the really, really fabulous Wau Wau Sisters [pronounced "vow vow"] fully staged an incredible cover of the Civilians favorite, "Gone Missing"

Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford of the Downtown hit "All Wear Bowlers" [Trey is a Civilian in another life and if it were up to me Geoff would be too] did their own thing

We had a great time - shared. The visiting artists' performances at the benefit for The Civilians Thursday night were even more wonderful than we had anticipated, but since there will be no second chance for these numbers as covered last night, the best I can do now is show you what it looked like.

Actually, thanks to the company and everyone who helped make the benefit a success, there really will be a second chance (and a third, and a fourth, and so on) every time and everywhere these people put on another show.

Michael Friedman, the group's brilliant composer and lyricist, "covered" his own brand-new song, "How to Can Peaches," written for a show still in the works; Andy Boroson was at the piano

I apologize, but I have no precise details on these images, although I know that the large piece at the top reflects Jesse Bercowetz and Matt Bua's continued fascination with Roosevelt Island. I believe the figure in the center of the second photograph represents an underwater diver, and the "drawing" at the bottom is a reference to the first successful American oil well.

I hardly know what to write about this magic duo. Beginning several years ago, I stumbled across the work first of one, then the other and eventually the projects they had done together. Very soon I was pursuing more than stumbling, but everything they do is still almost as baffling as when I first found it - only more masterful, and more seductive.

This past weekend we visited their temporary studio in 120 Broadway, part of a program of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). They had obviously cleaned up a lot for the official reception, but even what they had toyed around with and left pinned to the walls or lying on the windowsills (pre-studies?) could have kept me there most of the evening.

The press release for last weekend's event can barely begin to describe what you see above:

Bercowetz/Bua's work crosses disciplines and actively engages the community. Recently, it has been an investigation into the acts of youth deviance, social escapism, dissidence, utopian architecture and mobility. Often blurring the lines between work, play, manhood and boyhood. The process is elastic--crossing genres, mixing materials, and collaborating with others. The projects are often interactive with an exterior and interior. The subject matter is vast, experiential and vaguely didactic. Reality and fantasy collide--realistic situations are pushed to a fantasy level and that fantasy is treated as serious as real life.

Kiki Smith edition in the 2004 raffle (we were very lucky last year)

I don't get around to plugging very much of anything, even when I have the best will to do so, but the Momenta Art benefit this Saturday is just too good a thing for everyone - impecunious patrons, emerging artists and the excellent and worthy non-profit gallery alike - to let pass this time.

We've just heard that the tickets haven't yet sold out. Don't let us buy more than our share; please help this excellent art get into more homes.

It's also a really good party.

Barry has already posted just about everything you need to know about it.

after unpacking a suitcase in Grozny

an installation on Friendship of Peoples Square

"Give them bread, but give them roses too" [traditional socialist cry]

I hate loose ends, so I'm following up on a post I did two months ago with another link to the site of the Emergency Biennale in Chechnya and a story which appeared in the Guardian. The project was formally launched the day after I first wrote about it, but in the nature of this extraordinary outreach it has taken weeks to even begin to record its success. From Dan Hancox writing for the Guardian on April 13:

The 62 contributing artists were asked to submit two copies of their work, and duplicates are displayed in the Palais du Tokyo contemporary art gallery in Paris, along with a series of films and talks about Chechen life. These suitcases of art travelled from Paris across Europe to Grozny. The Chechen Biennale has now been established, with the art on display in Grozny's National Library. It will move on to four other cities, in the care of its Chechen supporters, who cannot be named for safety reasons.

This "arts sans frontières" approach makes the Emergency Biennale more than just another art festival - responding with speed and dedication, they are, like Médecins sans Frontières, working "on an emergency footing". Jouanno and Castro are clearly subscribing to the old socialist idea, "Give them bread, but give them roses too." A cultural life is a human right denied to most Chechens: the Russian authorities consented only a fortnight ago to rebuild the museums.

See the Biennale's site, clicking onto "news" and "artists" for more images.

