Storage & Display With an Antique Purpose

One thing that attracts us to antique furniture is how an item that was built for one specific purpose can call to mind a time and a culture very different from our own. Especially when that specific purpose is obsolete. Or it may simply appear old-fashioned or outdated.

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The Artist's Discipline

The title of Public Sale’s upcoming auction, Disciplined, refers to the artist’s focused study—in both the sense of the field, medium, or branch of artistic production in which an artist specializes, as well the self-managed conduct and rules by which an artist structures their practice.

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Silhouettes: Collections of a Collection

Public Sale’s upcoming auction Standing Still features an incredible lifetime collection of silhouettes, that  iconic style of paper illustration which became popular in the United States in the 19th-Century and democratized portraiture long before the advent of photography.

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Visibility After Dark: Four Photos from William Como's Archives

To celebrate Public Sale’s offering of photographs from the archive of After Dark and Dance Magazine editor William Como in our upcoming auction After Dark & Clean Lines, we examine four photographs by the magazine’s most celebrated photographers Kenn Duncan and Jack Mitchell, and a story they tell about the role of visibility in the struggle for gay rights.

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Mihail Chemiakin’s Metal Slag and the Residue of Art

Public Sale’s upcoming auction includes fifty-two lots of hardened metal slag, in both individual pieces and assemblages, in a range of sizes, each of them unique in shape and composition. They come from the studio of artist Mihail Chemiakin (b.1943), Russian artist and controversial figure in the underground art scene of the Soviet Union, who for many years maintained a studio near Hudson.

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COLLECTIONS: Barbara Porter & Robert Wincuinas

For our latest auction preview, Public Sale’s showroom will transform into a temporary museum of Folk Art and Outsider Art, with a trove of items from the collection of Barbara Porter & Robert Wincuinas.

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Worthy, Bird, and the Curious Case of Kareem’s New Balance

The story that came with a pair of shoes in Public Sale’s upcoming auction was that a school janitor found them in a locker room after a benefit game in which Kareem Abdul-Jabaar had played. But trying to confirm this provenance, and following the trail of clues, doesn’t offer any definitive proof to the story.

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