Architecture of a Memory
In the year 2000, America Online was everywhere, cramming promotional CDs into every crevice in the universe. Each disc came with a randomized, temporary login. Most were forgettable, but one disk had a pair of words stuck with me: Smoky/Chimp.
It was an absurd, resonant fragment of the early internet that outlasted its original purpose. A decade later, when I began “documenting” (using that term loosely) the New York art scene, that name became the vessel for a project that has now spanned over fifteen years of visual history.
The Impulse to Record
When this site launched in 2010, the “blogosphere” was a vibrant, messy ecosystem. I was a digital polymath at the time — maintaining three or four different blogs to track my investigations into photography, ceramics, and literature. Tumblr was a fantastic micro-blog for drawings i created and a notebook for drawings i loved. It was an era of personal curation, inspired by persistent voices like Arthag.
While many of those early digital archives have since gone dark, SmokyChimp still exists. It evolved from a simple list into a notebook of my time in the New York art world.
A Personal Lens
My professional life is spent adjacent to the walls of the art world. I have:
- Run Platform Gallery on the Lower East Side.
- Served on the Board of Artist’s Equity.
- Designed numerous galleries and arts foundations.
I build the spaces where art lives, but SmokyChimp is notes for myself of where the art lives after the lights are turned off and the crates have been packed away.
This project offers no professional kickbacks or industry leverage. It is entirely personal. I use this space to archive the “striking” — the exhibitions that demand more than a passing glance. For me, it’s a way to recollect a specific feeling, dig into a technique, or track the trajectory of an artist from a small LES storefront to a global stage. It’s interesting to me that I’ve been doing this long enough to track artists across multiple shows and years of work.
It is my visual ledger of the exhibitions that were worthy of further thought and study—a way to ensure that over time, I can keep the most important work remaining in focus.