Olivia Rose spent most of Thursday morning knee-deep in Red Delicious apples.
The Manhattanite, an artist, was busy engraving 80 pieces of the produce with iconic New York Post front-page displays — from the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral crowning on Nov. 4 — for a Tribeca exhibition she called “Apple Stand.”
Carving The Post’s covers into the crops, harvested from an apple orchard upstate, is simply Rose’s way of honoring New York City — and its favorite tabloid — with the fruits of her labor.
“There are millions of different stories that have happened in this city,” the millennial, a landscape architect, told The Post of the showcase, which debuted to 200 spectators at Blankmag Books, 17 Eldridge St., early Thursday evening. “This is my way of collecting those stories and giving them back to the city through my artwork.”
To make exact replicas of the headlining designs, Rose relies on an $8,000 XTool F2 laser-engraving machine, rather than a knife and an unsteady hand. She procured the 60-watt device last spring — right around the time she got the idea to transform food into her unconventional canvas.
“I was in my studio, and I wanted to try something new, and I just grabbed what was next to me. It was fruit,” Rose told The Post. “The engraver is so fast. Each apple in the exhibition took about one minute and 20 seconds to complete.”
Prepping for the avant-garde undertaking, however, takes much more time.
Rose devoted countless hours to combing through The Post’s full archive of front pages, cherry-picking her favorite layouts, and uploading the images to a graphics editing system — retouching certain covers for laser precision or removing tatters from decades-old prints.
She then shrunk each image down to 2 inches to perfectly fit onto the face of the apples.
“The Post’s covers are its marketing — they pull you in,” Rose added. “There’s something very attractive about how the art and the writing aren’t overworked, but are still very poetic.
“The paper is like your friend, who’s a little out of pocket, but fun.”
It’s high praise from a lifelong New Yorker and print media fan.
“Like an apple, The Post has always been accessible,” said Rose, who sells her festooned fruits for $50 a piece. “It’s meant for everybody. There are no barriers.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Rose chose to spotlight the crisp, juicy delights in her ode to NYC after learning the roots of its eponymous nickname, which was a popular expression for jazz musicians in the 1920s and ’30s who moved onto bigger gigs — “Big Apples” like NYC, in other words — after working in smaller towns.
It arrived here as a tourism tool for decades to come.
“The fruit became a symbol, a marketing tool — everywhere you go, there are things marked with ‘Big Apple.’ I really admire the city for self-branding,” she said. “Just like the New York Post.”
To extend the shelf-lives of her little creations, the creative often sprays the apples with a specialized sealant that postpones rotting. However, Rose chose not to seal the baubles featured in her exhibition, which is still on display on the Lower East Side.
She wanted to showcase natural deterioration in her showcase.
The visionary hopes her artistry resonates with her fellow Big Apple residents.
“This belongs to the people of New York,” said Rose. “It represents the city’s unique fingerprint.”
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