The Museum Project Posts - Page 9 of 23

December 9, 2017December 10, 2017

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	58 minutes (most recently)
Best thing I saw or learned	A vertical tour brings you up close to the engineering of an old-school cathedral. The building is buttressed to support the weight of an enormous tower that was never built. Above the ceiling… To balance that buttressing, there’s literally tons of lead above the ceiling vaults, pushing down and out as the buttresses push in.

Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine

Although I have rarely attended a service there, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine has figured large in my life in New York City.

Shortly after I arrived as a freshman at Columbia, I attended an event at the Cathedral. The Dalai Lama spoke, as did the daughter of Desmond Tutu. I vividly remember it was right around Rosh Hashanah, and a group of monks offered a chant in honor of the High Holy Days. Tibetan Buddhist monks singing in honor of the Jewish new year in the largest Christian cathedral in the world. To this day, that stands as one of my quintessential New York experiences. Continue reading “Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine”

December 8, 2017February 10, 2018

King Manor Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	65 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The library at King Manor houses beautiful, custom, glass-doored bookshelves and a library of 3,500 books. I like that the museum put a statue of Rufus King there. I imagine it was his favorite room in the house.

Of all the historic houses in New York this is the only Manor. As in “Stately Wayne…” We have multiple “Houses” of course, a “Grange,” a “Birthplace,” and a “Mansion” or two. A “Homestead.” And now, a Manor.

King Manor Museum

Long Live the King

I now regret that I used “The King of Queens” in my review of Kingsland Homestead. Sea captain Joseph King was probably a fine guy, but Rufus King was far more deserving of the sobriquet.

Rufus King, owner of King Manor, served as a Major in the Continental Army, a friend to Alexander Hamilton, and a staunch abolitionist before that was fashionable. King contributed to the framing of the Constitution and signed it as a delegate from Massachusetts, his home state.

King Manor Museum, Jamaica Queens — Rufus King

Washington wanted him in the Cabinet, but King demurred, and instead served in London as the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. He reportedly got on well with King George III.

On his return to the States, family connections along with Hamilton persuaded him to move his household from Boston to bigger, badder New York City.

King Manor Museum, Jamaica Queens King decided that he wanted a country farm as well as a place in town, and that’s how he came to discover his house in Jamaica. He bought King Manor in 1803. King added substantially to the house he purchased, taking an asymmetrical Dutch farmhouse and making it at least faux-symmetrical, on trend with the then-current Federal style.

What with the renovations and expansion King’s family didn’t move in until 1806 or so. Hamilton was of course dead by then, so sadly never set foot in King Manor. However, King and Hamilton were so close that A.Ham was godfather to King’s eldest son.

The King family was also close with Archibald Gracie. Two King sons married two Gracie daughters. Moreover, for a short time, King held a mortgage on Gracie Mansion.

Mind Your Manors

I was the sole visitor on a random weekday afternoon. The volunteer minding the place was terrific, though, giving me a thorough and thoroughly interesting tour.

King Manor Museum The tour takes you to the kitchen, decked out with a beautiful cast iron stove that dates from after Rufus’s day (his household cooked on an open hearth, which the stove tidily fills). Visitors also see the parlor, King’s library, and the dining room, which is complete with a trendy curved wall. King Manor Museum, Jamaica Queens

That graceful curved wall is just internal. It wouldn’t do to have a semicircular exterior wall breaking the house’s symmetry. There are two closets tucked into the odd spaces between the interior and exterior walls

King Manor doesn’t have much in the way of genuine King furnishings. It’s got some reproduction portraits. I wish it were more furnished than it is–even if the furniture is ersatz, it helps convey a sense of what life was like. It does have a genuinely old piano, and hosts concerts.

King Manor stayed in the King family until 1896, when Cornelia King, one of Rufus’s granddaughters, died. Soon thereafter the village of Jamaica bought the house and 11 acres of land to create King Park, preserving the building in its original location — a relative rarity in New York City.