[images, which I believe must remain anonymous although they are posted by "evelyne," are from emergencybiennale]

Richard Hoeck and John Miller Something for Everyone 2004 video installation view

Sabina Hörtner Twins 01 2002 Eddy marker on multiple cardboard sheets installation view

Marko Lulic Hart und weich Nr.2 [Hard and Soft No.2] 2002 painted wood platform with vintage film by Dejan Karaklajic and Jovan Acim installation view

I feel like we just came back from a trip to Vienna (again), or more specifically a visit to the studios of nine emerging artists living and working in the city which could arguably be described as the geographic and cultural center of a Europe which has rediscovered the treasure of its eastern lands. The Austrian Cultural Forum (ACF) is hosting this group exhibition curated by Trevor Smith of the New Museum through August 20.

Smith points out that although his assignment has placed these artists in a geographic context they do not necessarily define themselves geographically.

Many of the artists's works that I have chosen for the New York version of "Living and Working in Vienna" are marked by this tension between somewhere and anywhere, using architecture or film as the site for mediations on history, memory and cultural critique.

If artists are outsiders regardless of where they find themselves, we should all be delighted to see what creative minds can do with the fantastic kind of "outside" which is described by this gorgeous and surprisingly modern city today.

Go to this little bit of Austria on 52nd Street for the show and for how well it has been integrated into the spaces of this very interesting building. For the rest of this week there's the additional incentive of the avant garde festival "Moving Patterns: Electronic Music and Beyond," which is fully described on the website. Go early in order to check out the visual art, especially since its arrival seems timed perfectly for the cross-genre festival of sound.

Oh, and ACF performances are always absolutely free.

Spotted in Williamsburg on the inside of the narrow extruded steel pole supporting a parking sign.

Haydn, still fully-staffed

oops there goes another one

"Well, Julia Friedman Gallery has definitely upped the ante on art openings," Barry said to me as we walked along 10th Avenue to the second of two sites dedicated to yesterday's opening of the art of Pablo Helguera.

To be sure.

This was no ordinary gallery reception; First there was the opening performance and then the opening reception. It worked, at least for these two music nuts. I don't remember what the calendar looked like yesterday, but this was the only Chelsea event we hit before heading downtown for the LMCC open studios reception.

Helguera's exhibition, "Swan Song," can be seen in the gallery space on West 22nd Street through may 28th. Last night however, in a loft space in the Starret-Lehigh Building four blocks north, there was also a performance by a 23-member symphony orchestra of work related to the show. The short program included a minimal theatrical element attached to a beautiful composition by the artist himself, "Endingness," and to the last movement of Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony which actually ended the event, somewhat definitively.

On the floor below the musicians was outlined in wide masking tape the renaisance-era ceiling design which is integral to an important work installed in the gallery; As the individual players completed their parts in the Haydn piece, each rose one by one to extinguish a single wax candle supported on a clear lucite base near his or her music stand and then quietly exited the room.

The ensemble was the Mexican-American Orchestra, conducted by Alondra de la Parra. If I may be excused for doing so, I'll add here that it did no harm to its appreciation of the performance that this largely visual arts-oriented audience was listening to players who were led by the most beautiful conductor I have ever seen.

The works you'll find in the gallery each relate to the artist's theory about finitude, and the relationship between history, legacy, culture and language. In the midst of a crowded opening reception I found the most beautiful, and potentially "resonant," piece to be "Conservatory of Dead Languages." Resting on the shelves of a lighted vitrine built into a wall of the gallery are dozens of pale variously-colored wax cylinders, each of which documents a dying language.

On the ceiling in the front room is "Acolman." It is a sculpture in wood and wax repeating the design some of us had first seen earlier in the performance loft. It and the sound recording which is a part of it relate to a local belief that the voices of long-dead monks who sang in a Mexican monastery built almost 400 years ago can still be heard under the ceiling of its chapel.

Pablo Helguera Dead Languages Conservatory (Conservatorio de Lenguas Muertas) 2005 recordings on 30 wax cylinders 43" x 30" large detail of installation

Pablo Helguera Acolman (#1: Play) 2005 wood, wax and sound recordings 8' x 8' large detail of installation

Jim Drain AIDS-a-delic 2005 mixed media with yarn, fabric and beads 84" x 60" x 40" [I believe Ball Buster is the smaller piece to the rear]

Jim Drain AIDS-a-delic detail

Jim Drain installation view of Sergio (forground) and Big Boy

Jim Drain War Cry 2005 mixed media on paper 21" x 17" detail [of a piece which is part of an assembly/installation in the back gallery]

I'm a little late, but not quite never. Barry did a post last Sunday about Jim Drain's fantastic show, “I Wish I Had A Beak,” at Green Naftali. I just wanted to show some of the images I managed to take home on our visit the afternoon before.

