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July 7, 2026July 14, 2026

Bronx Children’s Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	52 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Any good children’s museum needs a some quiet spaces to balance the rambunctious ones. Bronx Children’s Museum, has named one of these quiet spaces Sonia’s Corner. As with so many museum halls and galleries, it’s named after someone, though in this case not a plutocrat or gajillionaire donor. And, actually, not one person but two. Two of the most prominent advocates for the BxCM happen to be named Sonia. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is one. Sonia Manzano, actor and author, is the other. “Sonia Who?” you’re probably thinking. You know her, though. For the past half-century and more, she’s played Maria from Sesame Street. It’s just a room, essentially (a nice room!). I didn’t even take a photo of it. But think about these two Sonias. One shaping the laws of the country and the other an unfamiliar name but someone who everybody who grew up with a TV in the last 50+ years knows and loves. Any corner that brings those two Sonias together is a good corner.

A Power House Museum

The Bronx Children’s Museum (BxCM for short) occupies the second floor of a castle-looking, century-old brick building in Mill Pond Park, a, skinny stretch of land sandwiched between the overpass of the Major Deegan Expressway and the Harlem River.

Bronx Children's Museum - Exterior

The building has a fascinating history, so I’m going to digress for a minute. Mill Pond Park, on the bank of the river, exists on the site of the former Bronx Terminal Market, which opened in the 1920s as one of the city’s main wholesale food markets. The Power House, built in 1923, generated electricity to provide refrigeration for the market. So, the fact that it now houses a museum makes it a sort of sibling to the Tate Modern in London.

Bronx Children's Museum - View from afar Like so many things in the Bronx, Bronx Terminal Market went into decline, rendered obsolete by the larger and more modern Hunts Point Market. This entire area fell into disuse and decay. Its rebirth happened because of nearby Yankee Stadium.

When the City firmed up the plan to build the new Yankee Stadium (it opened in 2009), it set aside $64 million from the project to build Mill Pond Park on the former market’s riverfront land. Almost $14 million of that funding went to restore the Power House, which today houses a tennis center, restrooms, and office space. And it also provides the home for the Bronx Children’s Museum. Bronx Children's Museum - Exterior

A Nomadic Museum Puts Down Roots

The Bronx Children’s Museum was founded in 2005. For the first five years it lived a nomadic existence, putting on events and doing community outreach. A conceptual museum, rather than a physical one. It graduated from there to being a mobile museum-in-a-bus, and then in late 2022, after over a decade of planning and development, it opened in its permanent home in the Power House.

Bronx Children's Museum - interior view

BxCM occupies over 10,000 square feet on the second floor. Its design follows the modern aesthetic of high ceilings and exposed ductwork, with large windows looking out at the river, and abundant amounts of beautiful blond, knotty, engineered wood that forms interior walls and, in places, floors and ceilings as well. The spaces are curvy and flow organically, defining areas without dividing the space. Doors and walls close off a few rooms (like Sonia’s Corner and classrooms), but mostly visitors can see the whole space from any point in it.

Bronx Children's Museum - Restroom — BxCM – restroom

Every corner of BxCM is designed to engage and delight. Even the stairwell, which is bright and lively, and the restrooms, which pay homage to the Bronx River… I imagine using the bathroom there feels a bit like peeing outside).

Arguably, I didn’t see the museum at its best, visiting after hours on a Friday afternoon. John Boudreau, BxCM’s Director of Strategic Partnerships & Branding was kind enough to give me a private tour. For my past children’s museum visits (Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn), I’ve borrowed friends’ kids, but nobody was available for this visit. BxCM has strict and totally understandable rules: neither unaccompanied adults nor unaccompanied children are allowed. Bronx Children's Museum - Stairway

That said, I didn’t have a hard time imagining the place buzzing with young ones. If I’m honest, having it to myself, not filled with noisy, sticky little monsters, was fine by me. I am deeply grateful for the tour, and I felt lucky for the time talking with John about the purpose and role of children’s museums generally, as well as the role that this specific one plays for its community.

John also told me that at the end of each museum session it holds a parade. All the visitors march through the space to say good-bye to it. I am a little sorry I didn’t get to see one of those. And I sort of wish the Metropolitan Museum of Art would adopt the custom.

The Space

BxCM uses its curvy spaces well. One section focuses on sciency stuff. It includes a few small critters in aquariums, and a build-your-own beaver lodge, since beavers once lived on the Bronx River (and occasionally still do). The biggest and fanciest exhibit presents a river in miniature, with actual water. Cloud shaped fixtures rain water down to a long, winding table where kids can learn about canal locks, build bridges, and float boats downstream to the ocean. I wanted to play with it very much.

Bronx Children's Museum - river experience — BxCM’s miniature river

Another space replicates elements of a Bronx neighborhood, with a casita, shop facades, a vegetable garden, and a “book bodega.” Playing store is a common feature to children’s museums. It’s odd to me, though there’s nothing wrong with preparing for a job in retail.

Other spaces encourage kids to stretch their creativity. An enchanted garden has costumes for pretend and storytelling. An artist’s studio recreates the actual studio of children’s book illustrator C.G. Esperanza. (Esperanza also did the art for the stores in the neighborhood.).

Bronx Children's Museum - art space

And of course,, there are also those quiet spaces, like Sonia’s Room, and a dedicated space reserved for toddlers and very young children, who may not be ready to navigate waterways or operate a retail establishment.

Books Abound

Throughout the whole museum, books abound. Sonia’s Room, the young kids’ space, other nooks and corners all are stocked with them. I appreciated how much this museum stresses the value of sitting down and reading — or being read to. John Boudreau observed to me that the Bronx had no dedicated children’s bookstore until the Book Bodega within the museum opened. He also said that BxCM has given away over 5,000 books since opening. Bronx Children's Museum - Book Bodega

Like all children’s museums, BxCM has to speak to kids directly, but also to parents and caregivers. Each section of the museum includes ideas for “Play” “Learn” and “Go” geared for adults. They suggest things kids can do in the space, things they can learn there, and then other places in the Bronx or around the City to see the ideas in action. And, it almost goes without saying, all the museum’s signage is bilingual English and Spanish.

Should You Visit the Bronx Children’s Museum?

For a Manhattanite, the Bronx Children’s Museum is not the easiest place to get to via mass transit. If you have a kid, or you are a kid yourself, is the Bronx Children’s Museum a place worth visiting?

I think it’s well worth a visit. The design, the way it executes its mission, its love for its young patrons and empathy for their parents and guardians all impress. Like the Bronx Museum of the Arts, it welcomes people who may not think museums are for them. John told me that some people bring their kids weekly, or even more often. Though I am not in BxCM’s target demographic, I’m still glad that it exists to make its young visitors more aware of the nature and cultures of the Bronx, of New York City, and of the world.

Bronx Children's Museum - Entry

Finally, just south of the Bronx Children’s Museum is the future home of the Hip Hop Museum. That institution should open sometime in 2026. I’ve been excited about it for years! I’m not sure it’ll make a strong double-bill with BxCM, but I bet the two neighbor museums will devise awesomely creative joint programs.

