Uncategorized Archives - Page 5 of 22

April 16, 2018

Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning

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Should you go?
Time spent	21 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Joseph S. Bell-Bey’s abstract acrylics were pretty cool. I particularly liked his deep blue one. Joseph S. Bell-Bey, “Bye Bye Bluebird”

In the late 1960s a group of business and community leaders in Jamaica, Queens decided to do something to try to arrest the decline of the Jamaica Avenue shopping district. Among other strategies, they decided their neighborhood needed a new arts institution.

The City abandoning its beautiful, Italian Renaissance-style Queens Register of Titles & Deeds building around the same time created an opportunity for some adaptive reuse, and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning was born in 1972.

Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning Programming at JCAL heavily emphasizes the performing arts, film screenings and lectures. JCAL’s main building has a theater, and it manages a nearby church building as a converted performing arts space. Classes are also a big part of the mission, including workshops and after-school programs for kids.

The JCAL building also houses a pair of gallery spaces, where it puts on several art exhibitions each year. It’s in that capacity that I paid a visit. Continue reading “Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning”

April 12, 2018May 17, 2023

American Museum of Natural History

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent	168 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Who am I kidding. I’m pondering, “What’s my favorite thing at AMNH?” when there’s no way I would pick anything besides the dinosaurs. Triceratops was my favorite as a kid. Undoubtedly were I cooler I would’ve picked a carnivore. But whatever. Triceratops it is.

I published the review below on April 18, 2018. I just added a new entry with some thoughts on the new (as of 2023) AMNH expansion, the Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. Please check that out in addition to the following!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about space.

‘Space,’ it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.

I quote that not because the American Museum of Natural History is home to the Hayden Planetarium, a great place to learn about space. Although it is. Instead I quote it because at 111,000 square meters (1.2 million square feet), the American Museum of Natural History is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is.

American Museum of Natural History, New York — Hayden Planetarium

And yet, whereas space is mostly utterly empty, so empty that stars and galaxies and planets and museums and all lesser matter is basically a rounding error on the emptiness of the vacuum, the American Museum of Natural History is almost always totally full. Of kids and harried parents.

Mindbogglingly full. All sucked in by the vast gravity of its impressive, unparalleled displays of taxidermied animals, dinosaur fossils, the wonders of space, gems, minerals and meteorites, artifacts and every other thing scientific-type people have sorted, classified and analyzed over the past century and change. Continue reading “American Museum of Natural History”

April 9, 2018

National Museum of Mathematics

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent	137 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The Museum of Math puts model racing cars on a Möbius strip track and lets kids drive them round and round. Möbius racing car track The depiction and the accompanying explanation of how one-sided shapes work are rich and complex, and epitomize the museum’s approach to learning.

The National Museum of Mathematics (or, inevitably, MoMath, sigh), occupies two floors of a deep, somewhat narrow storefront on the northern border of Madison Square Park. You know you’ve reached the right place because the door handles form a red letter π.

Automated vending machines dispense unique, reusable tags for visitors to wear. There’s a lot they could do to customize the visitor’s experience based on the tags. Possibly the things generate a useful datastream showing visitors’ paths through the museum and the exhibits they try or skip. I hope they do, at least; I didn’t see much in the way of visitor-facing uses of them. In which case why not use a traditional sticker or little metal badge? Continue reading “National Museum of Mathematics”

April 2, 2018

Hunter College Art Galleries

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Time spent	205 Hudson: 21 minutes Leubsdorf: 12 minutes East Harlem: 17 minutes Artist’s Institute: 3 minutes Total: 53 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	At 205 Hudson, Dario Robelto’s “I Miss Everyone Who Has Ever Gone Away,” 1997 recreated 2007. Little airplanes folded from the wrappers of candies from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s famous candy-pile artworks memorializing AIDS victims. It’s artistic appropriation in the most unexpected and literal way.

I discovered early in this project that just about every college in New York City has some kind of public art gallery or museum. Some are extremely impressive, like NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. A few have a specific focus, like the Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art. And some of them are surprisingly impressive and hard to get to, like the Lehman College Art Gallery and the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College.

Hunter College boasts not one but four art venues, collectively the “Hunter College Art Galleries.” If this were earlier in my museum expedition, I probably would write about each of them separately. At this stage, though, I crave variety in my write-ups, to say nothing of efficiency. And Hunter itself thinks of them in the collective. So my review covers all four spaces in one. It gets four dots on the map, though. Continue reading “Hunter College Art Galleries”

March 27, 2018March 27, 2018

Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum

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Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent	32 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	In addition to the historic photos and artifacts the museum has a series of odd, delicate, contemporary wire sculptures hanging below the skylight. I couldn’t find any explanation for who made them or why they were there. Google solves the mini-mystery: they’re by Judy Moonelis.

Almost all Jewish people in the U.S. are either Ashkenazi or Sephardic. Ashkenazi Jews trace their ancestry to central or eastern Europe, while Sephardic people lived in the Iberian peninsula, until they were expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella. However, they are not the only European Judaic traditions. Tucked away on Broome Street in the Lower East Side is the only synagogue in the Western Hemisphere serving Romaniote Jews, a distinct, ancient, Greek community.

Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagoge and Museum, Lower East Side

The congregation of Kehila Kedosha Janina occupies a modest 1927 building, currently one of the last active synagogues on the Lower East Side. And since 1997 the building has also housed a museum on its upstairs floor– open only on Sundays as of this review– presenting photographs and artifacts describing the community and its traditions. Continue reading “Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum”

March 24, 2018

Staten Island Museum

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Time spent	94 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	I had completely forgotten about New York’s state fossil, until the Staten Island Museum reminded me. It’s a sea scorpion or eurypterid, which I would absolutely not want to meet on a Jurassic beach. The State Fossil!

The Staten Island Museum started as a private pooling of personal natural history collections in 1881, opening to the public in 1908. Currently it claims to be New York’s only truly encyclopedic museum, embracing science, history, and art. And so it does, albeit in small doses of each.

The museum formerly resided in a classical building in St. George, near the Staten Island Ferry, until last year, when it moved to Snug Harbor. It’s a bus or car ride from the ferry terminal, but at least the architecture is still appropriately museum-y.

Staten Island Museum

The Snug Harbor Cultural Center is Staten Island’s Mall of Enlightenment. A Chinese Scholar’s Garden, a Children’s Museum, the fantastic Noble Maritime Collection, the hit-or-miss Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, and the Staten Island Museum all reside within its more-or-less renovated, beautiful, Greek revival grounds and buildings. Continue reading “Staten Island Museum”

March 20, 2018March 20, 2018

National Track and Field Hall of Fame

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Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent	75 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The black and red bars near the ceiling are the world’s highest pole vaults… The curators integrated visual depictions of track and field world records into the exhibition. Bars mark heights of high jumps, lines on the floor show long jumps and shot puts and such. It’s one thing to read a record, a much more viscerally impressive thing to see one in the flesh.

This is my second hall of fame (after the Hall of Fame for Great Americans), and the second museum in one of New York’s antique armory buildings (after the Park Avenue Armory). However, it is my first museum devoted to a sport. New York doesn’t have, say, a museum to baseball or football. Or soccer.

Metropolitan Museum of Art — Baseball cards at The Met

There are sports legends waxified at Madame Tussaud’s. The Jackie Robinson Museum hopefully exists in New York’s future. And the Met has its baseball card collection, which I suspect it keeps mainly to show it’s even more encyclopedic than the Louvre. But in general sports are an underserved museum topic in New York City.

The National Track and Field Hall of Fame resides in the 1909 22nd Core of Engineers Armory in Harlem. The entire building is now a track-and-field complex, with a running track in the vast former drill hall. Like most of New York’s armories the architecture is cool and castle-like.

Continue reading “National Track and Field Hall of Fame”

March 16, 2018March 17, 2018

United Nations Headquarters

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Should you go?
Time spent	138 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Octavio Roth’s depiction of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as cheerful, colorful lithographs. I particularly like the one about the right to leisure, which uses sailing as its visual. Octavio Roth, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN

As I was walking toward the East River on 42nd Street to meet a friend for my 11:30 tour of the United Nations, I realized that this institution breaks one of the rules of my museum project. I set out to visit every museum in New York City. Technically, in a legalistic, treaty sense of the world, the 17-ish acres of Manhattan occupied by the UN are not part of New York, or even of the United States. The UN is its own extranational entity. So from that perspective it isn’t a “New York museum.”

Then again, I should be less pedantic.

United Nations

Continue reading “United Nations Headquarters”

March 15, 2018

Clemente Center

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Should you go?
Time spent	22 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Pat Lay’s cheery-creepy cyborg sculptures, particularly the punk-borg “Transhuman Personae #12”

I’ve never been to an art gallery in 19th century school building that also housed an Escape the Room game before. But there is a first time for everything, particularly when you’re determined to go to every museum in New York City.

Clemente Center

The Clemente Center occupies P.S. 160, a public school building dating to 1897, built in the grand institutional gothic style, all pointed arches and stone- and iron-work. Abandoned as a school due to a fire in the pyromaniacal 1970s, the Clemente Soto Vélez Center was founded in 1993. It operates a number of endeavors in the building, including four theaters, artist studios, rehearsal spaces, two art galleries, and the aforementioned Escape the Room game.

The vestibule features a plaque from its founding as P.S. 160, with the names of a slew of great and good late 19th C. Dead White Males who contributed. Times have changed. Continue reading “Clemente Center”

March 14, 2018

Westbeth Gallery

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent	51 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	A set of four large, multipanel works by Karina Cavat, who curated the show, and who resides in a Westbeth apartment. And with whom I had a really interesting conversation. Karina Cavat, “Cook” They’re all dense views of burgeoning nature gone haywire. If I had to choose one, I’d pick “Cook,” an homage to a Weber grill.

On the far, far, western borders of the West Village a huge building complex occupies the entire block from Bank to Bethune and Washington to West Streets. Today this is Westbeth Artists’ Housing, founded in 1970 as a place for working artists to find affordable housing and studio space. To this day, artists live and work, show and teach there. Westbeth also provides a home base to the New School’s drama department and the Martha Graham Dance Studio, among other cultural institutions.

Westbeth Artists Housing

The complex also houses a gallery space, showing work from resident and nonresident artists alike. However, Westbeth’s arts incarnation belies an older and even more intriguing history. Continue reading “Westbeth Gallery”