And I want to add that I was totally relieved to hear that the yarn for these complex pieces doesn't have to be knitted by hand, as Dean Daderko explains in his review, "Magic Mushrooms," in Gay City News.

Sterling Ruby Kiln #2 2004 Lambda print mounted with Plexiglas and Sintra 22" x 33"

Sterling Ruby Prime Mover #1 2005 pencil, spraypaint and collage on paper 52.25" x 57.25"

Sterling Ruby Orange Inanimate Torso 2005 resin, PVC, spraypaint, formica pedestal 28" x 48" x 34"

Sterling Ruby Cry 2005 Lambda print mounted with Plexiglas and Sintra 72" x 46"

Sterling Ruby is back at Foxy Production and once again he's all over the place in both the solo show as a whole and in the individual works that each refuse to be limited to a single medium themselves. Collage seems to dominate new work in the visual arts everywhere lately, but Ruby's entire oeuvre can be understood as a single great collage of inventions, and each one of them in turn collages his bold, complex understanding of his world in layers which reveal little but promise much.

I just wish I could take it all home where I might see just how far I could get with it.

Ask Michael or John about the videos.

[images from Foxy Production]

Yesterday Barry wrote about Marguerite Evangeline's very strong show, "Shot Through," at Stefan Stux, but regretted he didn't have images of the work. I ended up with these on my own camera's chip, and thought I'd share them.

The works are each titled, Los Lunas, followed by a separate number. They are all from 2005, and they are of stainless steel and gunshot.

UPDATE: Bloggy now has a copy of her statement as a PDF file.

probably-irrelevant-footnote: In the shades of Longfellow's heroine, Evangeline is from Louisiana. Anyway, her work came to me first, but I've always been fascinated with Acadia, Louisiana and her beautiful name.

Frankie Martin "The One Minute Rave" installation view

Frankie Martin's "One Minute Rave" was still installed in the rear gallery at Canada when we visited the gallery this past Tuesday. She had created a club in the space of, roughly, a ten foot cube, although Barry and I were the only ravers available that afternoon, two days after the show had closed.

From Tom Moody's post:

Press a button outside a cloth-draped doorway, enter the room with the black light, strobe, and cardboard cutout DJ, and you have exactly one minute to freak out. Actually you can do it multiple times, but you have to keep sticking your hand outside the doorjamb to hit the switch that activates the music and lights. Some very nice handcrafted work, geometric patterns, psychedelic drawing, and pure kitsch from the era of smart drinks, glow in the dark whistles, and floor shattering bass lines. Which is still going on in many parts of the country, and/or in a state of being perpetually revived, as the '60s psychedelic thing continues to morph with new technology and new crops of initiates.

We missed the live rave dancers announced for opening night, but we went home with a 45 and this seven-inch album cover drawing:

Frankie Martin going to the rave 2005 "i don't want to be seen as fragile"

[the sign in the rear of the station wagon reads, "nerd on board"]

Jocelyn Shipley Hand Monster

I have to admit that I'm ethnically a goth, but I just don't get "goth." I'm pretty uncomfortable with the kind of grotesquerie represented by the work of Jocelyn Shipley, but I don't feel comfortable dismissing it, if for no reason other than my unwillingness to be bound by prejudice, even my own. I even hate to think that I'm just being slow in appreciating this work, yet I suspect there's more there than I'm able to see right now. That suspicion is reinforced by the fact that Shipley has the enthusiastic support of the excellent people at Canada.

So I'll admit that, for what it may be worth, for me a verdict is still pending, but here are a few shots of work from her recent show, "Pholklore," at the gallery, in the hope it will help more than one of us to figure it out.

Wow. Even if only for it's genre, it's pretty spectacular stuff, id'nit?

Jocelyn Shipley Hungry Man

Jocelyn Shipley Pantygram

Jocelyn Shipley Macaroni Man

All the works are from 2005, the dimensions vary, and the materials are generally found objects treated with paint, latex, or paper mache.