For Reference:

Address	725 Exterior Street, 2nd Floor, Bronx, New York
Website	https://www.bxcm.org/
Cost	General Admission: $14 for adults, $8 for kids
Other Relevant Links	Hidden Waters, the companion blog to Sergey Kadinsky’s book, “Hidden Waters of New York City,” discusses the Mill Pond that Mill Pond Park is named after, as well as the Power House. The NYC government’s website on Mill Pond Park Oneill McVoy, the museum’s architects’ page on the (multiple award-winning) project Beavers in the Bronx River

May 24, 2026June 24, 2026

New Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	172 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The New Museum’s re-opening exhibition featured a wall of art by a Barcelona-based Pakistani artist named Seher Shah. Drawings made of ink, pencil, and graphite dust, they are detailed, austere, formal, monochrome, serene. They remind me of blueprints, or musical notation, but twisted, aged, warped by time. The New Museum, Seher Shah, various works They are not the most on-theme pieces for the show, they’re definitely not the showiest, but after seeing them, I reached out to a Mumbai-based gallery that represents her, got a digital catalog of her work, and actually bought a piece, which is currently in transit from London to New York.

This essay on the Newest of the New Museum’s incarnations replaces the original one I wrote in 2017. The last time I wrote about it, the New Museum had just turned 40. Back then I suggested that based on its curatorial politics a better name would be The Progressive Museum. Which I concede would make a terrible name for a museum these days. No sense painting a bullseye on one’s back.

The Old New Museum

Marcia Tucker, a curator at the Whitney in the 1970s, felt that new and emerging artists didn’t get a fair shake at established museums (this despite the Whitney Biennial). She therefore set out to create an institution specifically for, well, the new. And thus another art museum was born in New York City. To ensure things stayed new over time, the New Museum decided that it wouldn’t have a permanent collection. Shows come, shows go, but there aren’t any greatest hits to visit time and again.

Now almost 50 years old, the New Museum is in many respects even less accurately named than it was in 2017. For the moment, though, “new” rings true, as the museum reopened in March 2026 after being closed for two years to expand, adding a prismatic new next-door space to its existing stack of boxes on The Bowery.

I wasn’t a big fan of the Old New Museum. I liked it okay, respected what it did, but found the architecture unwelcoming, not so user-friendly, windowless and personality-free with absurdly high ceilings and utilitarian stairs. Back when I reviewed it the first time, it had already spilled over into an old building next door. Now that building is gone and something newly new (for now anyway) is in its place.

The New New Museum

Why expand? The museum decided it didn’t have enough space to put on the shows it wanted to. It’s now added 60,000 more square feet, so, hopefully space won’t be an issue again for a while. In addition to the lack of space, the quirky Old New Museum lacked many of the amenities that museums think they need to have these days:

A cafe or restaurant (very fancy restaurant in this case);
One of those bleacher/ stairway thingies that people can sit on and that can be used for lectures or events;
Cool high-up indoor-outdoor space with a view, for throwing parties for rich patrons; and
An iconic museum staircase for the Insta or TikTok or whatever.

Much like the new Studio Museum in Harlem, the New New Museum now checks those boxes. I remain skeptical of super-deluxe architect-driven expansions, but the New Museum’s does help make the building more visitor-friendly, without overly diluting the austere forms of the original.

The Future of Humanity

The New Museum has re-opened with an absolute banger of a show. But, funnily enough, I can never remember what it’s called. I keep telling people it’s “The future of humanity something something something.” In reality, the show is called “New Humans: Memories of the Future.”

The whole expanded building is jam-packed, overstuffed, even, with different artistic takes on man — sorry, ‘human’ — and machine, human and nature, cities… it’s almost too big of a theme to make for any kind of coherent exhibit, especially for a museum of contemporary art. It’s encyclopedic in ways that New Museum shows historically weren’t. It’s got pieces in it from the 1800s, for heaven’s sake — the polar opposite of “new.” With that vague “future anything” conceit, practically anything could be included. And given the vast space, practically everything was.

The curators leverage the museum’s old and new spaces well — I never felt lost, for all that I did feel like I was taking in a lot. I especially enjoyed a narrow, intensely cobalt blue, space that told a capsule history of the early days of computer art. Again, it surprised me the New Museum did it, that 80s-era stuff is resolutely memories of the past at this point, not the future. But I enjoyed it just the same.

The show mixed very cerebral and political takes on being human with crowd

pleasers (an HR Giger alien, an inexplicably skinned E.T.) It was jarring in an interesting way to see a monumentally important piece like Jacob Epstein’s “The Rock Drill” from 1913 just a couple of rooms away from Simon Denny’s jokey 2019 sculpture that realizes a sketch from an actual Amazon patent for a cage to keep human warehouse workers safe from their robotic co-workers (to be clear, the human goes in the cage, not the robots).

What’s the New New Museum For?

Despite its vast ambiguity, I really liked… I’ve already forgotten the name again. Future…Humans? It offered lots to think about, balancing visions of the future of humanity from the present with ones from the 1910s, 1960s and even the 1880s. It was comprehensive, reflective, and well curated. Was all of it perfectly on-theme? No, it sprawled too much for that. But if I were a New Museum curator I’d be reveling in having the space to sprawl, and I’d be itching to attempt something this big. It was super serious and academically impeccable.

It was the least contemporary show I’ve ever seen at the New Museum.

Indeed, my slightly snarky take after seeing it was that it felt like a MoMA show, not a New Museum show. Nobody goes to the New Museum for deep historical context. At least, they didn’t at the Old New Museum. To me, the New Museum is supposed to be gonzo and over-the-top and strident and its shows are supposed to make me a little angry. I hope future shows will get back to doing that. New York already has one MoMA, and one is enough. (And, yes, I’m counting the Guggenheim.)

So, here’s hoping that after this show the New New Museum goes back to being very contemporary, hip and edgy, off-the-wall.

Should you visit the New Museum?

I return to my opening notion that the New Museum needs to rebrand. But what would it more accurately call itself? The Newish Museum (rhymes nicely with the Jewish Museum)? The So-Called New Museum? When I have a better idea, I’ll email them.

The New Museum is good at its job. Anyone with an interest in art, and particularly contemporary art, should go, with a caveat. Given the lack of permanent collection, once Future Humans (or whatever) ends, your mileage will vary depending on what is filling all that space on The Bowery.

New York offers a surfeit of places to see contemporary art. If whatever the New Museum’s curators are doing doesn’t excite you, I’d recommend MoMA’s Queens outpost, PS1 over the New Museum. It’s a great old building for new art. Or the Whitney makes a good choice, and you get the High Line as a chaser. Or you could always spend an afternoon visiting galleries in Chelsea.

That said, if you’re just a tiny bit conservative and you like art that pushes your buttons, riles you up, even ticks you off, I can almost guarantee that whatever’s on at the New Museum will do that better than any other institution in New York. (Barring a Whitney Biennial.) If you’re super progressive and want to find a fortress of your people in embattled times, the New Museum is definitely that.

Fans of contemporary architecture should also visit. Although I didn’t love the original 2007 New Museum building from SANAA, I respected its defiant eccentricity. A stack of boxes that resolutely refused to check the boxes of required museum features. The new addition makes the whole New Museum more user friendly and easier to navigate, in addition to adding many square feet of space. It’s also an interesting example of a very contemporary intervention grafted onto an already very contemporary original building, something that doesn’t happen all that often.

The New Museum, old and new buildings kiss

The Twentieth Century

I can’t end without mentioning my runner-up “best thing I saw or learned” at the New Museum. Ironically (or maybe not), it was one of the oldest things in the exhibition.