King Manor Museum, Jamaica Queens

Absent original fixtures and furnishings, the kitchen, parlor, and hall are given over to displays geared toward the school kids who constitute a massive proportion of visitors. Wall texts discuss Rufus King and his role in drafting the Constitution — and his opposition to the way that document basically punted on slavery, with the abolitionists among the Framers just sort of hoping it would go away on its own. One of King’s sons, John Alsop King, continued his father’s anti-slavery fight after his father died in 1827.

Grace Episcopal Church graveyard in Jamaica Queens — Long Lived the King

Another wall display discusses life in Jamaica when it was an independent village a long way from the towns of Brooklyn and Manhattan. My guide pointed out that Mr. and Mrs. King (and son John King) are buried in the churchyard of the Grace Episcopal Church just a few blocks away, so after departing King Manor I went to pay my respects.

Should you Visit the King Manor Museum?

King Manor fulfills its mandate really well. While I’m not saying “get thee to Jamaica!” if you like historic houses or founding fathers at all then you should unquestionably visit King Manor. It’s a beautiful old house, and the home of a person who turns out to be more interesting than I first expected.

My guide pointed out that King ran for president in 1816. Unsuccessfully, of course (we got Monroe instead). But not just unsuccessfully: King won only 34 electoral votes to Monroe’s 183, and put the final nail in the coffin of the Federalist party. My guide quizzed me: “In the history of the United States, two people from Jamaica have run for president. One was Rufus King. Do you know the other?” I thought a moment before suggesting, “The current president.” Yep.

His failure as a presidential candidate notwithstanding, King found many ways to serve his country during a time when his country was just being invented.

On the topic of slavery, Rufus King was ahead of his time. You can’t say that about all of his cohort. A visit to his home will acquaint you with someone who might be a B-list Founding Father, but who deserves better treatment from history, writers of hit Broadway musicals, and his adopted city.

King Manor Museum, Jamaica Queens

For Reference:

Address	King Park, 153rd Street and Jamaica Avenue, Jamaica, Queens
Website	kingmanor.org
Cost	General Admission: $5, suggested donation

December 2, 2017December 2, 2017

Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	38 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	This case of Tibetan figurines. The story is a spoiler, so I tell it in the review below.

Oh, this one hurts me a little. I really, really wanted the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art to be a diamond of enlightenment in the heart of Staten Island. An amazing, secret Shangri-La in the midst of Shao-Lin. I really did.

But it’s not to be.

Near the geographic heart of Staten Island, high on a hill, there’s a lighthouse. Climb the road up that hillside. Pass the lighthouse and enter a well-to-do neighborhood of big houses. Eventually, you will reach a large stone wall, festooned on one end with distinctive Tibetan prayer flags. Stairs lead you down to a library, exhibit hall, and a small, steep, garden. Perched on the hill like a miniature Potala Palace, you’ve found the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art Continue reading “Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art”

November 30, 2017December 1, 2017

Dia: Chelsea

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	46 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Art made out of ginormous freaking laser beams! Rita McBride, “Particulates,” 2017, lasers, site-specific particulates, extraterrestrial dust, and water

The Dia Foundation is a powerhouse in the world of contemporary art. It got its start in 1974 to help artists “achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope.” (Source: Dia’s website.)

New Yorkers probably best know Dia in the guise of Dia: Beacon, an important contemporary art museum located in Beacon, NY, a bit over an hour by train north of the city. The Dia Foundation also manages the Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room in SOHO. And several other important art places and spaces around the world (most notably two key environmental art pieces out west: Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and De Maria’s Lightning Field).

Dia’s offices are in Chelsea, and it has two art spaces there, too. Continue reading “Dia: Chelsea”

November 30, 2017June 22, 2025

New Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	96 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj’s “Ru,” a room-sized installation of reproductions of Neolithic artifacts from Kosovo mounted on metal bird legs and perched in habitats of sticks and water, installed in a large white room. Petrit Halilaj, “Ru” (detail) It’s odd and obsessive and a little creepy and cute at the same time — like a Miyazaki movie come to life. Petrit Halilaj, “Ru” (detail)

CURRENTLY CLOSED. As of June, 2025, the New Museum remains closed as it completes an expansion to its building on The Bowery. Reportedly the NEW New Museum will open in the Fall of 2025.

