I didn’t know Dash Snow. Like a lot of the New York art world, I became acquainted with him after the feature article that appeared in New York Magazine in 2007. Due to the hyper-competitive nature of so many here, Dash became the butt of nearly every young artist on the make, less a person than a target, a symbol of all the reasons the scene sucks. Now, with his passing, we’ll see what the long term value of his art really is. After this visit to the memorial, the thing that is most striking and sad is how young he was, just a kid. How will his family and young child carry on without him? Sometimes the life of an artist is brutal. Let's try to take better care of each other.

James Kalm visits the Lafayette House, a loft on the Bowery and a newly painted mural on Houston and the Bowery, as well as the memorial exhibition at Deitch Projects, in an attempt to document some of the important final locations in the short life of Dash Snow. Since the 2007 cover story in New York Magazine that launched him to the pinnacle of bohemian chic, Dash was seen as an avatar of hip. Long standing drug and alcohol problems and a tumultuous family life (Snow was the scion of the incredibly wealthy de Menil family) no doubt added to the stress that contributed to this tragic loss.