Albert Robida was a French cartoonist who lived from 1848 until 1926. In 1883, he published a series of cartoons titled Le Vingtième siècle (The 20th Century). The New Museum show includes a series of these delightful science-fictional visions of life in the coming century. The most on-point image is “The Tramway at the Louvre Museum.” It’s absolutely a memory of the future. A sharp, witty comment on mass tourism, how people (mis)use museums, and how tech disrupts the way we interact with art. Look at the happy tourists, zipping from photo op to photo op and then on to the next landmark or monument. Sometimes the old and the new are actually the same thing.

Albert Robido, Page from La Vingtiême siêcle

For Reference:

Address	235 Bowery (near Prince Street), Manhattan
Website	newmuseum.org
Cost	General Admission: $25 (pay what you wish on Thursday evenings)

February 28, 2026February 28, 2026

Studio Museum in Harlem

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	115 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The new building lets the museum show off far more of its collection than it could before. And yet, the best thing I saw this visit is the same as it was in 2017. Barkley L. Hendricks’s captivating “Lawdy Mama” from 1969 is an extraordinary portrait. The Frick Collection, of all places, gave Hendricks a fantastic exhibit while it was in the Breuer Building.

I visited the new Studio Museum in Harlem back before Christmas. This re-review has taken a while to write, but I figured I had better get it in before the end of Black History Month, so here it is, barely beating my deadline. My 2017 review of the old Studio Museum is here.

Studio Museum in Harlem Facade

The Studio Museum in Harlem is an art museum in, yes, Harlem in Manhattan. Its mission statement says the museum serves as “the nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally and for work that has been inspired and influenced by Black culture.”

I joked in my original take on the Studio Museum that, like Chief Brody said in Jaws, they’re gonna need a bigger boat. Well, they got one.

The museum formerly occupied lovingly converted, quirky, too-small space in an old building on 125th Street. It closed in 2018, tore the old building down, and finally re-opened in November of 2025 in a spiffy new building created just for it. Was it worth waiting seven years and a pandemic for a new version of the museum? Maybe.

Continue reading “Studio Museum in Harlem”

August 17, 2025August 18, 2025

The Frick Collection

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	210 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	I want to break my rule and say that the whole building is my favorite thing about the Frick, but if I had to pick just one thing, I’m so happy to get to visit the Garden Court again. It’s lovely, green, and a respite when you need a minute away from the art.

My second-favorite museum in New York City

The Frick Collection has re-opened in its Fifth Avenue mansion after a multi-year, zillion-dollar expansion and renovation project. My pithy original review from 2017 is here, and my review of The Frick’s temporary home-away-from-home in the brutalist former Whitney, former Met Breuer building on Madison Avenue is here.

I loved the original Frick Collection for its extraordinary good taste, and for succeeding as simultaneously one of the best house museums and art museums in the City. I loved it for bucking museum trends and norms:

Minimal wall text – just look at the art!
No cafe
No photos allowed (take that, Instagram!)

I worried when the big renovation project was announced. Would The Frick sacrifice the things that made it special?

Then, once the museum moved to its temporary space, I found I loved The Frick Madison. I thought the recontextualization of the collection was brilliant and I appreciated (though I did not always love) the opportunities that having the collection there created to let Mr. Frick’s art commune and converse with contemporary art. I was sad when it shut down.

But now The Frick is back, and the question on my mind is, is it still my second favorite museum in New York City? (If you’re curious, The Cloisters is number one..)

Short answer, if you’d rather not read this whole essay, is yes. And luckily enough, during the member previews for the new-old Frick this spring the museum waived its no-photo policy, so I can pepper this review with pictures.

Nothing but the best for Mr. Frick

I try to be careful about superlatives. If I like or dislike a thing subjectively, that’s not the same as something being objectively whatever. So, when I claim that The Frick Collection boasts not one but two of the very best roomfuls of art in New York City, that’s very conscious.

The first room is Mr. Frick’s Living Hall, which is home to an astounding set of pictures. Hans Holbein’s St. Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, forever glaring at one another from opposite sides of the mantel. El Greco’s St. Jerome in between them. The monumental St. Francis by Giovanni Bellini on the opposite wall, flanked by two literal Renaissance Men. I imagine what Mr. Frick’s ego must’ve been like, that he could sit with this group of guys around him, and not be intimidated beyond all ability to work, live, think, converse.

The second room is the West Gallery, which is, I sincerely believe, painting for painting, the best single roomful of art in New York. What a flex this particular collection of masterpieces is. The Rembrandts. The Turners. The Velazquez. The Titians. The Vermeers, plural. There’s not a miss in the room. Any of them merit looking at for hours, for days.

And the thing is, The Frick has always had many other rooms that, depending on artistic tastes and preferences, could easily rank on a “best rooms” list. And the new Frick has a lot more of those rooms to love.

The new Frick takes it to the next level

The ground floor of The Frick Collection includes the public, formal spaces the Frick family dined and entertained in back in the day, with plus dedicated gallery space, a lovely glassed-over garden court, and an entry foyer added in the 1970s.

One reason for the renovation was to address a fairly major need for more space, for many reasons. The collection continues to grow, and The Frick was stuck hosting lovely little temporary exhibits in very inadequate basement space. The gift shop was possibly literally located in Mrs. Frick’s former broom closet. The Frick held concerts in a room that decidedly did not live up to the rest of the building. All these issues are now addressed, and then some.

The biggest change from the old Frick is the second floor. Formerly offices of the museum staff, and before that the family’s private living spaces, the Frick has reclaimed a series of upstairs rooms for art. Everything about them is fantastic, although I do worry that they’re so intimate that crowd control will prove a challenge.

Frick newbies will take it in stride, but for Frick veterans there’s a fun frisson of trespassing when you go up that grand staircase the first time. While the Frick was in previews, they discovered the low risers and carpeting make the mansion’s staircase a little treacherous to descend, so they are up-only. Fortunately, there’s an awesome marble stairway in the new addition that safely returns you to earth again.

Addressing all The Frick’s former problems, the new addition also offers:

Much bigger and better space for temporary exhibits
A fancy cafe
New space to show drawings and works on paper
A beautiful subterranean theater (I can’t wait to hear a concert there)
A gift shop that definitely does not resemble a broom closet.

The Shape of Fricks to Come

We don’t live in a world where things get better. Entropy is the rule, change inspires skepticism rather than hope. But sometimes, against the odds, change improves, reinvents, opens new doors, or new floors. At least in museums. The new-old Frick Collection is better than it used to be.

Perhaps my biggest surprise — shock even — at the new Frick was a bowl of buttons at the member preview. Some bore the classy old-school “HCF” monogram logo, which, thankfully, The Frick has not thrown out in favor of some sort of superflat sans serif font. But the other buttons read, “FRICK YEAH!” If I’d been wearing pearls I would’ve immediately clutched them. Kudos to the marketing team for making a joke I never thought I’d see The Frick willingly make about its august founder’s surname.

I do have one reservation. I was excited about the restoration of the old gallery spaces, putting the collection back “exactly as it was.” Except, it isn’t. Not quite. The Frick has pulled off a super subtle intervention throughout, a temporary installation of dazzlingly realistic porcelain flowers by Vladimir Kanevsky, a Ukrainian-born contemporary artist. These play off The Frick’s art, sometimes too well. They reflect The Frick’s own amazing porcelain collection. AND they offer a nod to beleaguered Ukraine. Well played, curators.

But. But but but. That’s some new art snuck into in the old spaces. And a bit of me raises a skeptical eyebrow, reaches for my metaphorical pearls again. Just because this sneaky, subtle art intervention succeeds (really well!), that doesn’t mean the next one will. And I bet in this edgy, brave new Frick, there will be others. So, we’ll see.

Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, 1871, plus flowers — James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland, 1871 Plus flowers by Vladimir Kanevsky

That off my chest, I refuse to end pessimistically. Everyone should go to The Frick Collection. It’s both wonderful and essential. And now it’s a whole new Frick, and yet it’s also the old Frick, and I can’t wait to see what it does next. “Frick yeah,” indeed.

The Frick Collection, Henry Clay Frick — Henry Clay Frick, in his collection

For Reference:

Address	1 East 70th Street (between 5th and Madison), Manhattan
Website	frick.org
Cost	General Admission: $30, advance timed tickets essential
Other Relevant Links	Cromwell and More hating each other reminds me of Wolf Hall, where Hans Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell makes a cameo appearance Vladimir Kanevsky’s delicate porcelain work

August 8, 2025August 8, 2025

Vilcek Foundation

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	55 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	It’s lame to pick the obvious crowd-pleaser, but I loved the centerpiece picture in the Il Lee show. IW-2201, 2012 is a big oil and acrylic work. Here’s a detail, a larger picture is in the review, below. Photos do not do it justice, though.

Of all the things I love about New York, the best is how there is always more to it. There are so many bars, restaurants, cultural institutions, jazz clubs, whatever, that it’s virtually impossible for any one person to know them all. No matter how good your radar, on whatever the subject, New York City always has something flying under it. Waiting to be discovered.

For example, say you’re someone who has been going to New York City museums. You’ve been cataloging them and writing about them for nearly a decade. And you (well, me) think, arrogantly, that you’ve got the best database of museums, extant and closed, in the City. And then you discover a nonprofit that’s quietly been hosting art exhibitions since before you started your museum quest. That’s just a thing that happens.

A few weeks ago, I was walking on East 70th Street from the Frick Collection (re-review badly overdue) to Madison to catch the M4 bus when I stumbled on the Vilcek Foundation.

To be fair to me, the Vilcek Foundation has only been on 70th since 2018. Also, based on the foundation’s website the Vilcek Foundation didn’t do any art exhibitions between 2013 and 2019. So maybe I didn’t actually miss them, as much as they restarted a part of the mission that was on hiatus before they moved to the East 70th Street location.

Finally, in my defense, the only way to see Vilcek Foundation exhibits is to make an appointment and get a tour. However, that’s an easy process, and it’s hardly the hardest museum space to gain access to in the City.

All that said, I’m very happy to add a new-old place to my list.

Vilcek it out

The Vilcek Foundation exists to “raise awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters appreciation of the arts and sciences.” So, that’s not exactly a fashionable thing to do these days. It makes it akin to, among other places, the Ellis Island Museum. The Foundation gives out grants and prizes, and, across two floors of long, narrow gallery space, holds exhibits showcasing the work of immigrant, something-American artists.

The Foundation website opens with a nice, very unfashionable, tribute to the value of diversity: how it propels innovation and sparks new ideas and strengthens America’s cultural and scientific community. Perhaps, then, it’s better that it’s a bit of an under-the-radar institution, at least until the political winds change.

The Vilcek Foundation’s building, down the block from The Frick, is a landmark, 1910s-era townhouse, understatedly renovated. The gallery spaces aren’t huge, but they are decent in a stark white kind of way, consisting of two levels connected by a staircase of the type that seems required for upscale duplex art galleries and museums.

Who is Il Lee?

The current show at the Vilcek Foundation showcases the work of Il Lee, a Korean-American artist. Born in Korea in 1952, he moved to New York City in 1977 to go to Pratt. Impressively, a large part of his practice is done with ballpoint pen. Which leads to questions of whether it can be called “painting” (which the show catalog does). His work is mesmerizing, a mix of control and randomness, of planning and freedom. And effort. It’s a ton of work. I can only imagine the hours and hours it takes to cover a large-scale sheet of paper or canvas with so many ballpoint lines that they blur together into solid blocks of color. How many attempts end with a piece that doesn’t quite work, where one errant line throws everything into disarray.

The Vilcek Show offers a strong cross-section of Il Lee’s work, showing how his practice has evolved over the years. It highlights several of his loopy, swirly, ballpoint pen pieces and a selection of his prints. It also includes work he’s done in paint. Rather than painting per se, he layers oil over acrylic. He then uses a dry ballpoint pen as a stylus for dragging his signature swirly, swooping curvy lines into the layers of paint. It’s spectacular, tactile stuff, reminding me of the world’s most precise finger-paintings.

Funnily enough, Il Lee also loaned the Vilcek Foundation several bags of pens. Apparently he keeps every one he’s ever worked with. Those are on display in a plexiglas box in the middle of the ground floor gallery space. I’m a big fan of art that elevates humble materials, and there are few more humble than a Bic pen.

It was a beautifully curated show, fun and edifying at the same time, and it had the incredibly beneficial effect of introducing me to an artist who was not formerly on my radar. My bad for that. I can’t imagine how Il Lee does what he does, even though the work is essentially a “how to” for itself. The lines are the lines, there’s no concealing what he’s done. But the amount of time and patience, work and practice required to make them look just so boggles my mind.

Should you visit the Vilcek Foundation?

My guide to the Il Lee exhibit was a curatorial fellow named Olivia. I really appreciated her willingness to spend an nearly an hour with me, talking about Mr. Lee and his practice and his work. Seeing the show, and Olivia’s insights into it, were well worth the (tiny) effort it took to email to get a date and time scheduled.

Confusingly to me, the Vilcek show prior to this one was on Pueblo Pottery, which, would seem antithetical to the mission statement of celebrating immigrants, but I’m always down for some creative cognitive dissonance. I’m sure not every artist the Foundation features would be as in sync with my personal aesthetic as Il Lee turns out to be, but I’m looking forward to keeping an eye on what they show next, and to visiting again.

In the current political climate, I appreciate any organization that tries to remind the world that some of the greatest contributions to American art, science, culture, and society came from people who were not born here. If you’re the sort of person who disagrees with that, no harm, no foul, just skip this place, it’s totally fine.

But if you’re anyone other than that kind of person, I strongly recommend a visit, Il Lee is on until the end of May 2026, definitely go see that if you can. And after that? Check out what’s on, and if you have the luxury of planning in advance, book visit to the Vilcek Foundation as a chaser to a visit to The Frick Collection.

For Reference:

Address	21 E 70th Street (between 5th and Madison), Manhattan
Website	vilcek.org
Cost	General Admission: Free, but must make an appointment in advance by emailing info@vilcek.org
Other Relevant Links	Il Lee on Art Projects International Il Lee on Rembrandt, video from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

June 19, 2024June 19, 2024

Louis Armstrong House Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	82 minutes + 45 minutes at the Louis Armstrong Center (see update below)
Best thing I saw or learned	This place feels so real. It’s like Louis and Lucille Armstrong just left the room to get you an iced tea, and they’ll be back in a jiffy. Nothing is labeled, no velvet ropes. The Armstrongs’ iron (or very good facsimile) still sits in their closet. I strongly suspect their air conditioners cool some of the rooms. More than any other house museum I’ve visited so far, this place still feels like a home.

