Museum of American Illustration

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 61 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned I was just talking about taking a drawing class, and The Society of Illustrators holds $20 figure drawing sessions, with a bar and live music!  Naked people, alcohol, music, and art.  I mean, what more could one possibly want?

Here’s another place that I had no idea existed before starting this project.  The Society of Illustrators occupies a very handsome townhouse on East 63rd Street, and includes an ample museum space (and even a gift shop!) for showing off the work of illustrators of all kinds.

The museum is terrific, although given that it is a townhouse, there are some stairs to navigate — fair warning if you’re movement impaired.

But what they have is fascinating, including portraits of illustrious illustrators hung in the aforementioned stairways, and temporary exhibitions.  One of their gallery spaces is tucked into a narrow hallway that currently is painted bright red.  It really worked for a show of the work of graphic novel artist Tony Harris, but I hope it’s that way all the time. I’m pretty sure it’s the most exciting room I’ve visited on this project to date.

All the gallery spaces are enjoyable, if much less zippy than the Red Hallway.  They are extremely well suited to the types of work they show.  You can tell the Society has been doing this for a long time, albeit under my radar. 

And the current show is a stunner, a retrospective celebrating the 100th birthday of Will Eisner, possibly the most influential comic artist, well, ever.  In many ways he created the form, and it’s fascinating to move from pieces of his very early work, where he still worked within the then-standard grids of 12 boxes per page, to where he literally thought outside the box, and reworked pages into this extremely expressive medium we know today.  He didn’t coin the term “graphic novel,” but he is considered the father of the form.  Eisner was a relative rarity in that he both wrote and drew, so his books are his through and through.  Most modern comics take 3-6 people to produce, which is in no way meant to discount the talents of those who create them, just to emphasize how unique Eisner was.

Eisner was not at all afraid to get philosophical in his work. From “A Life Force,” 1988

I definitely recommend visiting the Society of Illustrators.  It’s a great space, with a neat, sometimes undervalued area of focus.

For Reference:

Address 128 E 63rd Street, Manhattan
Website societyillustrators.org
Cost  General Admission:  $12; free on Tuesday evenings
Other Relevant Links

Status Update

  • Total museums visited over my life in New York City: 80.
  • Total museums in New York City:  190
  • Percentage complete:  40%
  • Museum entries to date:  21
  • Changes:  Removed the Hispanic Society (closed ’til 2019 alas!); added the Judd Museum, the Museum of Food and Drink, and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

Czech Center New York

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 22 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Martynka Wawrzyniak slowly, slowly drowning in chocolate in a video that I didn’t really like per se but that I couldn’t look away from.  Definitely doused my craving for Ghiradelli for at least a few days.

The Czech Center’s museum space is small but effective, and it comes associated with three things that no cultural institution I’ve seen thus far can match:

  • A really awesome, dramatically red spiral staircase that goes from the ground floor up into the center of the gallery.

  • An amazing, landmark, 1890s-era building, the Bohemian National Hall.  I always thought the center of Czech culture in New York City was the Bohemian Beer Garden in Astoria, but lo and behold, this place was the heart of the community for almost 100 years.  It’s now home to the Czech Consulate, an investment office, the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, the gallery, a film space, and my third point:
  • A good-looking bar and restaurant on the ground floor.  I was a bit too early to stop in for a drink but I wanted to.  $5 for a small Pilsner Urquell! 

Continue reading “Czech Center New York”

Drawing Center

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 46 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Gary Simmons’s “Ghost Reels,” an installation in the stairway featuring the names of black stars of the silent film era, written in the style of a typewriter typeface, and partially blurred or erased, evoking a part of film history that many have forgotten.

The Drawing Center occupies a beautifully designed SoHo space, cast iron Corinthian columns outside, several gallery spaces within.  It’s all very clean and spare and modern.  Imminently Instagrammable, as they say.

They generally have 2-3 shows going at a time, and at least currently each focused on the work of a particular artist.  Continue reading “Drawing Center”

Parsons – The New School Gallery

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 32 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A wall hung with hundreds of backpacks found in the desert, lost or left by migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

As befits a school of design, Parsons has some great gallery space in its old building on Fifth Avenue.  Named the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery and the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, the two spaces host a variety of art-and-design shows.  The ground-floor space is great, with large windows looking out onto both Fifth Ave. and 13th Streets. Continue reading “Parsons – The New School Gallery”

Center for Architecture

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 29 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned The 1997 redesign of the lounge of my freshman dorm at Columbia is a noteworthy recent project of an African American architect/designer.  Feels like damning with faint praise.

The Center for Architecture claims to be “the premier cultural venue for architecture and the built environment in New York City.”  I can’t say that I was all that impressed with it. 

The main exhibit on when I visited was a prime example of a show that would’ve been far, far better as a monograph or website than something you have to go see in real life.  In theory, a show about post-colonial African architecture could be really interesting.  Projects that worked well versus ones that failed, ones by African architects versus Euro-American ones.  There are lots of interesting things to say.  This show doesn’t do any of that.  It just throws something like 80 projects at you, arranged roughly by country.  Each project gets summed up in a brief text and some photos, put into a shallow wooden box and hung on the wall, along with all the others. Continue reading “Center for Architecture”

Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 62 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Edward Hochschild’s “Vial Cross” from 1994.  A wooden cross studded with test tubes filled with pills, sand, hair, and bodily fluids.  I don’t think I’ve seen another work of art more eloquently sum up the suffering of the AIDS crisis.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum occupies the newest museum space in the city, having  moved into spiffy new digs in SoHo in just the last two weeks. 

