Touching Strangers: Photographs by Richard Renaldi

NYC publisher Aperture seeks crowd-funding support to bring the photo series to print

Photographer Richard Renaldi has been working on his latest project since 2007. In creating the “Touching Strangers” series, Renaldi invites total strangers on the street to pose together—touching—and captures a fleeting moment of intimacy, turning the ostensible discomfort into something wonderfully familiar. Shot with a large format 8×10 view camera, his newer portraits carry the same strength in composition and conceptional boldness that his earlier …

Cecil & Merl Cherry Bitters

Juicy bitters destined to elevate summer cocktail-making adventures

Launched in 2012, the company name Cecil & Merlhonors the two “sweet-tooth” patriarchs of the founders’Deborah Williamson and Bryan Calvertfamilies. Together, Williamson and Calvert began their business with rustic cheesecakeslemon ricotta, mango, dulce de leche and pumpkinserved from their Prospect Heights, Brooklyn restaurant, James. Now, in collaboration with mixologist Justin Lane Briggs, Cecil & Merl has bottled up the essence of summer in small-batch Cherry …

Ellen Gallagher: Don’t Axe Me

Meticulous layering breaks through the canvas to reinvent visual contexts and explore future possibilities in the New Museum exhibition

by LinYee Yuan Those familiar with the work of American artist Ellen Gallagher often view her delicate works on paper and canvas through the lens of racial and gender politics—Gallagher’s “DeLuxe” series famously abstracted African-American beauty and style advertisements from the ’50s with layers of yellow plasticine and carefully excised bits of paper. But in “Don’t Axe Me,” Ellen Gallagher’s first major museum exhibition in …