UPDATE: JUNE 2024

I first visited the Louis Armstrong House in July of 2017. As I mentioned in my 2017 review (below), the Louis Armstrong House had plans to build a new visitor center on a vacant lot across the street from Louis and Lucille’s house. That finally came to fruition in 2023 and so I recently returned to see the Louis Armstrong Center. I also re-took the tour, but rather than rewrite the whole review I’m tacking on this addendum (pre-dendum? fore-dendum?) to say a few words about the new exhibit, and how it goes with the house.

The new building is modern, fit to the low-rise residential neighborhood but with an exuberant glass facade. It houses the Louis Armstrong Archive, and has spaces for performance and instruction (I peeked in on a couple of kids practicing the trumpet), as well as a gift shop. The main thing visitors will care about, though, is an exhibit titled “Here to Stay” that summarizes Louis Armstrong’s life and times through selected artifacts and video and audio clips. This replaces the small exhibit in the former Armstrong rec room that I describe in the original review.

“Here to Stay” includes sections with titles like “Roots,” “Tools,” “Ambassador,” and “On Film.” Each display combines some artifacts and photos and wall texts telling the relevant story. Most surprising to me was a section called “Armstrong the Artist.” I mean, obviously he was one of the greatest artists of all time. But this section refers to Louis Armstrong as a visual artist. He made collages, in both scrapbooks and on the covers of the hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes he recorded. Is collage the visual arts equivalent to jazz? Maybe. Taking bits and pieces, remixing and matching them, putting them into surprising new orders, improvisationally. It makes sense, and showed me a side to Armstrong I had no idea about before.

Louis Armstrong's OTHER art, collage (on tape cases)

Interactive table at Louis Armstrong Center The exhibit also features an circular interactive table with multiple touchscreens. This gadget, designed to look like a record, that lets visitors explore in huge detail Louis Armstrong’s music, his collaborations with other artists, his travels, his life and the neighborhood, and more, all with stills, video, and audio. You could spend a long time exploring there.

The opening of the Louis Armstrong Center has provided a welcome opportunity to re-visit both the Armstrong’s house and my original review of it from seven years (!) ago.

In the years since my first visit, my love of the place has only grown. Whenever someone asks me for examples of unusual New York museums they should visit, it’s near the top of my list. And I regularly refer to it as my favorite house museum in New York. The addition of the new Louis Armstrong Center only strengthens the overall experience. I’m really glad they didn’t try to change the house itself to pack in more museum-type bits. So I’m taking advantage of this addendum to update my former rating (it was 3-4-4 before). This is absolutely one of the best museums in New York City, a wonderful tribute to a wonderful pair of people, and everyone should go.

With that, I’ll pass you off to Joe from seven years ago to give hist impressions of the house part of the Louis Armstrong House, dating from June of 2017. Having just taken the tour again, I can vouch for it being just as good this time around. You still can’t take pictures inside, though.

ORIGINAL POST: JUNE, 2017

A riddle: If Louis Armstrong were a superhero (and I’m not saying he wasn’t), what would he call his souped up vehicle for patrolling the streets of Gotham?

A: The SATCHMOBILE.

Actually the Satchmobile is the name of the official van of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.

Satchmobile, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens — Quick, Dizzy, to the Satchmobile!

Louis Armstrong practically invented jazz. He played all over the world, made a bajillion records, sang songs that everyone knows. And when he wasn’t doing all that, from 1943 until the day he died he and his wife Lucille lived in a modest three-story brick house in the Corona area of Queens. They entertained generations of neighborhood kids, Louis made tape recordings of himself (he was sort of a tape diarist), and generally lived far more quietly than you’d expect from a jazz superhero.

Louis Armstrong House Museum, Corona, Queens

Louis Armstrong died in 1971. Lucille lived for another 12 years, until 1983. They never had kids. And the house, pretty much exactly as it was when Lucille died, passed into the hands of the city. Queens College manages the place, and they lovingly restored and opened it in 2003 as the best house museum I’ve seen so far.

You can only enter the house on guided tours, but my gods, it feels just like you’re visiting the Armstrongs. The group (nine people joined my tour on a random Saturday afternoon) goes right up the front steps, rings the musical door chime, and proceeds on their visit, which explores every room in the house, down to the breakfast nook.

Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens, New York

The House

The management frowns on photos. I cheated once, to take a picture of Louis Armstrong’s infinitely mirrored bathroom. I wondered if Yayoi Kusama ever visited the Armstrongs. Or took this tour…

Bathroom, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Queens

Here are some of the things I managed to resist photographing:

Louis’s wood paneled den with its fabulous bar (there is still alcohol in his bar. Drambuie.) and fabulous reel-to-reel tape recorders.
The Armstrongs’ bedroom with its wild silver wallpaper.
The amazing 50s kitchen. Bright blue, enameled, curvy cabinetry, custom sub-zero fridge, everything built in. Paper towels stored in their own wall cubby. They even had a blender built into their countertop. Lucille and her kitchen designer were geniuses!
Their white upright piano, which neither of them could play, but looked good in the living room.
Four green ashtrays shaped like the suits from a deck of cards.
Art from a lifetime of world travels.
Okay, I wanted to take pictures of everything.

But I could not resist the bathroom. I apologize, Louis Armstrong House Museum folks.

The Louis Armstrong House uses sound, but unexpectedly it doesn’t play a lot of music. Rather, during the tour, the guide periodically plays bits of recordings of Armstrong talking about the house and his life. In his den, there’s a portrait of him by Tony Bennett (!), and Louis talks about that–how he signed it “Benedetto.” Letting the man speak for himself in his own home works incredibly well.

A Few Other Things

The entry to the Louis Armstrong House and its gift shop is in their former garage.

From the garage you proceed to a small exhibit area, in what used to be his rec room. Where he played poker with Dizzy Gillespie. (His poker table is on display upstairs.) I like to think of it as the Satch-cave.

Look at these stairs! And the wallpaper!

Exhibit Room, with inevitable brief DVD introduction

Currently there’s a display commemorating the 50th anniversary of the inescapable, somewhat saccharin (to my taste) “What a Wonderful World.” Not a hit when first released, the film “Good Morning Vietnam” rediscovered the song and set it on its path toward ubiquity. But Louis said whenever he sang it, it reminded him of Corona.

You can also see Armstrong’s bathrobe and slippers, life mask, and suitcases. And one of his trumpets. And three pages he wrote about his joy living in the neighborhood. I got the sense that even if someone had offered them, say, Andrew Carnegie’s mansion, he and Lucille would’ve stayed right where they were.

Koi pond, Louis Armstrong House The most unexpected thing about the house is the Armstrongs bought the lot next door and made it into an expansive garden, with pine trees, a little lawn, a tiny koi pond, and a bar and barbecue. In this one place, I felt a legendary musician exerting some star power. They only built the garden in 1970, so just a year before Armstrong died. Better late than never.

Garden, Louis Armstrong House

I sat there for a while playing in my head what I’ll get to say when someone asks me what I was up to today. “Oh, not much. Sat in Louis Armstrong’s garden reading a magazine for a bit.”

Changes Coming

The Louis Armstrong House experience will soon change significantly. A vacant lot across the street (where they currently park the Satchmobile) is going to get a spiffy new building that will greatly increase the museum’s ability to tell Louis and Lucille’s story. I think that’s wonderful — though I wonder if the neighbors on this quiet block agree.

But even as they’re able to show off more of their collection, I sincerely hope that the house stays just exactly the way it is. It is an amazing monument to the talent, humility, and soul of one of the great figures in the history of music.

