Meegan Barnes: New York Minute

You miss it. Everybody misses it. Downtown in the seventies when Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe holed up at the Chelsea Hotel, Sid Vicious drifting down its halls. Then the eighties, when Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring were out every night. Most of us got there too late. Meegan Barnes builds it back anyway: the bars, the restaurants, the rooms where downtown made itself up.

There’s the Odeon, red neon sign burning over West Broadway. There’s Max Fish, the Ludlow Street dive bar everybody called their own. There’s CBGB (Country, Bluegrass, and Blues), and, if you lean in, you can almost hear Blondie’s Debbie Harry singing "Heart of Glass." Barnes builds each one like a miniature stage set, the perspective tipped just enough to capture the building and whatever was living inside it.

The Chelsea Hotel is the main event. There’s a little Grand Budapest Hotel in it. The storied balconies are crowded with the musicians and artists who lived there, died there, or passed through long enough to become part of the legend. Half the fun is working out who is who. Mr. Dylan? That you?

Barnes came up as an illustrator, and it shows. She gets a person down with two or three telling details and lets the clay do the rest. The buildings in the back pull their weight too. Indochine puts out a palm tree and lights its front steps like an invitation. At the Carmine Street Pool, the neighborhood rises up behind Keith Haring's dolphin mural, its looping lines moving like bodies on a 1980s dance floor.

These are love letters to the places that made New York the city it is, and to a time that’s gone but still hums in the dark corners. You wander through them like a town you used to know, remembering, recognizing, and finding something new. We loved every step.

Meegan Barnes (b. San Francisco, 1975) lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated from California College of the Arts in 1996. An illustrator and clothing designer before she turned to ceramics, she worked at Kim Hastreiter's Paper magazine and later at Vibe as a designer and illustrator. Her sculptural "booty vases" took off in 2015 and led to collaborations with brands including Opening Ceremony and Axel Arigato. She brings an illustrator's eye for character and storytelling to clay, turning familiar cultural touchstones into playful, sharply observed objects.