| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value | |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 45 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | It can be hard for an untrained modern viewer to distinguish between youths and women in Japanese prints. There are subtle but important hairstyle and fabric differences but in terms of face and body shape, they were depicted very similarly. I wonder how many pretty women I’ve seen in woodblock prints over the years have actually been pretty dudes. |
The Japan Society’s home, Japan House, was designed in 1971, by architects Junzo Yoshimura and George Shimamoto of Gruzen & Partners, and built on a site near the United Nations donated by the Society’s then-president, John D. Rockefeller the Third. The Society’s history, however, goes back much further than that; it was founded in 1907 in the wake of an official U.S. visit by two Japanese dignitaries. Its fortunes have waxed and waned along with Japan-U.S. relations, and today the society is a great place to take a language class, hear a talk, see a movie, or see some art.
The building feels simultaneously modern (for a midcentury architectural definition of same) and Japanese, and the first thing you notice on entering is the sound of water from a gentle fountain, replete with a stand of bamboo, a modernist, completely enclosed and skylit, take on a traditional courtyard garden.
The Society’s gallery space is on the second floor, in rooms arrayed around the courtyard. They program all kinds of stuff there. It’s one of the first places I saw Haruki Murakami’s work; they’ve done great shows on crafts like contemporary Japanese basketwaving and ceramics; they did a show a couple of years ago on cats in Japanese art (I bet the Brooklyn curators were jealous the Japan Society thought of it first)… It’s a broad and varied list, always tied back to Japan.
The current show is called A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints, and looks at societal impressions of essentially tween- and teenage boys in early modern Japan. It makes the case that they were viewed as beautiful and desirable by both men and women, and displays a variety of contemporary woodblock prints, books, and other artifacts to examine how they were depicted and described in that society.
I am emphatically not going to use this blog to discuss concepts of gender or the politics of sexuality. But I was disturbed by this exhibition, because it robs the subject of the show of all agency: there’s nothing in it that says whether tween and teen boys in Japan liked being or wanted to be the objects of lustful attentions from grown up men and women. To me it feels uncomfortably like looking at TV shows and advertising from 1950s and 1960s America and concluding that women then enjoyed being secretaries and housewives and having their butts pinched by the boss.
My misgivings aside, like all Japan Society exhibitions I’ve attended it was well curated and thoughtfully designed. While none of the pieces in it is super-famous or a masterpiece, it leverages depth of collection to examine an otherwise unknown facet of life in Tokugawa Era (ca 1600-1868) Japan.
Unless you’re a fan of the Land of the Rising Sun (full disclosure, I am a fan, and have been a member of the Japan Society for well over a decade) I don’t think the Japan Society generally merits a special trip to the far eastern reaches of midtown Manhattan. But they put on a good show, and if you happen to be by the United Nations it’s an excellent place to imbibe some culture that will almost certainly be beautiful and interesting.
For Reference:
| Address | 333 E 47th Street, Manhattan |
|---|---|
| Website | japansociety.org |
| Cost | General Admission: $12 |
| Other Relevant Links |
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Jesse Chun’s Landscape series. What look like stylized, slightly monochrome landscape prints and turn out to be extremely enlarged images from passport pages. They are beautiful, meaningful, and you can play “what country is that?” with them.
Lehman College occupies a lovely campus (built as the Bronx campus of Hunter College in 1931) in the far northern reaches of the Bronx, a couple of stops south of the terminus of the number 4 train. Like most colleges, its architecture is a mix of classical and modern, the former mostly beautiful, the latter mostly notsomuch.
Lehman College’s Fine Arts Building (modern) is home to a small museum space, divided into two galleries. On the day I visited, one of them was filled with propaganda posters from the first and second World Wars. It was also in the midst of having its floor painted, and therefore while I could peek in, I couldn’t enter without tracking paint all over the creation, which the painting contractors politely asked me not to do.
Space number two was the larger, arranged around a central column supporting the roof of the building, which sloped down from all sides to the column, in a modern show of form following function, of the sort that makes me think, “yes, it does, but you could’ve done it differently and gotten both better function and better form.”
I didn’t quite know what to expect from a community college in the far reaches of the Bronx. Lehman’s other current show, “Alien Nations,” surprised and delighted me. I’m used to contemporary art being hit or miss — everyone’s tastes are different, and mine are notably quirky, so in any show of young, contemporary artists I expect to see at most one or two pieces I really like, and rather more that I really don’t. This show fired on all cylinders. 