You can build museums to jazz (not saying you can succeed, but you can try). You can memorialize great concert performances in museum form. You can digitize music and tell its story through touchscreens and headphones. But nothing you can possibly do will bring you closer to Louis Armstrong than visiting his house in Corona, Queens.

Meanwhile, somebody please write a Justice League-style comic book featuring the Superheroes of Jazz battling the forces of squareness.

Trumpet, Louis Armstrong House — Steiner trumpet, gift to Armstrong from King George V, July 1934.

For Reference:

Address	34-56 107th Street, Flushing, Queens
Website	louisarmstronghouse.org
Cost	General Admission: $10, with tour

May 4, 2024May 4, 2024

Statue of Liberty Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	37 minutes (in the museum; far longer getting to and wandering around Liberty Island)
Best thing I saw or learned	I keep coming back to a pair of quotations. One was from an editorial from the Black-owned Cleveland Gazette from Nov. 27, 1886, that read, “Shove the Bartholdi Statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country [exists for the] colored man.” Alongside that was a quote from Lillie Devereux Blake, president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association, who said, “In erecting a Statue of Liberty embodied as a woman in a land where no woman has political liberty, men have shown a delightful inconsistency.” Cheers to this museum for celebrating the statue and what she means, while acknowledging that not everyone agreed, even back in 1886, that liberty was a done deal.

Note: This review updates my review of the old Statue of Liberty Museum, dating from 2018, when the museum was located inside the Liberty’s pedestal.

Why Liberty?

We do not live in terribly allegorical times. Alas, this era rewards bluntness over allusion, and literalism rather than metaphor. How, then, can can one explain the enduring popularity of “Liberty Enlightening the World,” a very allegorical and symbolic symbol indeed, standing on an island in New York Harbor?

Because, judging from the insane queues of people who had journeyed from every corner of the world to go visit her inconvenient island, Lady Liberty remains exceedingly popular.

It’s stranger still because, when you think about it, “Liberty Enlightening the World” is a particularly 19th century sort of idea, obsolete in times where many both in the United States and outside it would question the mission statement.

With those thoughts on my mind, I semi-patiently queued, scrummed, went through airport-style security and boarded a ferry to cross the harbor to visit her, and the museum that tells her story.

The Statue’s Story

Surely everyone knows the story of the Statue of Liberty. Gift from France, colossal, New York Harbor. Immigrants. Lifting her lamp beside the golden door. Yadda yadda yadda.

The museum highlights five instrumental people, also immortalized in statues on Liberty Island:

Edouard de Laboulaye: who dreamed her
Auguste Bartholdi: who designed her
Gustav Eiffel: who engineered her
Joseph Pulitzer: who raised the money to give her a place to stand
Emma Lazarus: who gave her her soul

Statues of the key figures in the creation of the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island

Old Statue, New-ish Museum

The Statue of Liberty Museum occupies a purpose-built, very modern building on the northern edge of Liberty Island, as far from the statue as one can get without plunging into the harbor. Opened in 2019, it boasts a green roof, ample space for accommodating the huddled masses from the ferry, and fantastic views toward Manhattan, as well as of Lady Liberty’s rear.

Statue of Liberty Museum, Liberty Island, New York

The museum tells the story of the genesis, engineering, construction, and gifting of the statue, as well as her absolutely iconic role as a symbol of freedom, democracy, New York City, and the United States. Among other treasures, it includes the statue’s original lit-from-within torch, replaced during the 1986 rehabilitation of the Statue.

Continue reading “Statue of Liberty Museum”

February 25, 2024February 25, 2024

Paley Center Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	53 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The Super Bowl exhibit’s walk down advertising memory lane was deeply nostalgic to me. Amid Cindy Crawford selling Pepsi and a baby selling a brokerage, Apple’s 1984 ad, introducing the Mac, stands out as possibly the most revered commercial of all time. Also, why did anyone think Spuds McKenzie was a good idea?

Once Upon a Paley

Once upon a time, New York City was home to a Museum of Broadcasting. In 1975, William S. Paley founded an institution to preserve TV and radio programming. (The other company he founded was CBS.) In 1976, his Museum of Broadcasting opened its doors. “Broadcasting” feels like a technological fossil these days, appropriate for a museum. But it was the heart and soul of society in the late 20th century.

Paley Center for Media In 1991, the institution renamed itself the Museum of Television & Radio, since even then increasing amounts of TV was distributed in ways that had nothing to do with “broadcasting.” The same year the museum moved into a fun, Philip Johnson-designed post-modernist building, which is meant to resemble an old-timey radio.

In the early 2000s the museum rebranded as the Paley Center for Media. For a decade or so it offered a library and an event space known for putting on interesting talks with the television creators and stars. Recently, however, the Paley Center re-opened its museum, so of course I visited.

The Paley Center today has a medium-sized gallery space on its ground floor, and a small space upstairs. It’s also home to a video game gallery (available for rental for kids’ parties) and a library containing video monitors where visitors can access any of 160,000 television and radio programs and ads in the collection. So, it’s kind of like Hulu.

T Old time televisions he current iteration of the Paley Museum doesn’t have a permanent collection, although there are a few adorable antique TV sets on display in the library. Instead, it hosts temporary exhibitions on timely topics. To wit, when I visited in early February, the Super Bowl. And, in a nod to Black History Month, props and costumes from the Nat Geo “Genius” miniseries about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., in a modest second floor gallery.

The Gridiron

They really got into football

The Super Bowl took over the Paley Center the day I visited, one week before the Chiefs and 49ers faced off. The entry space featured a huge video screen showing highlights of halftime musical performances, and the elevator lobby was fully wrapped, and included Katy Perry’s halftime show outfit (from XLIV), along a shark and a beach ball. Katy Perry's halftime show costume, plus shark and beach ball

As befits a museum of broadcasting, the exhibit was less about the game of football itself, and more about the unofficial secular holiday and cultural phenomenon the Super Bowl has evolved into, with growing mass audiences, iconic advertising, and the previously mentioned halftime show spectacular, all getting at least as much attention as the games themselves.

The curators took a sensible chronological approach, with stats on each of the LVIII games along the top (who played, final score, TV audience size). Wall texts offered details on how the Super Bowl evolved, with images and video. Artifacts livened things up: balls and jerseys, helmets, playbooks, and, climax of the exhibition, the actual Vince Lombardi Trophy. (A reproduction belonging to the New York Giants was on display the day I visited, as the actual Trophy had important duties off in Vegas.).

Game balls and winning moments — This exhibit had a lot of balls

Downstairs, another space featured a selection of game balls, as well as a chunk of the set from the Super Bowl LV Halftime Show, with a choice of sparkling red jackets, should visitors wish to cosplay as The Weeknd. I did not see anyone do that while I was there. And the Paley Center’s theater ran historic Super Bowl games and/or ads, in case visitors wanted to revisit past high points.

Madonna's Half Time Show, Super Bowl XLVI, 2012 — Football is a mystery…

Curatorial Questions

The exhibition was co-presented by the NFL and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I suspect that is why all signs of Super Bowl controversy were scrubbed out of the narrative. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake were absent from the big halftime show screen. Not a word about concussions, either. Or team names that seem leftovers from an earlier, cruder era.

The exhibit made much of the patriotism of Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002. 9/11 casualties’ names streamed on a screen behind U2 at Halftime, which feels a little cringe-y now. However, it said nothing about players taking a knee during the National Anthem in the wake of Black Lives Matter. Ironic, given that Black History Month was the other thing the Paley Center was ostensibly honoring when I visited.