Brian Belott "Books, books, books, books, books, books and books" detail of installation

Brian Belott "Books, books, books, books, books, books and books" detail of detail of installation

We really overstayed our invitation welcome to the three shows at the Chinatown gallery Canada which closed a few days ago. In fact, Barry and I had wandered into the space after they had officially closed the official run of work by Brian Belott, Jocelyn Shipley and Frankie Martin.

On one side of the front gallery Belott showed a large renaissance-revival oak library table overflowing with his handmade books, each of their pages bursting with his infinitely-inventive collages. Belott covers the surface of every page of these found volumes until they can no longer close, but must stand upright in sensual invitation. We poured through dozens of them before we could tear ourselves away and let Whit (Canada's co-founder) leave for the night.

cash and carry

Are the big collectors now paying in cash?

Thomas Erben Gallery, installation view of the work of Jutta Koehter (reflected in the mylar screen and in detail on the right is Falling . . . Waters from 1995

I've been fascinated with Jutta Koether for years. I knew nothing about her earlier reputation in Germany, so I have to believe it's Pat Hearn's fault. I revered her artist choices even when I didn't understand them, and during the 90's she gave Koether, then a New Yorker, six solo shows in about as many years.

Thomas Erben has assembled something of a New York retrospective (1990's to the present) of an extraordinarily colorful creative artist who is at home in many disciplines considerably removed from the dramatic paintings included in the exhibition on West 20th Street, and the gallery has donned a party dress for the occasion.

Thomas Erben Gallery, view of gallery entrance and installation of the work of Jutta Koether (in large detail on the right is Das Wunder from 1990)

For a straight view of more current work, here is an image from the gallery website:

Jutta Koether Coronal Holes and the Sunny Eyes of Women 1999 oil on canvas 72" x 52" (inscription: "Trompe L'aime")

[image at the bottom from Thomas Erben]

Anthony Goicolea Fleeing 2005 acrylic, ink, graphite and collage on Mylar 85" x 75" installation view

It's not just the (always amusing, sometimes enigmatic) manipulated, multiple-self-modelled large-scale photographs any more. Anthony Goicolea is also now working with complex layered drawings, sometimes almost monumental in both their size and imagery, and with large-scale video installation.

The photograph-based work continues, with still more complex manipulations, but everywhere the simple amusement quotient has been suppressed a bit, and the work has grown immensely as a consequence.

It was a relatively quiet afternoon in Chelsea today but the benches in the little rustic barn Goicolea had erected in the back room of the Postmasters gallery space was full, with a crowd (mostly very young) waiting or peering in from outside. Methinks the artist is on to something here.

The show is called, "sheltered Life." From the gallery press release:

The sense of foreboding tinged with playful fantasy characteristic of many of the photographs is mimicked in a suite of complex figurative drawings on mylar. Androgynous figures of indeterminate age float on top of and through each other in a layered composition separated by planes of semi-opaque vellum paper. The ghostlike figures are caught in free-floating, awkward, transitional states: sometimes their images are doubled; sometimes they seem like as much animal as human. As the figures migrate through the forest in small packs, they fade in and out of each other in a series of tentative lines that read like traces of previous drawings and refer to memory and transition.

A large white barn occupies the second room gallery and acts as a shelter within a shelter while housing a 15 minute single channel video entitled "Kidnap". The video recounts the tale of a young boy's obsession and paranoia of being kidnapped. Shot in the Swiss countryside, several characters dressed in red-hooded uniforms engage in a series of clandestine rituals that unfold in a fairytale-like sequence.

Anthony Goicolea Kidnap 2004-2005 video installation, 17 minute DVD

installation view of two Chris martin paintings at Moore College

Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof each wrote about Chris Martin's work earlier this year in their wonderful Philly Artblog. For a bit more insight into his mysteries than I gave the other day, and a few more images, see "The question" and "A painter's question."

[image from fallonandrosof]

Six weeks ago I wrote about a terrific theatre piece at HERE, "All Wear Bowlers." After a brief hiatis Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle are back with the same show. Performances begin once again on April 22.

If you missed it the first time around, you can still get to heaven, and it will cost you only $20, $17, maybe $15, or even $10, depending upon your status when you ask for tickets.

