Small Gift

Sanrio's coast-to-coast celebration of 50 years of Hello Kitty and friends

For anyone who’s ever wanted to live inside their Hello Kitty pencil case, the cat character’s founder Sanrio is currently celebrating its 50th with Small Gift—a massive, national blow-out tour. Following last year’s global celebration of Kitty’s 35th anniversary last year, the parent company will host events at L.A.‘s Barker Hangar from 12-21 November before making its way to Miami for a celebration coinciding with …

Five Chair & Ten Tables

Conceptual artist Roy McMakin's funny furniture gets a hometown show

Roy McMakin‘s furniture designs aren’t the first to take on conventional assumptions about the distinctions between art and objects. As a trained architect, it’s not surprising that the interdisciplinary artist’s skillful manipulation of details rivals that of a legend like Ettore Sottsass. But where Sottsass used his painstakingly deliberate compositions to playfully reinvent ideas about what furniture can be, McMakin’s studied work makes wry observations …

My New New York Diary: A Film-Book

A cinematic duet between director Michel Gondry and cartoonist Julie Doucet

Highly charming and intensely creative, “My New New York Diary: A Film-Book” by graphic artist Julie Doucet and director Michel Gondry merges graphic novel with cinematic storytelling. The book comes packaged with a DVD, and both are a necessary accompaniment to the other to help tell the tale of Gondry’s meeting with Doucet. The French director proposed to make a film that would make Doucet …