The New Museum, devoted to cutting-edge contemporary art, turned forty years old this year. I know because one of the exhibits on currently celebrates its history, with a timeline and select ephemera from past shows.

New Museum

Having turned 40 myself some years ago, I think it starts to feel a little ironic calling oneself “New” at that age.

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 was yet another art museum born.

The New Museum moved into its current building on the Bowery in 2007, making that aspect of it still actually pretty new. More on the building in a moment. Continue reading “New Museum”

November 21, 2017

Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	28 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Chris Jones’s surreal and fascinating, 3D-ish (2.5D?) depiction of an empty house of many rooms, collaged from book and magazine pictures. Chris Jones, “After They Had Left,” 2016, Mixed media collage

Hebrew Union College Museum According to the guard at the front desk, in order to visit the museum at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Institute of Religion, you must do four things.

Visitor Pass

Present a photo ID, which they will hold onto for the duration of your visit.
Submit any bags for an inspection.
Agree to be wanded down with a handheld metal detector.
Wear an orange “Visitor” badge around your neck or other suitably prominently visible place for the duration of your visit.

Continue reading “Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion Museum”

November 21, 2017April 11, 2021

International Center of Photography

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	71 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The lobby boasts a large interactive screen that enables visitors to browse through the ICP’s digital image collection, sorted by timeline or via a large number of tags/keywords. It’s fun to see what comes up, and how images connect across times and places.

UPDATE APRIL 2021: This review is obsolete, as the ICP moved into a new home on Essex Street just before the pandemic. I haven’t visited it yet, though it is high on my museum to-do list.

The International Center of Photography is one of two photo-specialist institutions in New York (the other being the Aperture Foundation). It has a venerable history, founded in 1974 by the photographer Cornell Capa, the brother of even greater photographer Robert Capa. It’s currently located on the Bowery, very close to the New Museum.

In addition to its museum space, the Center offers classes, a full-time school of photography, and events.

Ironically, the ICP does not allow photography inside its galleries. I’m not certain whether that policy is general or just for the current show. Regardless, I have a few shots of the lobby area and cafe, but that’s it.

The ICP Galleries

International Center of Photography features two moderately sized gallery spaces, as well as a small video screening area. Visitors begin in a bland rectangular space on the ground floor, then go downstairs to a similar space directly below. I don’t have a lot to say about them — they are windowless and fairly generic, painted white when I visited. Continue reading “International Center of Photography”

November 18, 2017

MoMA PS1

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	114 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	“Meeting,” an installation by light artist James Turrell. One of Turrell’s Skyspaces, it is a moderately sized, square room, featuring dark wood paneled seating, white walls and ceiling, and a square cutout open to the sky. All you do is sit there and look at the sky thus framed, and the light patterns it casts on the walls. It shouldn’t work. I should find it boring. And yet…it’s beautiful.

MoMA PS1, Queens The Museum of Modern Art’s satellite branch, MoMA PS1, presents contemporary art in a unique setting in booming Long Island City.

PS1 started out as the “Instute for Art and Urban Resources, Inc.” in 1971. Originally nomadic, it settled permanently in its current building in 1976. And MoMA absorbed it into its empire in 2000.

School’s In Session

MoMA PS1, Queens Housed in a school building that dates to 1892 (“PS” in NewYork City parlance stands for “public school”) PS1 is another of New York’s examples of a masterful adaptation of an old structure to new, museum-y purposes. It’s the second schoolhouse-turned-museum I’ve visited, along with the City Island Nautical Museum.