[image, by Greg Costanzo, from 1812 Productions]

I neglected to point out yesterday that the works seen in the students' studios may or may not have been completed at the time they were seen this past weekend. My images may therefore be, in at least some cases, of works in progress. They might also be only studies, not intended to be shown out of their context. While these people are artists, at the moment they are also working as students, in rooms normally not visible to the rest of us.

Alicia Gibson (detail of painting)

Gibson is actually part of Hunter's BFA degree program, not the MFA; she wasn't in her darkened studio when we passed through it, so this image of one of the paintings is compromised by my camera's flash; what I saw there was extraordinary, mature work which will not stay in the dark for long; she will be part of the college's "Degree Show" opening this May

Chris Coronel

Coronel showed somewhat ghostly small paintings of midwestern grain elevators, beautifully executed; my favorite by far was the one shown above, but because the image is fuzzy I felt I had to make an exception to the format I've used otherwise in these two posts and show a second work below

Chris Coronel

Stephen Canino

incredibly dramatic use of color and form for pictorial narrative

Jennifer MacDonald

luscious small drawings and two wonderfully-bizarre short videos

I've run out of camera images, but I can still see in my head the good work, among that of so many others, of Becket Bowes, who seems to be at home in almost every media; the drawings and haunting desert photographs of Christina Dixcy; the humanist photo portraits, far beyond documentary, of Roberto Carlo Soto; the smart/silly sculpture and video of Scott Penkava; and the sweet/sorrow playground landscapes and jungle gym "portraits" of Lauren Orchowski. After this too-short list, testimony to a ridiculously inadequate memory, I begin to lose track altogether.

seen on the 6th floor, between WC's marked for separate genders

Fortunately we were on foot. And at least we didn't rush uptown on opening night, when the most of the local artworld zipped through the open studios at the Hunter College BFA degree show. We waited until the last day (okay, it was also only the second day). Actually, for all I know, these people have already all signed with New York's most agressive galleries.

Nevertheless, I've uploaded below images of some of the most interesting work Barry and I found today, although their presence here is very much dependent on whether I was able to get a satisfactory picture. To be sure, there's still much, much more left on West 41st Street.

Emily Noelle Lambert

wicked good painter, growing in leaps with every work we've seen

Ruslan Trusewych (tape on large vinyl surface on stretcher)

minimalist sculptor and painter, and the most common materials imaginable

Katy Krantz (large detail)

gorgeous works on paper

Dominic Nurre (view of studio)

Nurre's genius aches to be unwound and shown: I'm thinking a project room somewhere would be appropriate - now

Zach Harris (painting and artist's frame)

this stuff is scary brilliant, and I mean that in every sense of both words

Hope Hilton (cut-out paper installation)

beautiful, sensitive, smart and mesmerizing, although the work is difficult to photograph

I'm going to stop for tonight, and continue in another post tomorrow. If anyone is interested in seeing more of the work of any of these artists, I may have some additional images I could share, or at least be able to direct you to a website or an email address.

Chris Martin Midnight 2002-2004 oil, enamel and spray paint on plastic

I took this gorgeous image from the website of the Uta Scharf gallery, which is currently showing paintings by Chris Martin. It's a bit smaller than what I normally like to show here, but this shot looks much better than what I could come up with using available light on my visit this afternoon. Still, I have to say that there's no way I could try to reproduce many of Chris Martin's other, signature works on such a small scale.

It was the larger, much larger, canvases which first jumped in front of me a number of years ago, and I haven't been able to forget them since. Although his 1997 show at Pierogi 2000 had just closed, in the spring of that year I picked up a card at Joe Amrhein's space whose image was that of two men carrying across a Williamsburg street an extremely large (129" x 143") black canvas with a few iconic straight, white, chalk-like lines. The reference was the Abbey Road LP cover, whether conscious or not, but I was certainly hooked. I had to know who this artist was, and while I did a little research, for a while I couldn't find a live show anywhere.

In 2001 I was finally able to see what I had missed. That spring Martin had, I believe, shows in three separate venues at once, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I think I might trade an entire salon-style wall of works by other artist if I could afford one of Martin's big pieces. A few years ago Barry and I managed to claim a smallish canvas at a wonderful something called, I think, "The Cheap Art Show" in Williamsburg. It really was cheap, and we've treasured Chris's [blacklit abstract birds] ever since.

