December 1, 2006
Le Petit Prince, Le Ventre Geant
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Germany, a happy couple prepares for the arrival of their baby by decorating the nursery, or kinderzimmer, as it's known over there, with a delicately rendered scene from The Little Prince. And an equally masterful, silvered...
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[read the full post...]
November 14, 2006
Because So Much Is Riding On Your Art
I was all excited to post this sculpture by Juan Cespedes, a great Chilean artist who references cinematic and digital imagemaking using the lowest-tech possible. [Cespedes' show at Andrew Kreps Gallery in NYC just closed last weekend.] But then...
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[read the full post...]
November 11, 2006
Father, Flavin, Flickr
Just stumbled across this photo of a dad and his daughter with one of my favorite Dan Flavin installations at the MCA in Chicago. sierraromeo's photostream on flickr [flickr]...
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[read the full post...]
November 8, 2006
Pixel: Gerhard Richter By Way Of Zutano
We're big Zutano fans, have been since our first gifts arrived before the kid was born. Their prints are a little cutesy sometimes, but they're also modern enough to be considered a staple. I got to meet the Zutano...
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[read the full post...]
Design ME Some Modern Utopian Soviet Textiles, Comrade
You say you want a revolution? Well, yeah, if it means deporting the bunnies and the ducks to the gulag and decking the kid out in adorable prints of the Motherland's glorious steamrollers and tractors, well, paint me read and...
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[read the full post...]
October 13, 2006
"Different States of Being"
The Frieze Art Fair is this weekend in London, but because of preschool and other obligations, we're not there. As art fair circuses go, it's probably the most intelligent and well-thought-through and enjoyable, and not just because they make a...
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[read the full post...]
Daddy Tattoos...His Kid's Handprint On His Back
Along with this picture, DT reader Tom sent in a bit of the backstory, so to speak, for his new ink, which he got to commemorate the completion of their two-partner adoption of their daughter. With a tatoo this...
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[read the full post...]
October 12, 2006
Czech-Made: The World Of Shape, Ladislav Sutnar's Awesome Children's Book
You'd think it'd be enough that Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar launched the area code and helped ease civilization into the information age without having waves of data crash down upon our heads. You'd think it'd be enough that his...
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[read the full post...]
October 10, 2006
Somewhat Kid-skeptical Artist/Dad Builds Giant Slides In Tate Modern
The Tate Modern's giant Turbine Hall is the site of London's most high-profile art installations. Opening today is a set of giant curly slides by entemologist-turned-artist Carsten Holler. In an interview with the Observer, who discussed the impact becoming a...
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[read the full post...]
September 28, 2006
Put Balouga On Your Next Paris Kid-shopping Trip
Balouga is a new, sweet-looking gallery of children's design, from the small to the major, which just got added to my shortlist for our next visit to Paris. I mean, just look at that wall of chairs hanging there,...
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September 25, 2006
Art Collecting For Babies
I considered not posting about the NYT's Style section article on collecting contemporary art for kids. Not because I feel really implicated in it--though I do--but because to someone who already's hooked on collecting art, it just seems so normal....
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September 21, 2006
Bubble
Just came across this quote from artist Jason Rhoades. It didn't register with me at all when I first read it two years ago, but since he passed away--survived by his wife and 3-yo daughter--it just really struck me....
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September 14, 2006
Woz's House Has Cave, Murals For The Kids
More news from the Stuff I Won't Be Buying Dept.: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's house in Los Gatos, CA, was bought by some developers who did some extensive remodelling. But they left most of Woz's additions for his kids intact....
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August 23, 2006
Nerdbaby Alphabet Flashcards
Alphabet flashcards are the new American Apparel t-shirts, the medium of choice for indie-designed baby stuff. Check out artist Tiffany Ard's nerd baby alphabet cards, for example. Ard has a lyrical, watercolor-y style that no doubt keeps her busy...
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August 12, 2006
Artist Coloring Books, Some NSFK
The other day in Printed Matter, the always amazing artists' book store/exhibition space in Chelsea, I started wondering about what books artists might have made for kids. Given the thousands of publications on hand, I ended up narrowing the...