The museum occupies a modern building that has a very early-millennium feel to it (it opened in 2004). One of the things this project is giving me is a very strong sense of how hard it is to do a glass atrium for a museum that doesn’t age like a 1980s Marriott. The Bronx Museum has an atrium that must’ve looked fresh and modern when it opened, but already, not so much. It’s a real museum, though, with a tiny gift shop, a (lackluster) cafe, and expansive gallery spaces on the ground floor, and an event area and terrace on the second floor.
You enter the building into an oddly shaped (ah, the vogue for asymmetry in the early 2000s) space, containing the ticket/info desk and the cafe, as well as a ramp that leads to one gallery space and from there to stairs up to the second floor.
Something that’s stuck with me from my visit is this sign, a patient explanation in English, Spanish, and French about why you shouldn’t touch artworks in museums. My first reaction was that of a smug, overeducated museum veteran. And I wondered whether the sort of person inclined to touch a piece of art in a museum is the type of person who’d bother reading a sign that explains why that’s bad for the art. But on further reflection I see in it an indicator that this museum’s constituency isn’t generally me.
The Bronx has gone all in on Cuba. It’s currently running a show called Wild Noise/Ruido Salvage on contemporary Cuban art from the 1970s until now. This show is dynamite. Complex, diverse, and expansive, I came away from it feeling like I have a sense of the breadth of Cuban art today. I also feel like if this show were at say the Brooklyn Museum or even one of the smaller art museums of Manhattan, it would be something of a blockbuster. The museum claims that this is “the most extensive cultural exchange between Cuba and the United States in five decades” and also says that five years of work and research went into this. I believe it. Super timely, and canny in other ways, too: a significant number of the pieces in the exhibit are now part of the museum’s collection.
Finally there were some pretty colored acrylic abstractions by Arlene Slavin on the terrace, and a series of photographs by Clayton Frazier of the people of St. Dominique (aka Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
Oh and a chunk of the old Yankee Stadium. Because it is the Bronx.
The BBG’s amazing tulip collection was going full-force the day I visited. This time of year always makes me think that the Dutch 17th century tulip-mania wasn’t entirely irrational.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG) is one of the two great arboretums (arboreta?) in the city. It’s sibling/rival is the New York Botanic Garden in the Bronx, and there are a number of other botanic gardens of note, to say nothing of the great parks. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is also a bit problematic for me: it was on the original list of all the museums in NYC, and even back in February I can remember thinking, “but is a botanic garden really a kind of museum?”
At best the answer is “sort of.” I think of botanic gardens as zoos for plants, more than museums of plants. What’s the difference? A zoo and a museum can both be places of edification and entertainment. But I had trouble ranking BBG on the scale I’m using for this project–it didn’t turn out well, not because it’s a bad place, but because the museum yardstick doesn’t really work for it.
The annual Sakura Matsuri, or Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival, is a bonkers mix of cosplay and traditional dance and music. Packed with people but worth it.
Of course the garden is educational and beautiful. 
Almost better than the content was the array of antique tube monitors they scrounged up to show the video on. It’s been long enough that these bulky, cubical relics are starting to look alien to me. TV was so much better on one of these fuzzy old behemoths, said no one ever.
The African Burial Ground is a small monument overshadowed by the government buildings around Foley Square. As they were digging for a new federal building in 1991 they discovered bodies, and from there re-discovered a forgotten cemetery used by the city’s African American population in the late 1600s and early 1700s.
Today a corner of what used to be the cemetery is a small green open space with a black granite monument, standing in for a headstone. There aren’t any markers, of course, and if it weren’t for the signs and a series of low humps of earth, you’d probably just think it was a pocket park. It’s not the whole extent of the cemetery, as this city is sufficiently about commerce and building that it won’t let the past fully forestall progress, even when that past includes the earthly remains of slaves.
The African Burial Ground is definitely not entertaining. But it is important. Every New Yorker and everyone with an interest in the city and its history should go and pay their respects.
Utterly unsurprisingly, there were four references to Michelle Obama in the text for the Black Fashion Designers show. Because I really miss having her in the White House, I’ll pick the Laura Smalls sundress Mrs. Obama wore on Carpool Karaoke.
If I think about the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), it’s generally in terms of the building — the brutalist concrete pile that jumps over 27th Street at 7th Avenue, the anchor tenant of the Garment District. I’ve walked by it many times and surely I’ve seen the sign that said “museum” — it’s pretty evident. But not being especially a part of that world, I probably just glossed over it, edited it out, walked on. The Museum Project ensures that doesn’t happen anymore. My museum-dar is now top-notch.