Founded by Charles W. Leslie and Fritz Lohman, longtime collectors of art by LGBTQ artists, the museum has a substantial collection, and will be curating 6-8 shows annually.  Though the space is brand new, the museum and foundation have been around a while, and in fact they’re inaugurating the new location with a survey show, “Expanded Visions: Fifty Years of Collecting.”

The two words that leap most quickly to mind when I think about the place are “diversity” and “penises.”  The collection endeavors to cover an impressively diverse array of artists, and many different kinds of people are represented.  But at the same time, really, there were a lot of penises.  A lot.  I should’ve counted them.  But perhaps it’s better that I didn’t.

I’m not entirely sure I get what “LGBTQ art” is.  I mean, I’m not that naive, I get it in the simplest sense.  A bronze torso, like a Greek statue, of an incredibly buff dude with his t-shirt pulled up and jeans open and fallen to this taut, muscular thighs fits the bill.  But many, many gay artists have made art that I wouldn’t necessarily consider gay.  Mapplethorpe’s flowers, Hockney’s landscapes…I don’t think this museum would collect those. Based on the works on display it seems most accurate to say “LGBTQ art” involves some fuzzy triangulation between artist, subject matter, and intended audience to count. 

The new space for the museum is mostly terrific.  You enter into a fairly narrow area where two greeters welcome you and point out what’s on. There are two gallery spaces, a smaller one to the left as you walk in , and a larger one to the right and back. There’s also a kitchen space as well. I am torn between thinking it’s charming that there’s a kitchen right sort of in the open, and thinking their architect really should’ve found a way to separate that from the public space.

Kitchen notwithstanding, it’s an airy, pleasant space with the requisite good lighting and beautiful wood floors.  I’m looking forward to seeing how the museum uses it over time.

The inaugural show is sort of a hodge-podge.  I get that survey shows do that, and I would be disappointed if they’d segregated the gay art over here, the lesbian art over there, etc.  Sorting by chronology or medium can  oversimplify, too.  But I would’ve appreciated some effort to put a lens on the collection.  Love versus sex.  Ideals of beauty.  Something.

Should you go?  It depends on how you feel about diversity and penises.  And maybe, even if you are squeamish about either of those two things, you should consider going anyway.  It might be good for you.

For Reference:

Address 26 Wooster Street, Manhattan
Website leslielohman.org
Cost Free

 

New York Earth Room

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 18 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A large room full of dirt

In 1977 Walter De Maria constructed the New York Earth Room, a site-specific artwork commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation.  De Maria took a second floor space in a typical SoHo building on Wooster Street and filled it, throughout, with 250 cubic yards of earth.  That’s a 22-inch depth of material across the whole space.  280,000 pounds of art!

And if you know where to go, on days when it’s open, you ring a bell and get buzzed in and walk up to the second floor to see a large room full of dirt.

Continue reading “New York Earth Room”

International Print Center

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 23 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A couple of black and white, square, surreal architectural prints by Brandon Williams.  This project is not supposed to be about shopping for art for me, but I would totally like to own them.

Perched up on the fifth floor of an old industrial building in the middle of the High Line / Chelsea art gallery district is the International Print Center New York, a non-profit that puts on regular shows on the art of printmaking.

Continue reading “International Print Center”

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 45 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Schomburg’s Media Center was showing a selection of Blaxploitation films as a complement to the Black Power exhibition. I stopped for longer than I expected to to watch Pam Grier refuse to take crap from anybody.  I feel a little guilty, as the history of Black Power is incredibly important, now more than ever.  But Pam Grier was the best thing I saw there.

The Schomburg Center is the New York Public Library’s research branch focused on the African American experience. It’s a complex of three buildings in Harlem, hosting a ton of talks, events, and exhibitions. Much of the Schomburg Center is currently undergoing a thorough renovation, so I couldn’t visit anything beyond the exhibition space.

This is the first of at least three library branches that I’ll be visiting and writing about in the course of this project. If there’s one thing the NYPL does really well, it’s bring documents to life. 

The current show at the Schomburg Center is on the Black Power movement of the late 60s and 70s.  (2016 marked its fiftieth anniversary) Well chosen quotes highlighted the establishment reaction to the Black Power movement, actual newspapers, magazines, flyers, photographs, pins and other key documents made an exhibit that involved a great deal of reading much more immediate and interesting.  Music from the era helped convey the emotion of the time. And some well chosen videos on a couple of screens added variety.

The show covers a large amount of ground, reflecting on the political and organizational tactics of the Black Power leadership, as well as on the movement’s impact on fashion, the arts, and popular culture. I confess I always wondered about the berets that were such a signature part of the Black Power look.  The show suggests they came from the influence of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

The Schomburg’s exhibition space itself is beautiful, light and airy, with big windows.  It’s not large, but it was the right size for the show it contained. 

Should you go?  For both the Schomburg in general and this show in particular, I’d say yes.  The NYPL knows how to pull off focused exhibits leveraging documents as the main things that tell the story.  I’m not sure everything they program there will be as relevant or important as Black Power!, but I feel confident it’ll be interesting.

For Reference:

Address 515 Malcolm X Blvd (Malcolm X and 135th)
Website nypl.org/locations/schomburg
Cost Free
Other Relevant Links