I’m very fond of PS1’s building. A new, concrete structure houses the admissions desk and a small shop, and the concrete stretches around a courtyard with a couple of outdoor spaces, leading to the stairs into the old brick schoolhouse itself.

PS1’s interiors retain a great deal of scholastic charm, including floorplans on blackboards, institutional stairs, sections of ancient linoleum and wood floors, and desk seating in the cafe (run by trendy Brooklyn restaurant M. Wells). And light fixtures that almost certainly come from a company called, appropriately enough, Schoolhouse Electric.

Thanks to the cafe, a tantalizing bacony smell permeated much of the ground floor. Delicious if slightly distracting. I always like a building that retains enough of its original purpose that you can still feel it, at least assuming its spaces for art work well as well.

MoMA PS1, Queens

Some Permanent Art

PS1 has several permanent pieces, things that are part of the infrastructure. There’s the aforementioned Turrell Skyspace. Also multiple works in stairways, making traveling within the building a more artistic experience. I’m particularly taken with spooky tree silhouettes by Ernesto Caivano.

There’s a mysterious hole in one wall which may or may not align with astronomical phenomena. And Saul Melman gilded most of the school building’s massive original boilers, like blinged up steampunk.

Mostly, however, PS1 hosts temporary shows that MoMA doesn’t want or can’t fit in the mothership in midtown Manhattan.

Art, Angry and Baffling

The big show at PS1 currently is “Kinetic Painting,” a Carolee Schneemann retrospective. Schneeman hit it big in the 1960s as a multi-threat, with an oeuvre combining painting, sculpture (and hybrids thereof) and aggressively challenging performance pieces. Her work reminded me of lots of different things. I have in my notes:

An extremely angry Joseph Cornell
A deranged Cindy Sherman
An insane Marina Abramovic

Among other things. Not to accuse her of being derivative — Schneemann was definitely not copying anyone.

Possibly Schneemann’s most infamous piece is something called “Meat Joy.” A performance from 1964 involving several men and women in their skivvies, along with gallons of paint and assorted raw meat — fish, plucked chickens, and such. PS1 has a video. I’m not sure how much of the piece is choreographed versus improvised, but either way, it is funny, gross, and uncomfortable.

Which three words sum up my reaction to much of Schneemann’s work. I liked some of it, don’t get me wrong. But if you go, do not bring the kiddies.

The other large exhibit at PS1 currently is the work of Cathy Wilkes, which I found incomprehensible. I realize the line between “art” and “trash” hasn’t been the same since Duchamp’s famous fountain. But still.

PS1, I Love You?

Contemporary art is almost by definition challenging. I like PS1 mainly because I find the space very friendly. I guess if I’m going to be challenged by art, I’d rather be challenged in a nice, comfy place rather than someplace cool and sterile and purpose-built. (More on that when I review the New Museum.)

PS1 provides awesome spaces to display art, with a nice variety of sizes and scales to the rooms, many of which retain windows that let in tons of natural light. Visiting PS1 takes a reasonable amount of time — despite three floors plus some work in the basement, it won’t exhaust you. The cafe and bookstore there are both terrific too.

For some people, even art lovers, contemporary art can be a bridge too far. That’s perhaps why MoMA keeps this place safely across the river in Queens. Still, if you’re willing to take the plunge and have your buttons pushed, MoMA PS1 is a fantastic place to do it.

Worst case scenario, you might find something you like. And if nothing else, there’s always James Turrell’s eternal sky.

For Reference:

Address	22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
Website	momaps1.org
Cost	General Admission: $10, but free in 2017 for all New York City residents
Other Relevant Links	Schoolhouse Electric M. Wells Restaurant

November 17, 2017

Woodlawn Cemetery

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	120 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	My favorite monument at Woodlawn is the Straus family mausoleum. Three mini-tombs form a complex for the sons of Isidor and Ida Straus, plus a memorial to their parents, famously lost on the Titanic. It’s a unique hybrid of art deco and Egyptian Revival, complete with an awesome, streamlined, funeral barge.

