FOOD: Tea By Tiffany's Green Meditation

Green Tea Chocolate Granola - courtesy of Tea By Tiffany
Photo Credit: Chante/VySyn Photography 

Tea and mediation go hand and hand - that's what I along with a few other guests learned at last night's green tea meditation event hosted by Tea By Tiffany at Asali Yoga in Harlem. The evening was filled with learning, sharing, embracing a renewed way of thinking and tea tasting, of course.

After returning from the recent annual tea industry event in Las Vegas, Tiffany treated us to four teas from Korea and Japan that she brought back from the conference. 

Let me know you...this tea is indescribable. It is pure, high-quality tea from the farms of the shaded, unshaded and mountain sides of lands far away that when sipped you feel as if you are being transported to those parts unknown.

Incredible!

Aside from the tea leaf offerings, we indulged our senses to sweet green-inspired treats, like the one above, as well as our spirits to the inspirational words of meditation speakers, Alan Watts and Jiddu Krishnamurti.

After a long, long week at the office, this was the perfect way to kick off my weekend with great tasting tea and a lesson in meditation.

Tiffany will continue to host these themed events more frequently so I encourage you to join her mailing list for updates and if you are interested in a private tea tasting contact her here.

What's in Your Cuppa?
Chante

ART: Gutai at the Guggenheim

Photo Credit: Chante Ramsey/VySyn Photography

"Gutai art does not alter matter. Gutai art imparts life to matter." 

-Gutai Manifesto

Yesterday, I checked out the Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim on the exhibition's closing weekend.

It was my first time visiting the Guggenheim (if you have not been, you need to go once in your lifetime). The venue is it's own immaculate work of art, I must admit! Ok..back to the art.

Gutai: Splendid Playground presents the creative spectrum of Japan’s most influential avant-garde collective of the postwar era. Founded by the visionary artist Yoshihara Jirō in 1954, the Gutai group was legendary in its own time. Its young members explored new art forms combining performance, painting, and interactive environments, and realized an “international common ground” of experimental art through the worldwide reach of their exhibition and publication activities. Against the backdrop of wartime totalitarianism, Gutai forged an ethics of creative freedom, breaking through myriad boundaries to create some of the most exuberant works and events in the history of Japanese and international avant-garde art. 

Immediately, when I walked into the museum, visitors were bombarded with Yoshihara’s Please Draw Freely, a collective drawing on a freestanding signboard re-conceived for the Guggenheim’s rotunda and created by visitors, invites adults and children to collaborate, think, and imagine for themselves. And, when you look up as you are propelled to do at the Guggenheim, you see a recreation of Motonaga Sadamasa’s magisterial work (Water) that lingers above consisting of polyethylene tubes of varying widths filled with brightly-colored water between the rotunda levels, making giant brushstrokes out of catenaries in the open air that catch the sunlight.

How cool is that!?

As I made my way up the rotunda's ramp, you feel like you are transcending levels of your own art consciousness and constantly questioning the definition of visual art - what is art? who decides that? how is art created? 

That was my take away from this journey. 

The presentation of these works and the works themselves rendered me speechless. The works that resonated with me were Shiraga Kazuo's Wild Boar Hunting (both the work and his creative process), Tanaka Atsuko's Electric Dress and Shimamoto Shozo's animated film (distorted with vinegar and paint to create another art form).

Stunning!

You have got to see this exhibit for yourselves! The showing at the Guggenheim is through Thursday, May 8th! Also be sure to view the video about the exhibit, here.

-Chante

Photo Credit: Chante Ramsey/VySyn Photography

Artists Unite for Japan - "FIX YOU" (official vid)

To benefit the victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that shook the lives of so many in March 2011, 49 artists from 18 countries including Simple Plan's Pierre Bouvier and Sebastien Lefevbre, Evaline, These Kids Wear Crowns and 11 year old Yuto Miyazawa came together in Singapore to rerecord Coldplay's Fix You.