Keith and Stéphanie, Monaco 1989

Monaco, if one discounts a particular religious state, is the smallest country in the world and recently welcomed citizen number 10,000 in the cheery form of a baby girl. Personally, I’m a big admirer of European principalities that have stoically maintained a discrete identity despite centuries of psychopathy from invasive neighbors. Like most independent states, much can be chalked up to rugged geography combined with territorial ruthlessness. But darlings, our modern era now demands flexibility and finesse. Believe it.

Monaco’s geography contributes both to its independence as well as its urban crush.

In Monaco’s case, the nation successfully transitioned the lion’s share of its economy from tourism and casinos into modern wealth development under Prince Rainier III. Therefore, it is not too much of a reach to consider that the sunny cliffs and cerulean sea of that exclusive principality share something with NYC beyond a leaden concentration of the rich and powerful.

Not the Knicks: Jürgen Nefzger’s 2011 series ‘Grand Bruit’

It is an entire nation that, like New York City, shares the continuing building up and tearing down of dynamic urbanization. Like us, they attract a certain class that constructs and destroys as both a matter of course and as a leisure-time activity. Here a massive celebrity wedding in midtown, there a sprawling auto race. Here entire neighborhoods leveled to slice the island in crisscrossing, gas-guzzling, extraction-wealth constructs, beaux arts masterpieces razed to rubble. There, however, thanks to our loud leadership of largesse, they’ve just now put a check to it all by installing strict oversight to slow the developmental grab-ass au courant.

Jürgen Nefzger’s 2011 series ‘Grand Bruit’

Writer Virginia d’Umas describes these parallels of high-value geographical limitation in her feature on Monaco’s newest art exhibition entitled “Memory Of Places,” held at Salle d’Exposition du quai Antoine-Ier:

“The thematic connection to New York stems from architectural historian Jean-Philippe Hugron’s analyses comparing Monaco to New York in terms of density and their capacity to function as laboratories for new forms, transposing themes from the book Delirious New York to the Principality.”

1978’s Delirious New York introduces “Manhattanism,” Koolhaas’s theory on how New York’s hyper-dense, chaotic, and vertical environment was shaped by a “culture of congestion”

Locals only: Jürgen Nefzger’s 2011 series ‘Grand Bruit’

Curated by Célia Bernasconi, Director of the Heritage Institute, the exhibition aims to help preserve and promote the artistic and architectural legacy that tells the story of Monaco through a mirrored urban intensity with Manhattan. The exhibition visualizes these ideas through mixed-media displays featuring architectural surveys, striking day-in-the-Monégasque-life photography by Jürgen Nefzger and, in a bright sashay to the streets of NYC, a newly public rendition of a mural by Keith Haring. 

Keith Haring in Monaco

Haring was a close personal friend of Princess Stéphanie, the half-American Gen X royal who shocked everyone with her brave, athletic punk silhouette. Stéphanie was A Girl Who Dared. Still a teenager, she backed up that warrior style when the glare of her mother’s accident burned through the tabloids… and there was stunning Stéphanie, standing stoically in her public grief. At the time I remember thinking that her dramatically browed, quintessentially 80’s face suddenly gone so pale in photos reminded me of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, with whom the family shares history. But that’s a side quest. 

Maternity ward interior waiting room, Princess Grace Hospital, Monte Carlo, Monaco

The story here is that the madly manageable mix we call Manhattan has been invoked. Our most rebellious DEI success story has been showcased by a determinedly self-actualized partner at a time when America has been largely scratched from international dance cards.

Princess Caroline at the mural’s unveiling, 1989

That being our bullishly unhappy circumstances, now is an excellent time to point out that it was philanthropy and not necessarily art that brought the Monégasque princess and the street-level graffiti artist together. Stéphanie was a platinum-selling artist in Europe, and her work on behalf of her mother’s Princess Grace Foundation set her in the center of New York’s best and brightest. Haring’s worldview dovetailed precisely with Stéphanie’s rebel aesthetic, so she and her sister Caroline brought him to Monaco to paint a vibrant mural at the Princess Grace Maternity Hospital.

Haring at work

Delighted with the mural’s result, Princess Caroline promptly bestowed knighthood upon our boy: the Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Culturel (Knight of the Order of Cultural Merit), making Keith Haring the youngest person and sole Américain to receive the distinction.

Polaroid: Caroline and Keith, 1989. Courtesy of The Haring Foundation

Needless to say, this will be a stimulating exhibition for New Yorkers near and far. I understand Portugal has become overrun and Spain is full of English. Might I suggest we make like our (greatish) grandparents and plan a winter wander on the riviera this season? With holiday temperatures lingering at the high fifties, tourism at an ebb and political weather below freezing, it’s a good time to compare notes with a culture that made grace under pressure a national ethic.