Through a door, the second room opened upward and outward, to about triple height, a real surprise given the subterranean location. Again black, but this was a wide-open, encompassing space filled, tastefully and carefully, with islands of beautifully dressed mannequins stretching into the distance. “Zou bisou bisou” (but not the Mad Men version) playing in the background quietly set the tone. I’ve discovered I like museums that use music subtly and cleverly to set a tone or convey a time. Here it works particularly well.
I didn’t spend a lot of time at the Museum at FIT, but that was mainly because I had a meeting to get to. Even with my fairly limited knowledge of and interest in clothing, I could’ve spent another 15 or 20 minutes. Both shows were expertly and lovingly curated and beautifully presented. I have no doubt that FIT has the resources to deliver an authoritative exhibition on any fashionable topic it cares to. And both exhibits zoomed in on subjects that the Met Fashion Institute, with its more general audience, probably wouldn’t do.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA for short). I knew the space would be great — it was designed by Maya Lin. But having recently been a bit disappointed by 
MOCA is indeed a beautifully designed museum. The space is consists of a series of rooms that surround a central open atrium, which extends from a skylight down to the classrooms, office, and restrooms on the basement level. Scarred bare brick underscores the age of the building, and its more industrial heritage. And windows carved into the rooms around the atrium ensure there’s always some natural light filtering in. The windows aren’t just openings, though: videos projected onto them make them serve a very clever dual purpose — the videos are also visible, of course, from the atrium side of the glass as well.
The educational program succeeds as well as the building does. MOCA does exactly what you’d expect: tells the story of the Chinese immigrant experience in the United States. The show is largely chronological, starting with Chinese immigration to build the railroads and the subsequent racist reactions to Chinese immigration in the 19th century, which led to laws that essentially prevented most Chinese immigration, as well as constraining the kinds of work Chinese immigrants could do.
In addition to the main space, there are two areas for temporary exhibitions. They currently feature an awesome look at Chinese food in the US, featuring about 33 chefs. Wall projections show video interviews where they speak about their lives and work and their take on “authenticity.” The museum set up one room like a banquet, with place settings for each chef that includes a short bio. This is a missed opportunity in our photogenic food-obsessed instagram age: there should be pictures of each chef’s signature dish at their setting. Still it’s a fun show, including a collection of personally meaningful objects: cleavers, cutting boards, menus, and such. Martin Yan’s wok is there, and Danny Bowien’s favorite spoon.
El Museo del Barrio is currently the northernmost of the “Museum Mile” museums, occupying a stately building on Fifth Avenue, just across 104th Street from the Museum of the City of New York. According to its website, it started in the early 1970s as a cultural center focused on Puerto Rico. It has since expanded its focus to cover all Latin American and Caribbean art and artists. After bouncing around East Harlem a bit it found its current home in the Heckscher Building in 1977.
The main show when I visited was of video art by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, as well as selections she chose from the museum’s permanent collection. I run hot and cold with video art. On the one hand, two of the best, most memorable works of art I’ve seen in the past two years were video pieces. On the other hand, I am bored to tears with the vast majority of it. Muñoz’s work, largely non-narrative, did little for me. I lacked the eye or knowledge to understand how her selections from the permanent collection clicked with what she’s trying to do.
The other show featured recent acquisitions, definitely a common and valid theme for a museum, although given the small space available, I didn’t find it very edifying as far as key current trends in Latin or Caribbean art. I liked some of the pieces, but I also thought much of the work on view wasn’t especially “Latin.”
If you aren’t a local, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Brooklyn Museum is all about Brooklyn. There is 
The biggest show on currently is Georgia O’Keeffe: A Living Modern, portraying her more as icon than as artist. It blends some of her paintings with clothes from throughout her life, and photographs of her taken by everyone from Alfred Steiglitz to Cecil Beaton to Karsh to Richard Avedon. It’s fascinating to see how so many different photographers viewed one individual, and how easy it is to tell those with whom O’Keeffe clicked, and those with whom she didn’t. It’s also fascinating to see how carefully she controlled her own image from the start of her career. By her later years, you don’t even need to see her head. Gnarled hands holding an animal’s skull against a black, belted dress lit by harsh desert light communicate exactly whom you are looking at. This is the Brooklyn Museum doing something different, fresh, unexpected, and doing it well.
And its efforts have alienated at least some of its core audience –i.e., me. Prior to this visit, I hadn’t gone since a Takashi Murakami show in 2008. It hasn’t done anything to make me want to go. Should you go? Yes. But go knowing that some of the Brooklyn Museum’s efforts at being edgy, innovative, or populist are terrible, and therefore it isn’t as good as it could or should be.