Akiva Listman Lights Up New York

During my visit to Akiva Listman’s Long Island City studio, a passer-by walked in and pointed at one of the figures on Listman’s canvases: “I think I know this guy! That’s Hank O’Neal!” This is the effect Listman hopes for from his paintings—that people will see small, specific beacons of familiarity in them. Maybe not always as specific as recognizing somebody within a Bowery and Broome street scene as photographer Hank O’Neal. (Listman did not know who that was either. He remarked to me “Most people just ask if the guy in that piece is Bernie Sanders!”) But he knows that New Yorkers see themselves not in the postcard or travel guide depictions of the city, but in the ordinary. That ordinary comes out in the composition itself of each of his pieces, where the focal points of his street scenes are garbage bags, neon signs, and trash bags.

During my visit to Akiva Listman’s Long Island City studio, a passer-by walked in and pointed at one of the figures on Listman’s canvases: “I think I know this guy! That’s Hank O’Neal!”

One of the first things that mystified me about Listman is his ability to capture the sheen of light on the metal of a car. In Listman’s eye, the light undulates and warps over the surface of the metal without sacrificing the shape of the car. And it’s not just cars, he has an uncanny knack for painting light on anything.

The glow of a streetlight, the wan glint of a subway sign, the pinpricks of red in the marquee of a halal cart. It all comes through from Listman’s brush. His technique? “You have to know that the lightest thing you can paint is white. I start with white and slowly fade out. It also doesn’t hurt to surround stuff with a very dark color,” he explained. But the fact that many of his paintings originate from iPhone photos poses a problem. “The thing is, though, when you’re looking at a screen, the screen emits light, too. I spent a lot of time being disappointed with how tough it was to convey what I saw on my phone. My canvases are not emitting any ‘real’ brightness. They can reflect as much as you let them back to you,” he said. They really do appear to emit their own light. The longer you look at them, the more that becomes apparent.

“The thing is, though, when you’re looking at a screen, the screen emits light, too. I spent a lot of time being disappointed with how tough it was to convey what I saw on my phone. My canvases are not emitting any ‘real’ brightness. They can reflect as much as you let them back to you,”

Like Listman, I love neon, and he is one of the few people I’ve met as fascinated by the neon and LED sign wholesale store in Chinatown as I am. Vida Signs on Canal Street, which Listman encountered while having lunch at nearby King Dumpling, is the source of all of the glowing decals of noodles and dumplings all around Chinatown, or the blinking COLD BEER signage outside of delis. I found the idea that there was an entire store selling things to get you to buy things at other businesses incredibly amusing and spent many afternoons watching the little points of light in the windows. I failed to convince my then-housemates that we needed a Chinese restaurant neon sign for our apartment and so I have never actually made a purchase within those hallowed walls, but Listman has. A large red and blue OPEN neon sign sits above his workspace, and he takes it along to his gallery shows to remind people that the show is, in fact, open. In the case of my visit, the sign added a much-needed glow to an otherwise rainy afternoon in Queens.

Listman’s interest in the arts is lifelong, from making snowmen as a child to art classes in high school in Riverdale to eventually studying at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. “I want to make things that are approachable to anyone who is anything, especially education-wise,” he said. “I was never an academic person and I grew up with a lot of learning disabilities. So I don’t want to make things that you have to read a whole lot of wall text to ‘get.’”

“I want to make things that are approachable to anyone who is anything, especially education-wise,” he said. “I was never an academic person and I grew up with a lot of learning disabilities. So I don’t want to make things that you have to read a whole lot of wall text to ‘get.’”

That attitude towards accessibility doesn’t sacrifice depth, though. One of Listman’s specialties is something I had honestly never even considered before—painting paint. He loves to paint representations of other people’s painting work, like graffiti and road signs. Once he pointed it out, I couldn’t stop noticing it in his work. “Graffiti is one of my favorite things to paint,” he said. “In a fun, cheeky way it’s an art historical reference to paintings I learned about in college who would paint paintings in paintings.” An example of this would be John Singer Sargent’s Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot, a painting I had a hard time articulating why it was I was so entranced by at the Art Institute of Chicago. There’s something about artists painting other works of art, or in Singer Sargent’s case, painting another person painting. They expose the futility of our perception, maybe.