“Mémoire des lieux” or “Memory Of Places” runs until January 24th, 2027 at the Salle d’Exposition du quai Antoine-Ier in Monaco and welcomes visitors with free admission from Tuesday to Sunday between 12pm and 6pm.

More than 75 original works celebrate the extraordinary career of an artist who has made caricature an art form all its own.

Some artists capture a likeness. Others capture a personality. Ken Fallin does something considerably more remarkable: he captures the entire performance of being someone, often with nothing more than a few beautifully placed strokes of pen and ink.

At Gallery New World Stages, located at 343 West 49th Street, ABOUT FACE: THE ART OF KEN FALLIN brought together more than 75 original works celebrating one of the most distinctive artistic voices in American entertainment. Curated by Bernard Stote, the exhibition offered a fascinating journey through Broadway, Hollywood, politics and Wall Street, with a collection of famous faces transformed by Fallin’s unmistakable wit, elegance and extraordinary eye for character.For those of us who have spent our lives in and around the theatre, Ken Fallin’s drawings are more than illustrations. They are part of Broadway’s visual vocabulary. His subjects may be actors, politicians, business leaders or cultural icons, but his genius lies in recognizing the detail that makes each individual unmistakably themselves. A raised eyebrow, an extravagant hairstyle, the angle of a chin or the particular way someone carries their importance becomes, in Fallin’s hands, an entire biography.

There is a wonderful theatricality to his work. He understands that a face is never simply a collection of features. It is an expression of ambition, vulnerability, humor, vanity, intelligence and sometimes magnificent absurdity. His drawings can be affectionate without becoming sentimental, pointed without becoming cruel and exaggerated without ever losing their essential truth. That balance is considerably harder to achieve than it looks.

Fallin’s career began with the wonderfully irreverent Forbidden Broadway, where he created advertising campaigns and posters for the legendary theatrical revue. Inspired by the incomparable Al Hirschfeld, Fallin developed his own distinctive approach to capturing the larger-than-life personalities who inhabit the entertainment world. It was an ideal artistic marriage: a show that lovingly skewered Broadway’s biggest stars and an illustrator who could reveal an entire theatrical personality in a handful of lines.

Jim Kierstead, Richard Hillman, Lorna Dallas, Sal Viviano

What followed was a career that extended far beyond the footlights. A five-year association with the Sunday edition of the Boston Herald established him as a regular presence in arts journalism, while national advertising campaigns for American Express, Belvedere Vodka and CNBC’s Squawk Box demonstrated that his visual wit could travel effortlessly between entertainment, commerce and the financial world.

Ken Fallin and Lorna Dallas

His illustrations have appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Hollywood Reporter, Chicago Tribune and The New Yorker. Since 1994, his work has been a regular presence in The Wall Street Journal, where his portraits have given personalities from business, politics and culture an unmistakable artistic identity. He has also chronicled the New York theatre scene through his illustrations since 2010, extending a tradition in which the artist becomes an essential witness to theatrical history.

Ken Fallin and Sal Viviano in deep conversation

That is precisely what makes Fallin’s work so important. Photography documents how someone looked at a particular moment. A great caricature tells us how that person occupied the world. It catches the public persona, the private eccentricity and the quality that makes an individual memorable long after a performance has ended or a headline has faded.

Fragrance designer Sue Phillips was also there and showed me her caricature when she was an actress

The comparison with Hirschfeld is inevitable, but Fallin has long since earned his own place in that distinguished artistic tradition. Where a lesser caricaturist might settle for an oversized nose or an exaggerated smile, Fallin understands composition, movement and the almost musical rhythm of a line. His drawings are deceptively economical. Nothing feels accidental, and very little is wasted. Each flourish has a purpose, whether it is revealing a performer’s flamboyance or exposing the carefully cultivated authority of a Wall Street titan.

T2C owner Suzanna Bowling who wrote the books forward and Ken Fallin

His achievements have received recognition well beyond Broadway. In 2010, Fallin earned an Emmy Award nomination for an animated CNBC commercial, and in 2012, his first one-man exhibition, Ken Fallin Draws Hollywood, was presented at the Hamilton Selway Gallery in Los Angeles. His work is included in the permanent collection of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, an extraordinary distinction that places his drawings within one of the world’s great institutions devoted to art and design.

Chita

Then there are the private collectors, a roster that reads like a particularly glamorous opening-night party. Bernadette Peters, Angela Lansbury, Bob Avian, Sir Cameron Mackintosh, Sir Patrick Stewart, Marlo Thomas, Helen Hunt and Norbert Leo Butz are among those who own his work. It seems entirely appropriate that performers who have spent their careers interpreting characters should appreciate an artist who can interpret them so brilliantly.