I would have hoped for some acknowledgement that the Super Bowl isn’t an unalloyed marvel. It’s possible to celebrate something even while acknowledging its flaws, and their exclusion is a notable miss.

Paley Center Super Bowl exhibit — Nothing but good times and soaring audiences and ad revenues here…

Should you visit the Paley Center Museum?

Unless you’re an old-school TV fan, or some sort of insane museum completist, it’s hard to recommend the Paley Center. Twenty bucks is a high price for the relatively small museum space, so it’s not worth just dropping in.

The institution knows its mass-media subject better than just about anyone else. But its “rah-rah, no problems here” approach to the Super Bowl exhibit, although fun, raises questions of objectivity and curation. Even if a future exhibition subject were to interest me, I’d wonder who was shaping the content, and what kind of slant it might have.

If you want a museum of popular culture, the Museum of Broadway in Times Square, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and the exhibit spaces at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center are all far more worth your time and money.

Bethpage Long Island rates the Paley Center "best of New York City" Then again, the town of Bethpage on Long Island, which for some reason feels qualified to weigh in on New York City museums, rated the Paley Center a “best museum and best children’s party place” in New York in 2023. So…you may want to take that into account as you evaluate whether you should visit.

The Paley Center’s library of 160,000 old television shows and commercials was revolutionary in the early 90s. In today’s world of infinite streaming, it’s much less impressive. Speaking of old commercials, it reminds me of this 1999 ad from a long-defunct phone company. I suspect there’s much old television programming on the Paley Center hard drives that’s not available anywhere else. Maybe there are lost treasures waiting for a reboot. Or maybe it’s just a lot of poorly acted, standard definition time wasters brimming with casual racism and outdated views of women. I think I’ll stick with Hulu.

For Reference:

Address	25 West 52nd Street, Manhattan
Website	https://www.paleycenter.org/
Cost	General Admission: $20
Other Relevant Links	Apple Macintosh 1984 ad Spuds McKenzie If you’re seeking a particular old show, you can check whether The Paley Center Library has it before you go

July 17, 2023July 17, 2023

Museum of Broadway

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	137 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The “Oklahoma!” exhibit contains a small, framed, handwritten scrap of paper that contains every rhyme Oscar Hammerstein could think of for “surry,” including “occur he,” “furry,” “chauffeur-y,” and “arbitrury” [sic]. It’s not my favorite song but the peek it provides into his songwriting process delights me.

When I discovered New York was getting a Museum of Broadway my first reaction was “Wait, why don’t we have one of those already?” It seems an obvious and overdue subject for a New York museum. I felt a little on the fence about it given my aversion to “museum in name only” experiential entertainment offerings. If they hand out flyers for it in Times Square, and charge $69 for “daily anytime entry,” can it be a legitimate museum? But, I figured I should take a look.

The Museum of Broadway is appropriately on West 45th Street between 6th Avenue and Broadway. It would be amazing if it were in a defunct theater, but instead it occupies four windowless floors of what I’d guess used to be office space. Very friendly staff greet visitors on the ground floor, then send them up three flights of stairs (there’s an elevator if needed) to start the museum experience.

Ease on down the exhaustive wall timeline

Like an IKEA, visitors to the Museum of Broadway follow a very directed journey. While people can meander at their own pace, there’s only ever one way to go. Instead of a series of gallery spaces, the bulk of a Museum of Broadway visit consists of a sequence of rooms and hallways that offer a chronological tour of the New York theater scene from its earliest days to the present.

Visitors arrive at the top floor and spend a quick minute getting a welcome from a docent and a quick quiz: What makes a Broadway theater a Broadway theater? That’s followed by a welcome video promoting the awesomeness of live theater, and then visitors are turned loose at the start of the timeline, in about 1890.

The earliest history of theater/theatre in New York City The timeline panels are text heavy and extremely detailed. Some of the early ones distinguish between plays and musicals, but later panels tend to run together, as though the curators realized they were running out of both time and space. No sane visitor has a prayer of reading all of them. Rather, I suppose, you just look for things that catch your eye, favorite shows or stars, or key moments in Broadway history. Frank Langella in Seascape, 1975, at the Museum of Broadway

For example, in the midst of a busy panel covering the mid-1970s I was stopped in my tracks by a picture of Frank Langella and Maureen Ackerman dressed as giant lizards (!) in a 1975 Edward Albee (!!) play called “Seascape” that somehow won the Pulitzer Prize (!!!). If more Broadway shows had giant lizards in them, I’d probably see more Broadway shows. “Godzilla: The Musical,” anyone?

Timeline sections are very smartly punctuated by installations related to specific shows or (in a few cases) people. These feature specially commissioned art, actual costumes, props, or other artifacts, and occasionally video interviews and interactive features. And, perhaps inevitably, prompts that this spot or that spot would be great opportunities to take a selfie.

Stars of the show

These show-focused installations were generally fantastic. I won’t spoil them all, but will share a few personal highlights.

Museum of Broadway: Sondheim wordplay

An anagram crossword puzzle that makes a fitting tribute to Stephen Sondheim.
A couple of Julie Taymor’s fantastic puppets from “The Lion King.”
In honor of the longest-running show in Broadway history, an art piece consisting of 13,981 crystals (one for each performance!) suspended in such a way that if you stand in the exact right spot they form the Phantom of the Opera’s mask. As obsessive and magical as Andrew Lloyd Webber himself.

Museum of Broadway: the Phantom in crystals

Acts II and III

Museum of Broadway: Hamilton swag The timeline sequence is quite long, taking up the first two floors of the museum. Eventually visitors arrive at the present, which features a model set for “Wicked” and a couple of costumes from “Hamilton.” That makes this the most self-referential entry yet on the Hamilton Museum Tour of NYC. (Other notable stops include Hamilton Grange, the Morris-Jumel Mansion, and Trinity Church.)

The timeline ends with a few empty columns for 2023, 2024, and 2025, suggesting that either the museum, Broadway, New York City, humanity, or the planet only has a few years to go. We’ll see.

I wonder about the amount of time and space spent on Broadway’s relatively ancient history. Broadway’s post-90s, post-Disney renaissance felt rushed, which I found odd given that’s the era most visitors are most likely to know and connect with.

Museum of Broadway: props. Specifically, sausages — Prop sausages

The floor below the timeline sections shifts gears. It combines multimedia, interactive displays, and artifacts to break down all the behind-the-scenes parts of a production. Different sections illuminate writing, props, costumes, scenery, lighting, and all the rest of the many pieces that make up a theatrical production.

For those who dream of producing, directing, or even marketing (yep, marketers get love, too) a show, this section provides provides immense, even overwhelming, amounts of information on how the sausage gets made. Museum of Broadway: all about costume designers

Visitors then descend one final staircase to the ground floor and exit through an inevitable gift shop.

Museum of Broadway: Exit through the gift shop

Should you visit the Museum of Broadway?

Museum of Broadway: all the roles that go into making a theater production The Museum of Broadway was created with passion and love — obsession may not be too strong a word — for its subject. This is a place geared for people who love the theater, and who already know something about it. On the other hand, total novices may be bewildered or bored. Moreover, although worlds better than those cynical, experiential quasi-museums that separate tourists from their money, this is unquestionably one of New York’s most expensive museums.

Nonetheless, the Museum of Broadway delivers a mix of erudition, surprises and delights, and showbiz pizazz. I’m not the biggest Broadway fan and still spent over two engaging hours there. Anyone who was a theater kid in high school, who gets excited when they get tickets to a show, or who has a shoebox full of old Playbills, will find a visit worthwhile.

