The Museum Project Posts - Page 6 of 24

March 27, 2018March 27, 2018

Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum

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Edification value
Entertainment value
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

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
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
Entertainment value
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

Edification value
Entertainment value
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

Edification value
Entertainment value
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
Entertainment value
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”

March 8, 2018May 1, 2018

Nine Future New York Museums

Thinking about “future New York Museums” could inspire a ruminative, speculative essay on how the museum business will evolve over the next decade. I certainly have some thoughts about that, given my intense museum-going over the past year.

However, I’ll save those thoughts for later. (My essay on museums and Instagram offers a taste.)

More prosaically, as I near the end of my museum checklist, I have started to wonder about specific, new museums with plans to open somewhere in the city.

It’s difficult to track “coming attractions.” However, the American Alliance of Museums, the body that accredits institutions for excellence, offers a good place to start. Several future New York museums are already members there. And that, combined with recent news coverage (and a few links from friends), leads to the following list. It probably isn’t comprehensive, but here are 9 — make that ten– future New York museums. Continue reading “Nine Future New York Museums”

March 7, 2018

Center for Book Arts

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	34 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	A book turned into a fantastically eroded landscape by Guy Laramée. Google that dude, his work is amazing. Guy Laramée, “Archaeology,” 2010, altered book

The Center for Book Arts is one of those quixotic organizations whose unlikely existence helps make life in New York worthwhile. In this digital age, the idea that an organization will teach you how to letterpress print, how to bind a book, how to marbleize paper, seems hopelessly, charmingly, vitally anachronistic. In addition to classes, the Center for Book Arts also offers memberships; join and you can go and hand-set lead type to your heart’s content. Just don’t lick your fingers while you do it.

Continue reading “Center for Book Arts”

February 26, 2018February 26, 2018

New York Museums of Excellence

Museum Buttons When I first compiled my list of New York museums, one of my sources was the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). Trade associations, I love ‘em. The Alliance accredits worthy institutions. However, its website describes an AAM Continuum of Excellence rather than a black-and-white, accredited-or-not dialectic.

Indeed, the AAM offers a variety of options for museums short of full accreditation. The simplest simply being signing a Pledge of, well, Excellence. AAM maintains a list of museums that have signed the Pledge and/or proceeded further along its Continuum, up to and including full accreditation. Continue reading “New York Museums of Excellence”

February 25, 2018

National September 11 Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	133 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	A special exhibition of New Yorker covers that featured the Twin Towers both before and after Sept. 11. My favorite of all is probably this one from 2003, showing New York’s iconic buildings twinned. Particularly timely exhibition now that Condé Nast’s headquarters are in One World Trade Center.

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum bills itself as a single, unified whole. And indeed, the museum is integrally part of the plaza, a cavernous underground space that extends all around– and under– the footprints of the World Trade Center towers. However, for my purposes I’m thinking about them separately.

National September 11 Memorial and Museum — The WTC Memorial

The September 11 Memorial, with its somber square fountains and all the names, is one thing: well worth a visit even as the Trade Center has gone from being a giant hole in the ground to being a thriving center for commerce and commuting once again.

The September 11 Museum I don’t recommend so heartily.

Continue reading “National September 11 Museum”