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August 3, 2006
"Rhoades is survived by his wife, artist Rachel Khedoori; daughter Rubi, 3..."
He was really just an acquaintance; I was just another fan/groupie/collector, I'm sure. But still, I am really kind of undone to learn that Rhoades died. Jason Rhoades, 41; Artist Combined Humor, Poignancy [latimes]...
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July 29, 2006
Takashi Homma's Tokyo And My Daughter
The Zurich-based art publisher Nieves has just released Tokyo And My Daughter, a book by photographer Takashi Homma. It's the latest in a series of artist titles that includes Sonic Youther Kim Gordon's Chronicles, Vol. 1 and Thumbsucker director...
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July 25, 2006
Toy Portraits Wig Me Out
Regine posted a link to British artist Peter Jones' portraits of toy monkeys, which kind of creeped me out. But not before reminding me of NYC artist Sarah Blackwelder's even more ominous paintings of stuffed animals, which seem totally fraught...
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July 5, 2006
Oliver In A Tutu by Catherine Opie
I just thought this was a cute picture, even though, as Tyler points out, the kid is going to be "scarred for life." No dads, actually, but two moms, including artist--and UCLA professor--Catherine Opie, whose photo of her son,...
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June 30, 2006
Mark Jenkins' Storker Project
Mark Jenkins is a Washington, DC-based artist whose humorous, absurdist, and ephemeral work inhabits its public settings almost unnoticed. Since learning about Jenkins' Storker Project over a year ago via the always-incredible street art mecca, Wooster Collective, I've kept...
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June 24, 2006
Plable: Play-Under Table, By Yumiko Tanaka
Yumiko Tanaka is a graduate student at the Royal College of Art in London. There, as part of a project to explore the way adults and children play and interact together, she developed the Plable. It's a concept for...
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June 6, 2006
Dutch Artist Made This Kid's Chair Out Of Shelf Brackets
I found this cool children's chair, made from standard bookshelf brackets and wood by Rotterdam-based artist Helmut Smits. He doesn't know it, but Smits' latest sculpture is an eerie almost-portrait of me: it's a system for turning Diet Coke...
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April 28, 2006
Baby's Got A Knitted Gun
jackhammer Originally uploaded by Extreme Craft. Call me an old-fashioned peace-nik, but I don't think I want my kid playing with guns, even a swell, knitted machine gun by Extreme Crafter Theresa Honeywell. If the kid did express interest...
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April 9, 2006
B is For Bugaboo, Basquiat & Brooklyn
Basquiat Show Originally uploaded by daddytypes. DT reader and NYC at-home dad Jon McGrath took this picture of his well-behaved son Emmett at the Jean Michel Basquiat show at the Brooklyn Museum last year. It's part of the daddytypes...
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April 4, 2006
Jill Greenberg: "End Times" Indeed
I am totally down with the title, but I can't decide if "End Times," Jill Greenberg's exhibition of hyper-glossed up photographs of wailing children is actually commenting on the apocalypse or hastening it. I know which one the artist...
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March 30, 2006
To Do, 4/16: The Coloring Book Project at P.S. 1
I've been dreaming of cool children's books by contemporary artists since before the kid was born. So it's exciting to see Jen DeNike, an artist I've admired and who's work has gotten a lot of exposure lately, is hosting Coloring...
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March 23, 2006
Questioning The DT Approach To Celebrity Parenting
There are days--like yesterday, when it was reported that amiable enough ambassador for his generation/Princess Bride actor Fred Savage will soon become a father--when I wonder if I shouldn't give up on the whole "unidentified local man" cynicism and just...
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Kids And Minimalism: At Home With The Judds
If you worry that having a kid's going to totally cramp your pristine minimalist loft style, you're right, and he will. But then, it even happened to the greatest minimalist of them all, so deal with it. The Donald...
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March 4, 2006
Portrait Of My Dog And Your Baby, By William Wegman
Artist/photographer William Wegman is well known for his portraits of generations of his Weimeraners in various positions and poses. His work is in all kinds of major museum collections and has been published in a lot of books, too. What...
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