Nico Daswani's Blog (21)

Meet the irrepressible Leese Walker, leader of the "Elevated Soundscapes" walk on the gorgeous High Line Park in Manhattan, which was part of Create Culture's 2011 Summer Creative Walks. 

Meet the fascinating Kaoru Watanabe who lead the "A Conversation With Nature" walk, as part of Create Culture's 2011 Summer Creative Walks series.

In this article, The Guardian profiles several young artists across the UK who are re-discovering older creative tools and technologies such as old typewriters, vinyl players and old film cameras as a way to attempt to re-discover a more authentic and less elusive way of making…

According to this New York Times article, the hugely popular exhibition, "Arts in the Street", at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in…

I caught up for a New York minute with musician, composer and producer (and Guggenheim fellow!) Cristian Amigo at the Travers Park playground in our neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens, on a cold day in April 2011... check out the video to find out what Cristian would do if he was mayor of New York!

Longtime Culturalista Matt Jones has a new CD out called "The Devil's in This Whiskey" with his new project, Brooklyn's Two Cent Revival. The album mixes "folk-tinged Americana and classic country elements…

This wonderful project by Alexander Chen, www.mta.me, has been my soundtrack all day. The artist explains the project as such: "at …

In "A Minute With..." we catch up for a New York minute with artists and cultural workers in New York City to see what they are up to and what they love about the city. In the first of the series, I caught up with Aaron Friedman, Founder and President of the wildly successful…

For anyone who has lived in or visited LA, the idea of a neighborhood art walk is a little bizzare-- (unless you can valet-park your car on the way there!). The historic neighborhood of Leimert Park, which John Singleton (Boys n the Hood) once called the "black Greenwich Village", has nevertheless succeeded in getting huge amounts of people to its new art walks, meant as a way to preserve and revitalize this historic neighborhood. In this video, the organizers asked the art walkers…

You Are Now The Owner of This Suitcase is the second installment in a trilogy of plays produced by Theatre 167, currently playing at PS 69 in Jackson Heights, Queens until April 3, 2011. I had chanced upon the first production, 167 Tongues, last year (which I blogged about here) and had been looking forward to the next chapter with…

The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins looks into the reasons why so many British artists move to Berlin. One artist is quotes as saying: "London seems to get more and more like Manhattan in terms of its inequality. As an artist, one can sometimes feel that one exists to provide entertainment to the wealthy: you are simply a skilled servant. In Berlin, as someone making art,…

WNYC's Julia Furlan reports on a story that has been gathering pace and that the Guggenheim would like to see go away:  "There may be a few key art works missing from the Guggenheim's collection in Abu Dhabi. More than 130 artists have signed onto a petition boycotting the Guggenheim's new Saadiyat Island museum over alleged unfair working conditions for migrant workers building the project."…

Chris Gill tells the story in The Art Newspaper of 30 artists in Shanghai who are being evicted of the building that houses their art studio (is Shanghai the new Manhattan?!). They are not leaving without a fight though.…

The JapanNYC Festival currently hosted by Carnegie Hall will go on despite the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan. So far none of the artists have needed to pull out. Daniel Wakin in the New York Times writes: "The hall’s programmers and managers face challenges on two fronts: the practical problem of bringing in performers from a devastated…

Joshua Hammer of Smithsonian Magazine offers a behind the scenes portrait of several artists, including visual artists and rappers, who are at the forefront of the arts in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and are using their work to educate citizens and protest the government. Artists like J-Me…

I've just seen the news on WNYC's web site that the much beloved Five Pointz building in Long Island City, Queens, a global mecca for graffiti culture, is up for demolition, and will be replaced by luxury apartments. From what I know this used to be home to several artist studios until it became unsafe a few years back, but street…

When I took a class on the World's Fairs at NYU a few years back, I came across information about this enigmatic man, Faraway Moses. 

Faraway Moses was a "Dragoman", defined on Wikipedia as:

"the official title of a person who would function as an…