I think he's a brilliant and materially-spectacular artist. What you will find in the modest space on 76th Street this week is an amazingly rich and remarkably heterogenous selection of his current work, with a couple of pieces stretching toward sculpture. Unfortunately the current show at Uta Scharf closes Saturday, but I'm sure Ms. Scharf would be more than happy to pull out a few pieces from the back room if asked.

In the meantime, please forgive me for uploading so many images here; it was hard enough to stop with just five.

Chris Martin Untitled 2005 oil, acrylic and collage on canvas 43" x 30"

Chris Martin Thirteen (For Ray Johnson) 2004 oil on corrugated plastic 26" x 24"

Chris Martin Psilocybin 2004 oil, acrylic and collage on shirt 24" x 18"

Chris Martin 1,2,3,4,5,6,7... (Ravine) 1987-2004 oil, aluminum foil and collage on canvas 25" x 15"

[images from Uta Scharf]

Diana Puntar Dual Disturbances 2004 plywood, plastic aluminum laminates 47" x 40" x 60" large detail of installation

But we found much more than Gae Savannah's newest creature extravaganza, a slightly-larger-than-life-size sculpture, "Paroxysm," at Jack the Pelican Presents this month.

As for the at least slightly-quaint title of the show, "Culture Vulture," the press release explains it simply:

In 1967, Carl Andre said, "Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us." "Culture Vulture" show explores notion that art and culture are not the same thing.

"Culture Vulture" originated in diverse sources: a sixties article in MAD Magazine on the rent-a-beatnik craze; tourists at Hopi villages, buying up all the cheap roadside jewelry like it were the last on earth and gawking at rain dances; revelers at night clubs; late night internet junkies downloading Paris Hilton. The search for culture, or its most immediate facsimile, is a search for identity. Culture is an imposition, or even a virus, that infects us with the need to fill in the blanks.

The crowds at the opening reception for this very interesting group show curated by David Gibson were almost overwhelming, so a proper look at the goodies was very difficult, and for the same reason decent pictures were almost out of the question.

I love group shows; they often open up totally new worlds to the curious. But they also present some difficulties. Aside from the occasional frustrations caused by a look at interesting work which under the circumstances can only be a tease, the problem with installations which can display only a single piece by a new artist is the difficulty the format presents for any kind of fair judgment. In this case however I can already stand by my impressions of the pieces I saw that night by Savannah, Diana Puntar, Karen Heagle, Russell Nachman, Katherine Daniels, Amie Cunningham and Emmanuelle Gauthier (list in formation). Ooops, is it unfair that I am already at least slightly familiar with the work of five of these seven artists? Or am I just demonstrating my point about the challenge of group shows?

Gotta go back, if I can, and do some sleuthing.

Karen Heagle Holly 2003-2005 oil on panel 53" x 61" large detail

Emmanuelle Gauthier Courtesans 1996 C-print mounted on plexiglas 30" x 40" large detail

Meredith Allen blue bunny #5 (blue sunset) 2000 C-print 8.5" x 11.5"

Meredith Allen is showing her wonderfully-inspired combination of concept, color, abstraction and humor in a show of new work, "Forever," at Sarah Bowen Gallery in Williamsburg.

From the press release:

In Forever, a series of photographs portrays the artist's mother's loving yet obsessive collection of beanie babies preserved in found plastic packing materials as well as clear Ziploc bags. The photographs are at first glimpse personable; however the literal and somewhat amusing presentation of beanie babies enclosed in plastic bags becomes more unnerving upon examining the logical yet perverse nature of encapsulation as a cherished act of preservation.

The image at the top of this post is obviously not part of the show, but I wanted to show it here anyway. It's a favorite of mine. It haunted me from the first moment I saw it, I think because its sweetness didn't hide a suggestion of mischief, vulnerability, even terror. Blue Bunny is part of an older series, "Sugar Tales." I don't think it's been shown anywhere yet.

Allen's own site, which was incidently built by Barry, includes many more really great images, both from the current show and of older work, but two of her beanie babies are shown just below.

Meredith Allen Forever (walrus) 2005 digital archival dry pigment print 11.5" x 17.25"

Meredith Allen Forever (cockatoo) 2005 digital archival dry pigment print 11.5" x 17.25"

[images from Meredith Allen]