My personal favorite Katherine Hepburn

New World Stages has given this remarkable body of work an ideal theatrical setting. Gallery New World Stages occupies 150 linear feet of exhibition space across two floors of the New World Stages complex, offering audiences an opportunity to encounter Fallin’s work in the heart of the neighborhood that has inspired so much of his career. Surrounded by five theatres and the constant energy of New York’s performing arts community, the gallery provides a fitting home for an artist whose imagination has been so closely intertwined with the stage.

The King is back

There is also something especially satisfying about seeing caricature celebrated in a gallery rather than treated merely as an accompaniment to an article, advertisement or theatrical production. Illustration is too often regarded as a supporting art, even when the image becomes more memorable than the words it was created to accompany. Fallin’s work makes a persuasive argument that a great caricature deserves to be experienced as art in its own right.

Audra as Lady Sings The Blues

For Broadway lovers, the exhibition is an opportunity to revisit the faces that have shaped our theatrical memories. For those interested in Hollywood, politics and popular culture, it offers a reminder that fame is as much about personality as achievement. And for anyone who appreciates extraordinary draftsmanship, it is a chance to study the remarkable precision behind drawings that appear almost effortlessly spontaneous.

What Ken Fallin has accomplished over the course of his career is more than the creation of an impressive collection of portraits. He has developed a visual record of the people who have entertained us, challenged us, influenced us and occasionally made us roll our eyes. His drawings preserve not simply their appearances but something of the cultural moment in which they mattered.

Long after a Broadway marquee goes dark, a television series ends or a political figure leaves the spotlight, Fallin’s lines remain, capturing the wit, extravagance and unmistakable humanity of his subjects.

And that, ultimately, is the magic of ABOUT FACE. We recognize the famous people on the walls, but we also recognize the extraordinary intelligence of the artist who saw them so clearly.

Because in Ken Fallin’s world, everybody has a face. But only a true artist knows which lines tell the story.

ABOUT FACE: THE ART OF KEN FALLIN is presented at Gallery New World Stages, 343 West 49th Street, New York City and is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, is filmed from the Hotel Edison and is a podcast extension of T2C. We are back after a small hiatus.

Today on Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, we meet an artist whose life has always existed at the intersection of precision and imagination. Don Hershman is an award-winning San Francisco-based artist, born and educated here in New York, who spent much of his professional life as an accomplished podiatric surgeon while quietly developing another language entirely—the language of paint.

His new solo exhibition, – OUT OF LINE –, now at One Art Space in Tribeca through October 20th, brings together four bodies of work that at first seem remarkably different: barns, fragments of the urban landscape, still lifes and portraiture. But look more closely and they are connected by one thing—the line. Hershman repeats it, overlaps it, disrupts it and uses it to build structure, color, memory and identity.

What is fastanating isn’t really an exhibition about four different subjects. It’s about how an artist finds his visual language and then discovers how many different things that language can say. So today we talked about the surgeon and the artist, about structure and abstraction, about code switching and identity—and about what happens when Don Hershman deliberately goes out of line.

Join Mr. Hershman at One Art Space, 23 Warren Street until October 20th.

I am so grateful to Don Hershman for his conversation, his joy of life and his art that captures the imagination.

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

Last Wednesday, Arlo SoHo‘s opening reception for Akea Brionne drew a crowd that wanted art with their evening kiki and cocktail. I too, came for the artist… however, I lingered for the curator. 

From left Jasmine Arakel, Akea Brionne and Stacilyn Silvers-Setayesh

Jasmine Arakel is a shyly prescient impresario that has been showcasing her way from Boston to Miami with her “Living Room” series. Thanks to a heap of heart and sweat equity, Arlo guests can enjoy art of the moment and creator talks without so much as leaving the lobby. Arakel’s hotel-as-gallery idea has caught fire even as major galleries and traditional art markets burn to cinders. To wit, the mighty Waldorf-Astoria hosted its own premiere of the MVo Art Show the evening prior, on its way to a tangentially targeted audience from its former life at Sotheby’s.

Akea Brionne opening at Arlo Soho

Like MVo, Arakel came to art by way of Madison Avenue, with campaigns for Nike, Samsung, Chevrolet, Adidas and Google behind her. In 2022 she founded Curated by Jas, an advisory and curatorial firm that places blue-chip contemporary work in public and private spaces. She brought an advertiser’s instincts with her: she knows what makes people stop walking and she knows what makes them buy.

Akea Brionne opening at Arlo Soho

Down in front! Art talks at Arlo SoHo’s Living Room Gallery

Her newest treasure is Akea Brionne, who holds a dual BA/BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Cranbrook, all in the service of photography. 

