Cool Hunting

Electric Windows
Bringing together 24 street artists from all over the world, Electric Windows is a semi-permanent installation of large-scale work exhibited on the exterior windows of a 19th century blanket factory in Beacon, NY. We traveled to the small town earlier this year to meet some of the artists and watch them make "urban art" in a not-so-urban setting. We also interview one of the...

Mika Rottenberg
For our final video taking a closer look at this year's Whitney Biennial, we travel to the Harlem studio of video artist Mika Rottenberg. Known for videos depicting women engaging in elaborate systems of production that often harvest their own body, Mika shows us the set of her latest piece (and Biennial installation), "Cheese" and tells us the backstory of making the video. We...

José Parlá
Our video about Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá's work explores the thought and process behind his densely-layered graffiti paintings. Perhaps more than any other artist, José blurs the lines between word and image and graffiti and "fine art." In the video José explains his influences (including his brother Rey Parlá's abstract scratch films) and at his Fort Greene studio we get the rare privilege of...

Jason Young: The Curling Stones
Our video last week profiled the New York-based Canadian artist Jason Young, highlighting his resin paintings and the intensive process that goes into making them. This week we bring you an exclusive broadcast of The Curling Stones, an experimental film directed by Pascal Franchot that fictionalizes Jason's work with curling stones, used in the Olympic sport that involves sliding heavy stones on ice. In...

Okamoto Studio
Takeo Okamoto, an established sushi chef in his native Japan discovered his calling for ice sculpture and moved to the iciest place he could think of, Alaska. Winner of several international awards, including a Silver Medal in the 1998 Olympics, Takeo now runs Okamoto Studio with his son Shintaro in New York City. We were introduced to them through Jeremy Mangan, an artist whose coffee paintings we admired. When we spoke with Jeremy he mentioned that he also sculpts ice—he's in fact Okamoto's principal carver—the result of Jeremy and Shintaro having met in an art class at Hunter College. We decided right away to make a video of the studio and, after some deliberation, we realized CH mascots Otis and Logan would make the perfect subjects for a video and a great feature at our 50th Episode party. Guests were treated to the breathtaking sculptures of the Sealyham Terriers themselves and to raw footage from the video of them being made.