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.
Read MoreWhen you want a place to sit, but not for a very long time, you don’t sit in a chair—you sit on a bench. If sitting in a chair is like parking, sitting on a bench is like idling, between trips, keeping the engine running and ready.
Read MoreThere’s something appealing about an object that seems to be delicately balanced.
Read MoreAsafo flags, an artistic tradition of the Fante people of Ghana’s central coast, do a lot of pointing. Literally—they often depict a figure with an outstretched arm and one finger extended, in the direction of another figure, an object, or sometimes a whole scene.
Read MoreA pair of chairs may be placed at random.
For many of us, there may be something upsetting about this. Can’t the two chairs form some kind of arrangement, or acknowledge each other’s existence?
Read MorePublic 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.
Read MorePublic Sale’s upcoming auction Design! Design! Design! features several items designed by late 20th-Century designer Philippe Starck, including a sofa (Lot 007) and chair/ottoman (Lot 006) from Starck’s legendary Royalton Hotel lobby in New York City.
Read MoreFor 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.
Read MoreA quick review of how the word “democratization” has been applied to the fashions of different time periods reveals how tastes in jewelry at least can move freely, in tandem with new technologies, between high and low.
If you live in Hudson and love design, you probably know Mark McDonald or, at least, have been influenced by his work in some way. Mark is a longtime collector, scholar, and promoter of the mid-century modern design subset in furniture, glass, ceramics, lighting, jewelry, metal, wood, and books.
Read MoreThis prototype Bauhaus style modular cabinet was designed and handmade by Charles G. Weiss of Hoboken NJ in 1985. The 6-piece "Circle Seat" can be configured in hundreds of ways, including a butterfly-shaped shelf and throne-like chair.
Read MoreWe are pleased to have enlisted our friend Ben Lisi of RRL to compile our first Top Picks of 2022 for our upcoming Life in America Auction. Lisi has over 25 years of experience in the fashion and design industry, with a specific focus as an expert in branding for RRL's retail locations.
Read MorePublic Sale’s upcoming auction, titled Life In America, features several antique handmade quilts. Many of these display the patterns that have come to be mythologized as part of a secret code used by escaping slaves during the Underground Railroad.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MorePublic Sale’s Mid-century Strong auction features over 75 lots from the New York City and Hudson-based artist Cary Leibowitz, also known as “Candy Ass”—a moniker he once picked up in a casual conversation about childhood epithets.
Read MoreWhen Public Sale opened in Summer 2020, our premier auction featured items from the storied Vincent Mulford Antiques, which had recently closed after being a fixture in Hudson for decades. This included hitherto not-for-sale pieces from the basement and other farther reaches of the building, whose every room Mulford had artfully arranged with his eclectic finds.
Read MorePublic Sale staff had the recent privilege of gathering some pieces from Hudson NY’s famous “Tiger House,” a rare example of Dutch Jacobean architecture that some have called “the grandest house in Hudson.”
Read MoreA number of the items in our upcoming auction, titled Beauty and the Beast, came from Ezra Fitch’s childhood estate.
Ezra Fitch was the cofounder of Abercrombie & Fitch, the iconic lifestyle clothing brand that was started by David T. Abercrombie.
Read MoreProceeds from the sales of select firefighting, and rescue-related antiques will be donated to help fund recruitment and retention of Columbia County Volunteer Firefighters.
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