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

She uses those credentials the way a good architect uses a blueprint. The photographic portrait is her structure… and then she sews it. The figures are stitched onto the canvas in thick black thread, and the color comes in panels of bright glitter and a library of fabrics. Jacquard is the one that has captured her imagination. “The jacquard loom was our earliest computer system,” she explained, which is the sort of sentence that makes a room full of creatively curious people suddenly look at a tapestry from the left lobe. The layers are, by her own admission, a reflection of her Virgo nature. She loves to sort chaos into beauty. Who among us wouldn’t? 

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

Brionne was born in New Orleans in 1996 until the diaspora of 2005 and now lives and works in Detroit. According to her website, the large-scale woven works are portals where figuration dissolves into abstraction, holding personal and ancestral memory in the same frame. 

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

Water, gardens, celestial bodies, thresholds and domestic architecture recur as metaphors for transformation, migration, care, grief and return. The practice is rooted in her experience as a Creole woman, and in Black Southern folklore, Indigenous knowledge systems and somatic approaches to healing. 

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

This latest series grew out of her search for creative satisfaction outside her familial duties. “I think my art is much more flamboyant than my personality,” the young mom told me with a chuckle. She was dressed in calm dove grey and linen harem pants, a staid counterpoint to the bold, glittery work on the walls. It was the most elegant case of an artist hiding in plain sight that I’ve seen since Clark Kent.

Producer Kaisha Huguley of Broadway’s Wanted

The room was full of the right kind of people, including Kaisha Huguley, producer of Broadway’s Wanted, who was clearly mesmerized by Arlo’s activation for the evening. I should really say “activator,” because it arrived in the dazzling form of Pepe Muñoz, the fashion illustrator from Spain. 

Pepe Muñoz at work

Fashion plated guests

Pepe dashingly served bold strokes and savvy squiggles as he turned party-goers into fashion plates. We left clutching our textured watercolor paper, each presented in a chic black envelope, giddy at being seen so elegantly. Some of us were also giddy because the artist bears a distinct resemblance to Pedro Pascal’s younger, hotter brother.

The writer as illustrated by Muñoz

In an era when art is often sold on a screen, Arlo and Arakel are betting that people still want to stand in a room and look at something real, preferably with a drink in hand. On the evidence of last Wednesday, they are winning.

Arlo Hotel SoHo
231 Hudson Street
New York,NY 10013

Live From The Hotel Edison Times Square Chronicles Presents, is filmed from the Hotel Edison and is a podcast extension of T2C. We are back after a small hiatus.

Today owner Suzanna Bowling talks with with Caricaturist Ken Fallin and his new book About Face. Fallin’s big break was in 1983 doing the posters and advertising for the popular satirical revue Forbidden Broadway. In 1987, he was commissioned by the Boston Herald to do a celebrity caricature every week in the Sunday arts and entertainment section. Fallin has illustrated roughly 500 notable people for the Wall Street Journal, including President Barack Obama, Paul Newman and Tim Russert for Peggy Noonan’s memorial of the newsman in the paper.

The Fabulous Ken Fallin

His Forbidden Broadway posters promoted the show in London, Tokyo and Sydney. Outside of entertainment, Fallin developed relationships with corporate clientele, particularly American Express, which engaged him on several national media campaigns as well as private work. Belvedere Vodka hired him to turn famous icons like the Playboy Bunny and Quentin Tarantino into bottles of the alcohol. Other clients have included HBO, Showtime and Walt Disney Productions.

Ken Fallin in Shubert Alley

His new book About Face is a distinctive art and cultural publication that brings together a broad collection of caricatures celebrating notable figures from entertainment, music, Broadway, Hollywood, and contemporary popular culture. Through expressive artwork and recognizable subjects, the book captures the personalities and visual character of individuals who have made an impact on audiences across different generations. The collection reflects the author’s ability to transform familiar faces into engaging artistic interpretations while maintaining recognizable characteristics. With its combination of artistic expression, cultural familiarity, and entertainment value, ABOUT FACE offers readers more than a traditional collection of drawings. It presents a visual journey through the personalities and cultural figures that have shaped entertainment and public life.

Join Ken Fallin on October 7th at New World Stages, 340 W 50th St, from 5 – 7 for the unveiling of his art with a wine and cheese soiree. You have been invited.

I am so grateful to Ken Fallin for his conversation, his joy of life and his art that captures the imagination.

We are so proud because the show and our guests are featured on the TV screens in the lobby and the hotel rooms.

Rommel Gopez, Ken Fallin, Suzanna Bowling

Thank-you Magda Katz for videoing and creating the content to go live, Rommel Gopez and The Hotel Edison for their kindness and hospitality, Broadway HD and Dr K and at 200 West 54th Street for giving me back my health and my smile.

We have been named by Variety Entertainment News as one of Summer’s Best Picks in the category of Best Television, Radio, Podcasts. The company we are in, has made us so humbled, grateful and motivated to continue.

“The Daily Geek Report” named host Suzanna Bowling on the list of Most Engaging Hosts.

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