| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value | |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 52 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned |  I’m impressed by the sheer blackness of the Folk Art Museum’s gallery space, as designed for the Gabritschevsky show. It’s super different from anywhere else I’ve seen art yet. |
CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, In April of 2025 the American Folk Art Museum closed for renovations to its building. The museum expects to reopen in 2028.
I have a problem with the idea of “folk art.” In my mind, it always translates as “art that’s just not very good.” The naive stuff, the outsider stuff, the untrained stuff, the stuff made by people not right in the head…always it feels to me like there’s some qualifier that attaches to the creator or the work that sets your expectations lower. And for me art is all about high expectations. I know there’s a Museum of Bad Art, and that’s cool. Badness can, if it’s bad enough, be instructive and entertaining. But I wouldn’t want to go to a museum of mediocre art. So I’d never been to the Folk Art Museum.
The Folk Art Museum also has one of the sadder recent histories among the city’s cultural institutions. The museum built itself a large and beautiful home down the block from the Museum of Modern Art back in 2001. However, demand to see folk art is apparently far smaller than they figured, and they couldn’t pay back what they borrowed to build it. So the museum sold its building to MoMA in 2011 and moved uptown to a much, much smaller space in the white marble monolith that houses the Church of the Latter Day Saints diagonally across from Lincoln Center. MoMA has since controversially demolished the old building, which really was striking, to further its own relentless expansion.
This is particularly sad because the museum has a substantial collection, but nowhere to display it. When I visited, all of the small yet cavernous space was devoted to work by two artists, both in the “not right in the head” category.
Eugen Gabritschevsky was Russian born and well on his way to a promising career in the biological sciences, including postdoctorate work at Columbia, when in 1931 he was institutionalized in Germany. Carlo Zinelli was born in Italy in 1916 and committed to a psychiatric hospital in Verona in 1947, where he lived the rest of his life, until 1974. Aside from both being in mental institutions, the two men and their art had little in common that I could see.
I’m going to be looking at more art by institutionalized people when I go to the Living Museum, at some point in this project. It often feels uncomfortable, like it’s exploitative, or like there’s so little basis for understanding what the artist was thinking that any interpretation on my part is presumptuous.
But should you go to the Folk Art Museum? They know what they’re doing. The two exhibits were beautifully installed, they used iPads cleverly, wall texts were generally great, and I really liked the way they suspend frames via cables, so that they float in the air. But I’m not sure the museum in its current incarnation is going to win any hearts and minds. If you already have a deep love of folk art, you should go. Everyone else can feel just fine skipping it.
For Reference:
| Address | 2 Lincoln Square, Manhattan – TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS (THROUGH 2028) |
|---|---|
| Website | folkartmuseum.org |
| Cost | Free |
| Other Relevant Links |
Visiting Gracie Mansion for this project made me realize I knew nothing about Gracie Mansion, beyond the name.
I was just 
Here’s another place that I had no idea existed before starting this project. The Society of Illustrators occupies a very handsome townhouse on East 63rd Street, and includes an ample museum space (and even a gift shop!) for showing off the work of illustrators of all kinds.
The museum is terrific, although given that it is a townhouse, there are some stairs to navigate — fair warning if you’re movement impaired.
The Czech Center’s museum space is small but effective, and it comes associated with three things that no cultural institution I’ve seen thus far can match:
Gary Simmons’s “Ghost Reels,” an installation in the stairway featuring the names of black stars of the silent film era, written in the style of a typewriter typeface, and partially blurred or erased, evoking a part of film history that many have forgotten.
The Drawing Center occupies a beautifully designed SoHo space, cast iron Corinthian columns outside, several gallery spaces within. It’s all very clean and spare and modern. Imminently Instagrammable, as they say.
The ground-floor space is great, with large windows looking out onto both Fifth Ave. and 13th Streets. 
The Center for Architecture claims to be “the premier cultural venue for architecture and the built environment in New York City.” I can’t say that I was all that impressed with it. 
The Leslie-Lohman Museum occupies the newest museum space in the city, having moved into spiffy new digs in SoHo in just the last two weeks. 
The new space for the museum is mostly terrific. You enter into a fairly narrow area where two greeters welcome you and point out what’s on. There are two gallery spaces, a smaller one to the left as you walk in , and a larger one to the right and back. There’s also a kitchen space as well. I am torn between thinking it’s charming that there’s a kitchen right sort of in the open, and thinking their architect really should’ve found a way to separate that from the public space.
The inaugural show is sort of a hodge-podge. I get that survey shows do that, and I would be disappointed if they’d segregated the gay art over here, the lesbian art over there, etc. Sorting by chronology or medium can oversimplify, too. But I would’ve appreciated some effort to put a lens on the collection. Love versus sex. Ideals of beauty. Something.
Should you go? It depends on how you feel about diversity and penises. And maybe, even if you are squeamish about either of those two things, you should consider going anyway. It might be good for you.