Legendary Cornelia Street Café will open a new public art exhibition, featuring the paintings of world-renowned New York City-based artist Robert Cenedella, starting on January 24, with an open reception from 5:30 – 7:00 pm.
This exhibition marks the start of a series of special events to announce the Cornelia Street Café’s Underground performance space attaining its new 501 c3 status, a little more than a year after sheltering under the capacious wings of Fractured Atlas, an arts service organization with the goal of impacting a wider segment of the arts community in a manner that is both scalable and sustainable.
On February 21, there will be a by invitation only, special dinner and screening of the award-winning documentary Art Bastard, which chronicles the often-controversial artistic life of Robert Cenedella, who has been described as a “master of pictorial satire and fantasy, justly celebrated for his paintings revealing all aspects of big-city life,” by The Art Students League of New York.
Over the years Cenedella has forged a strong connection with the Café and its founder, Robin Hirsch. A frequent visitor and friend to the storied establishment, Robert Cenedella was happy to be a part of ensuring the longevity of the 40-year-old bistro and performance hub, where so many artists from various disciplines have gotten their start.
Like the Café, Cenedella ignored all the modern art rules, instead choosing to follow his own, distinct path. As M. Kay Flavell said of Mr. Cenedella in George Grosz: A Biography, he “…chronicles the everyday life and the changing rituals and mythologies — of sex, sport, art, politics, money making in contemporary America, with his combination of imaginative vitality, precision, and humor.”
The Cornelia Street Café has been a uniquely different type of venue from the start, one that has given a platform to every conceivable genre of artist, the rebels, the social activists, and the irreverent. Creatives like Suzanne Vega and the Songwriters Exchange got their start there, so too did Eve Ensler and The Vagina Monologues. It was the place where Senator Eugene McCarthy read his poetry and Dr. Oliver Sacks read his prose, where Nobel Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, stilt walkers and ventriloquists, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company to members of Monty Python mingled.
On its tenth anniversary in 1987 New York’s Mayor Ed Koch proclaimed it “a cultural as well as a culinary landmark.”
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29 Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village