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.

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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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There are photographers who document New York society, and then there are photographers who become part of the society they document. Annie Watt belongs firmly in the latter category.

Sometimes a photograph does something far more important than document who was in a room. Walking into Watt’s 20th anniversary photography exhibition at The Consulate, hosted by owners Kiril and Miki Mihajlov, one photograph on the wall stopped me. There was Annie with Judy Gilbert and my friend Errol Rappaport, who passed away last year. For a moment, Errol wasn’t someone I was remembering. There he was again, caught in a living moment among friends. That is the peculiar magic of a photograph: it can collapse time. Someone who is gone can suddenly walk back into the room.

Prince Mario-Max

Nearby were photographs of Prince Mario-Max, another familiar figure in New York’s social and philanthropic world, among the many faces Watt has captured during a career chronicling New York—and, during the season, Palm Beach. Taken together, the walls weren’t simply displaying photographs. They held pieces of lives, friendships and celebrations, a social history preserved one shutter click at a time.

Rod and Judy Gilbert

On September 16, Watt turned the camera back on her own remarkable journey with a one-night-only exhibition and fundraiser celebrating 20 years of the Annie Watt Agency, 2006–2026. But the evening wasn’t simply about looking backward. Net proceeds benefited scholarship programs at the School of Visual Arts, helping promising young artists move forward.

For two decades, Watt has been a familiar presence at galas, benefits, openings and celebrations. Her ability to make people comfortable in front of a camera, coupled with her celebrated eye for posing, turned what began as the work of one independent photographer into the far-reaching Annie Watt Agency. As her bookings grew beyond what one photographer could handle, Watt began sharing assignments with other photographers, eventually building an agency whose work now extends from New York and the Hamptons to Palm Beach and beyond.

Highlighting other photographers work

The Consulate proved a natural setting for an exhibition built around people. Guests mingled over wine and delicious hors d’oeuvres while live jazz played and Watt’s photographs transformed the restaurant into a temporary gallery. The people in the room weren’t simply looking at photographs; many were part of the world those photographs preserve.Even better, guests were encouraged to take their portraits off the wall and bring them home, allowing the exhibition itself to disappear piece by piece as the evening progressed. What had been part of the gallery became a personal keepsake.

Under the scaffolding a fantasy blooms upon summer’s edge as the ladies at the helm of One Art Space bring Hunt Slonem and his colony of rabbits quite literally home to 23 Warren.

Renaissance of whimsy: Hunt Slonem at One Art Space

The arc of Slonem’s career itself is a masterworking of the American dream and this, his “Through The Looking Glass” exhibition, is an ebullient celebration that insists upon deliberate optimism, despite life’s grim particulars.

Unique Glass Bunny 2026. Courtesy Hunt Slonem

If NYC (battered, resilient, always game for wonder) is the looking glass, then the reflection here is sunny and, despite the state of the nation at large, spot on with whimsy.

The artist held court on September 10, 2026

Hunt Slonem at One Art Space

Here Hunt takes his ubiquitous bunnies, created with singular frolicking strokes that lop themselves onto an array of colored canvases and sends them multiplied throughout One Art’s bright expanse.

Oval Bunny 2026 oil on wood. Courtesy Hunt Slonem

Hunt Slonem at One Art Space

It’s a much larger experience of Slonem than when we shared gallery space at DTR last year. Now, the bunnies have birthed themselves into twisty glass and bright neon. They shimmer in huge lenticular display. At the far end of the exhibition a towering tea cake of bright pastel lurched stoically, Carroll-like and bunny festooned, natch.

Hunt Slonem at One Art Space

Producer Jamie de Roy

The artist, himself resplendent in a verdant green-patterned blazer, chatted amicably among book signing with press, collectors and fans. One Art Space always puts together a top class affair, and the passed small bites were equally creative. Guests sampled from a clever arancini set with tops cut off, revealing its nest of bedfellows marinara and mozzarella, as well as tiny rafts of thinly sliced rare roast beef on artisanal crackers, tuna tartare and heady truffles cuddled with Telaggio cheese in a tender vol au vent.

Hunt Slonem at One Art Space

Hunt Slonem at One Art Space

I couldn’t stay for cake, Manhattanites have just returned from their far-flung summer places and the season has started on steroids. However I trust that, just like Slonem’s hare harem, it too was an airy delight of soft fluff and — upon reflection — just what our collective needs.