Phantom Living: Ibiza’s ‘Instant City’, 1971

The Instant City was an inflatable construction created in Northern Ibiza in 1971 to provide temporary accommodation for students attending the three-day 7th Congress of ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design). A series of brightly-colored, interconnected environments that housed up to 350 people at any one time…

In the Driver’s Seat: The Paintings of Paul Roberts

In the tradition of the Photorealism and Hyperrealism movements that had evolved as offshoots of Pop Art, the paintings of musician, songwriter, and figurative painter Paul Roberts exist in the liminal space between perceived glamor and kitsch, taking their cues from the archetypes of genre fiction and the heightened realities of cinema and photography…

Getting Bombed: Carl Chaplin’s ‘Art Nuko’

From the early ’70s through the early ’90s, Canadian artist and activist Carl Chaplin produced and exhibited a series of paintings depicting the atomic destruction of major cities from around the world “to point out the horror of what would happen to all of mankind in a nuclear war.” The series was called Art Nuko, and it became quite controversial…

Apocalypse, Rinse, Repeat: The Graphic Experience of Greg Irons’ ‘Light’

Despite a tragically short life, and despite still being almost completely unknown, Greg Irons has exerted an extraordinary influence on the course of underground and mainstream comics, graphic design, and the tattoo world, where he is regularly cited as a legend. Irons was born in Philadelphia in 1947 and moved to San Francisco during 1967’s Summer of Love, where he immediately found work designing event posters for music promoter Bill Graham…

Escape from the Pondox Corporation: Mark Beyer and the Mystery of the Mundane

By Daniel Elkind

Whenever I get to thinking about the old New York City, with its cheap book marts and thriving alt-weekly trade, its surplus of less unaffordable apartments, and tolerance (or indifference) to street art that hadn’t been curated or vetted to death—in short, the turnstile-jumping bridge-and-tunnel life that began disappearing long before 9/11—I think about Mark Beyer…