That said, I do mean “a visit.” The biggest downside to the timeline layout is it makes for a fairly static experience. There is a small space for temporary exhibits. Currently it features “Chicago,” which at 26 years is (post-Phantom) Broadway’s longest running show. But unless the curators find ways to change things up periodically, I’m not sure that even big Broadway fans will feel much need to see this show a second time.

Museum of Broadway: Lifecycle of a Broadway Show

For Reference:

Address	145 West 45th Street, Manhattan
Website	https://www.themuseumofbroadway.com/
Cost	General Admission: $34-$41 or more (!!) My advice: take advantage of the discount on Tuesdays and avoid the service charge by not buying tickets in advance.
Other Relevant Links	“The Surrey with the Fringe on Top“

July 9, 2023July 9, 2023

Hispanic Society of America

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	60 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Sorolla’s entire mural series (which I write about below) was easily the best thing. However if I had to pick just one panel, I’d go with Seville/The Dance, which evokes Carmen… the happy, carefree parts, not the stabby misogynistic ones. My little internet photo does not do it justice!

Note: I first visited the Hispanic Society in May of 2022. I revised my review in July 2023 as the Society has continued its reopening. The original review is here.

Iberian Dreams…

Like many other institutions around New York City, the Hispanic Society of America was founded by a rich guy who became obsessed with something. Think Gustav Heye and what is now the New York branch of the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian, or Mr. Frick’s collection or Mr. Morgan’s library… Occasionally it was an obsessed rich woman, like Jacques Marchais’s thing for Tibetan Art or the artistic passions of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

In the case of the Hispanic Society, the rich dude was Archer Milton Huntington. And the obsession was the art of the Iberian peninsula. Archer Milton Huntington opened his Spanish Museum in 1908, though he’d dreamed of having a museum of some kind since he was a boy. Born very rich, the story goes that as a young man Huntington fell in love with Hispanic art on a visit to Mexico, which sparked many trips to Spain, learning Spanish as well as Arabic, and becoming both a connoisseur of and an expert in the art and culture.

Hispanic Society Museum and Library, Exterior, New York

The Hispanic Society is located in a splendid Beaux-Arts building in Harlem, part of the Audubon Terrace campus. It’s an interesting quirk of fate that Spanish is much more likely to be spoken in the museum’s neighborhood today than when it opened there over a century ago. The beautiful old building is a blessing and a curse: the museum closed for a massive renovation shortly before I started my museum project back in 2017, and remained closed until 2022.

Recently, the Hispanic Society entered the second phase of its reopening, following the teaser “we’re back” exhibition that I saw in its basement last year.

Hispanic Society Main Entrance (under construction)

Soto and Sorolla

The Hispanic Society has now reopened two spaces: its Main Court and the Sorolla Room. The Main Court has two levels (though only the ground floor is currently open) and is something like a roofed-over medieval cloister, featuring an open space surrounded by ornate archways and a small corridor running around the perimeter under the mezzanine. It is an exciting space, though its relatively small size limits what the Society can exhibit there.

Hispanic Society interior

Nevertheless, the cleverness of the Hispanic Society’s reopening exhibit belied its small space.

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida was a famous Spanish painter (“the most esteemed and renowned Spanish painter of his era,” per a wall text) who died in 1923. Jesús Soto was a Venezuelan abstractionist who made highly formal geometric sculptures who was born in 1923. That coincidental birth/death centennial year provides a somewhat tenuous justification for exhibiting their work together. However, each artist was interesting in his own right, and together they bridge the old Hispanic Society/ new Hispanic Society philosophy regarding curation and collecting.

That philosophy, by the way, has evolved from a focus mainly on the Old World to including the New, and from classic and retrospective to embracing contemporary work.

Hispanic Society's Sorolla and Soto exhibit, 2023, New York

I appreciated the way the Hispanic Society installed Sorolla’s bourgeois society portraits in the arches of its Main Court. Floating in space they echoed the 3D, geometric, sculptural layering of Soto’s work.

Jesús Rafael Soto, Untitled

The Sorolla Room

The Sorolla Room is something else. Much like the Spanish Inquisition, I was not expecting it. Back in 1909, the Hispanic Society held the first major US exhibit of Joaquín Sorolla’s work. Based on the success of that show, Archer Milton Huntington commissioned Sorolla to create a series of murals depicting life in España, installed in the eponymous room.

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida's Vision of Spain murals at The Hispanic Society

The murals are a delight — packed with regional detail. Colorful and exotic, they combine mundane scenes with holidays and festivals. I might feel concern that they’re a bit too exoticizing, but, hey, Sorolla was Spanish, I think it’s safe to assume he knew what he was painting. I want to take a guided tour of these murals, or at least come back and visit many more times.

The Hispanic Society installed another exhibit in the Sorolla room, entitled “Jewels in a Gem,” featuring the work of Luz Camino, a contemporary Spanish jewelry designer. This worked surprisingly well. The installation was designed to leave the murals unimpeded and the jewelry complemented what was on the walls — sometimes directly. For example, I appreciated the fishbone earrings in a case juxtaposed with a fish market scene.

Luz Camino, fishbone earrings at the Hispanic Society

Fish Market from Sorolla's Vision of Spain murals, Hispanic Society Camino’s work reminds me of early 20th century jewelry by Lalique or Cartier. It draws heavily on nature, but also has a healthy dose of humor. I don’t know who would want enamel and gold earrings lovingly shaped into popcorn, but I respect that person.

Although full of beautiful things, my one nitpick is the exhibit would have been richer had it included some of Camino’s notebooks, design sketches, and other preparatory work — I love seeing inside a designer’s creative process.

Luz Camino, popcorn earrings

Should You Visit the Hispanic Society Museum?

I’m excited that the Hispanic Society has continued its return to life as a museum. Its important collection and beautiful building are invaluable restorations to the New York’s cultural fabric.

With this phase of its reopening, the Hispanic Society has gone from being “worth a quick stop if you happen to be in that part of Harlem” (quoting myself from 2022) to being well worth a trip. The Sorolla murals are arguably the closest thing Manhattan offers to a visit to Spain. (Mercado Little Spain at Hudson Yards is the other contender…)

The Hispanic Society would make a good combination with the splendid Morris-Jumel Mansion, both historic buildings. It is also close to the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling if you’ve got kids in tow.

Hispanic Society of America Stairway — Upstairs coming soon (I hope)

I chatted with a friendly guard who said that the Society expects to have more gallery space open by autumn. I’m already excited about making another visit.

Hopefully part of the longer-term plan will make the pleasant piazza of Audubon Terrace more inviting, too. An al fresco café or tapas bar would be fantastic there (where’s José Andrés when you need him?!). Sculptures on the terrace immortalize Don Quixote (yay), the conquistadors (boo), and El Cid (I think he’s a “yay” but your mileage may vary…). The terrace was once a sort of Lincoln Center of cultural institutions, featuring the American Indian Museum, the American Numismatic Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That last one is still there, and occasionally open for exhibitions, too.

Audubon Terrace Plaza — El Cid, by Anna Hyatt Huntington

For Reference:

Address	613 W 155th Street, Manhattan
Website	hispanicsociety.org
Cost	General Admission: Free
Other relevant links	Mercado Little Spain (tapas and more by José Andrés) Luz Camino, Madrid