“With graffiti, I’m not trying to make anything more or less beautiful than it really is. I want to paint things as they are. I love the community and I want to help it be appreciated in a fine arts way,” Listman said of his depictions of tags on the streets of New York. It got me thinking about just how much of the world is painted material. The walls of our apartments, the signs we see, the metal of the signs on the streets we walk, the gloss on our phone cases, the chrome on computer keys, and even the dye itself on the clothes we wear. Pigmentation and artificial color are the visceral language of our world. Without it, everything around us would look very different. Works of art deconstruct that, and in turn allow us to be deconstructed by them if we let them.

One of Listman’s most recent deconstructions of a single moment, There Are No Rules is a frayed, decaying No Parking Sign against a brick wall. “A lot of life in New York is being told what to do and what not to do by signs. At the time I made this, I felt very much like I was being told what to do by people around me,” he said. “This sign has this beautiful texture even though it doesn’t work anymore. So, I put it into canvas and took the time to turn it into art.” In Listman’s interpretations of them, objects of the everyday take on a life beyond functionality. A pervasive part of modern life is that things exist only to be functional, not beautiful. Listman elevates things beyond their functionality. Case in point is his series of painted MetroCards. He thumbed through his not yet painted MetroCard collection and pointed out the difference between each, “this one has more yellow than orange, this one is a little chipped.” Each MetroCard is painted black and decorated with an illustration of, yes, a garbage bag. #10, my favorite of the collection has a striking electric blue tie at the top of the black bag. “I wanted to make that one Tiffany blue,” he elaborated. “If you can appreciate the difference between different garbage bags, you can appreciate anything. Everything in life is aesthetically pleasing if you want it be!”

“If you can appreciate the difference between different garbage bags, you can appreciate anything. Everything in life is aesthetically pleasing if you want it be!”

Lately, Listman has been working on inserting his own experience more into his work in subtle ways. In Alter Ego, a canvas depiction of a dripping Spider-Man popsicle and its shadow, Listman worked through his emotions about not feeling like himself through the medium of an ordinary New York scene.

One of his most recent paintings is of a dandelion sprouting up through cracks in concrete. Like all of Listman’s pieces, light and composition tell a story in the minutia of the paintings. The center of the dandelion bloom is a vibrant stroke of orange that slowly feathers out into gold, then a neon highlighter-esque hue, then white tips. On that particular work, he said: “Dandelions are like New Yorkers,” he said. “People try to spray them and kill them but they still grow.” The dandelion’s resilience comes through in its central placement in the piece, its defiance among the spots of grey in the concrete. The thing about Listman’s paintings is that they aren’t strictly realistic. They use photorealism to expose the way our perceptions are subjective. We all see light differently—I look at Listman’s paintings on my phone with the blue light setting off, which will look different if I send it to a friend who has the blue light all the way up.

“Dandelions are like New Yorkers,” he said. “People try to spray them and kill them but they still grow.”

Anybody who’s ever tried to photograph the moon can tell you that what we see with our eyes isn’t what we produce with our cameras. And don’t even get me started on how every creature on earth sees color in different ways. Somebody once told me that it isn’t actually true, though, that mantis shrimps can see fifty colors humans can’t. But with Akiva Listman’s work, maybe we don’t need to go beyond our own species to see a color landscape that completely changes us.

Emma Riva is the managing editor of UP. She is the author of Night Shift in Tamaqua, an illustrated novel that follows a love story between 24-hour-diner waitress and a Postmates driver. As an art writer, she is particularly interested in working with international artists and exploring how visual art can both transcend cultural boundaries and highlight the complexities of individual identity. Emma is a graduate of The New School and a Wilbur and Niso Smith Author of Tomorrow. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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