citylikeyou — New York / Jason Koxvold

Jason Koxvold is a creative director at StrawberryFrog, artist, and co-founder of Renegade Pencils, an organisation that helps give children access to a creative education. His work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, RESFEST, SXSW and the Los Angeles Film Festival. He has held creative workshops in Singapore; glued reflective balls to interns in San Francisco; spent hundreds of hours photographing landfills in Tokyo; driven an ambulance across Europe and Central Asia to raise money to build schools; raced motorcycles in the Scottish grand prix series; been interviewed by the Russian FSB in a holding cell in the Arctic Circle, and by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Kentucky.

http://www.koxvold.com

Photographer Artist

Current city: New York

koxvold.com

New York / Museum

I love that there's a museum dedicated to American art, founded at a time when American artists were underappreciated. The exhibitions are curated with a broad but discerning eye, and the architecture is spectacular. In my experience it's typically much quieter than the obvious choices like the Met and the MoMA - although both are remarkable, there's something I love about the scale and style of the Whitney.

New York / Restaurant

While the current trend in noodles may well be ramen, this bafflingly-named Japanese restaurant just ten minutes from my apartment specialises in udon. Unless you are my friend Diego Zambrano it will probably take you several visits to get through all the things you need to try on the menu - the gyoza are otherworldly, the sushi 'tacos' clever enough without being silly. New York has thousands of awful Japanese places; this is not one of them. It's super nice to come in on a Sunday night and eat at the bar next to curmudgeonly old guys barking at each other in Japanese.

New York / Place

When I first moved to New York, enamoured by its parks and museums and design firms and restaurants and bars, I never imagined that there could be much more to its geography than that. How wrong I was. My first drive across the George Washington Bridge was jaw-dropping - the cliffs of New Jersey are astonishingly tall, covered in a dense thicket of trees. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Drive up 87 to the Catskills or the Adirondacks and you'll witness the Hudson River winding its way through spectacular scenery and unforgiving seasons. Now I can't get enough; just two hours up the road, it's like the city never existed. Perfect recuperation after a long week.

New York / Park

I have old friends in San Francisco who grudgingly tell me that the High Line is everything that's wrong with New York. Well, too bad. To me, it embodies a culture that's constantly reinventing itself: a defunct elevated railway that was becoming a burden to the city ("we used to climb up there to throw garbage bags full of rotting Korean food at the Hasids!", noted a successful photographer's assistant) becoming a startling example of urban greening for the public good. The expert landscaping makes it feel like walking on a Montauk beach - but a stone's throw from some of New York's most progressive galleries and hotels.

New York / Restaurant

I'm a huge Japanophile: if there's one other place I'd like to live, it's Tokyo. I must have been there seven or eight times, most recently just after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Anyway, EN is a gem on Hudson Street, serving real Japanese cuisine. It turns out that EN is a chain in Japan; there are a lot of branches making lovely bosky food in cosy neighbourhood locations. But their New York incarnation is grand in scale and ambition, with solid, warm interiors (not unlike if the Whitney were a Japanese restaurant, oddly) - a remarkable hybrid of this city, and the other one that I'd love to live in.

New York / Designer

Sebastian Chen Speier is a Creative Director and Product Designer in New York. He is currently a Design Lead at Instagram. Before that he was the Global Design Director on Nike SNKRS.

New York / Creative Director

Laura Aviva is a Creative Director, and runs the product design studio L'Aviva Home. Originally from Los Angeles, she now splits her time between NYC and Mexico City.

New York / Artist

Kent Rogowski is an artist/photographer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Kent’s works are often provocative and whimsical manipulations of objects and images that surround us in our daily lives. From teddy bears to jigsaw puzzles and self-help books, he uses and alters mass-produced consumer products as a vehicle for self-expression. By transforming the generic into something personal, Kent questions what these products communicate, and also what role they play in our culture. His first monograph, Bears, was published by powerHouse books in 2007. He has shown his work both nationally and internationally with solo shows in New York at the Jen Bekman Gallery and the Foley Gallery and the In Focus Gallery in Cologne, Germany. In 2000, Kent received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is now a Senior Critic. He has also taught at The Pratt Institute and The School of Visual Arts in New York.

New York / Photographer

Naima Green is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator.

New York / Designer

Recently featured in Entrepreneur Magazine and known on the NYC tech scene as the interior designer of choice, Danielle has a uniquely eclectic, yet slightly industrial take on design. She has displayed her expertise in the design of high profile start up spaces like SeatGeek, Eligible, Codecademy, Venmo, Fueled, Newscred, Contently, Kitchensurfing and Gilt. As well as collaborating with General Assembly and Knotel on their respective build-outs.

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