I need to preface this review with a disclosure. I have been visiting Woodlawn Cemetery for almost 20 years. Also, I’m a member of, and volunteer with, the Woodlawn Conservancy, and help out with guided tours there.

So I have a strong bias. I love this place.

Cemeteries as Museums

In my review of Green-Wood Cemetery (New York’s other masterpiece cemetery, in Brooklyn) I explain why I think great historic cemeteries merit consideration as museums. In short, their unique combination of history, art, architecture and nature makes them both edifying and, for some definition of the word, entertaining. And definitely inspiring.

Continue reading “Woodlawn Cemetery”

November 15, 2017

Derfner Judaica Museum & Hebrew Home Art Collection

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	67 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	It’s probably a sin that Torah pointers remind me of nothing so much as highly ornate magic wands from the Potter-verse. But they do.

The Derfner Judaica Museum is one of two museums on my list located at institutions that I’d generally tend to avoid. It resides within the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, a senior assisted living facility. (The other is the Living Museum, located in a mental health facility in Queens.) But it’s on my list, so off to the Bronx I went.

Let’s start with Riverdale. There are many places in New York that don’t feel like “New York.” Fresh Kills. City Island. Broad Channel. Even among the non-New York places, though, Riverdale is special. Surely it is as far from anyone’s mental image of “The Bronx” as it’s possible to get. Verdant and spacious, much of it feels like the suburbs, a clump of wealthy Westchester transplanted within city limits.

Riverdale, the Bronx — The mean streets of Riverdale

The Derfner Judaica Museum: An Overview

The Derfner Museum resides in a bright, 5,000-square-foot ground floor space in the Reingold Pavilion, a 2004 building on the Hebrew Home campus. Windows connect it with the outside, with views encompassing a sculpture garden, the Hudson, and New Jersey’s palisades. Windows also connect it with the lobby and other public spaces of the larger institution.

Derfner Judaica Museum, Riverdale, Bronx An assortment of display cases feature Jewish ritual and cultural objects, organized largely by type, with helpful explanations for those not conversant with them. I expect most Hebrew Home residents would have more than passing familiarity with Jewish rites and tradition. I appreciated that the curators include rare random visitors like me as part of the intended audience.

Many of the pieces on display come from the collection of Ralph and Leuba Baum. Ralph moved to the U.S. in 1936, married Leuba in 1939, and built a successful business as well as a hefty collection of Jewish art and ritual objects. In 1982, the Baums donated 800 pieces to the Hebrew Home to start this museum. If you’re curious why it’s not the Baum Museum, in 2008, Helen and Howard Derfner underwrote the creation of the current space.

The clear focal point of the exhibit is a single, badly damaged, Torah scroll. It comes from a synagogue in a suburb of Hamburg, Ralph’s hometown. The synagogue burned in 1938, during Kristallnacht, and this scroll is the only one of its 13 Torahs to survive. In its silent witnessing way it’s as moving as anything in the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and it was the object that inspired the Baums to donate their collection.

Derfner Judaica Museum, Riverdale, the Bronx

Other Things to See

When I visited the museum had two additional exhibits on display. One was a set of 100 charmingly sketchy watercolors of residents and staff by Brenda Zlamany. The other shows Chuck Fishman’s striking black and white photographs depicting Polish Jewish life, taken from 1975 until the present.

Derfner Judaica Museum, Riverdale, Bronx

I also perused the art in the Hebrew Home’s public spaces a bit. The Hebrew Home displays prints, paintings, and sculpture to help make the place seem less, well, institutional.

Derfner Judaica Museum and Hebrew Home — Andy Warhol, “10 Portraits of Jews”

The plethora of options in New York — the Jewish Museum, the Bernard Museum, the Center for Jewish History — made me wonder about the Baums’ decision to gift their things to a retirement community.

However, the Hebrew Home started collecting art long before it opened the Judaica museum. The institution follows a philosophy of “if you can’t go to the art, the art should go to you.” In that context, the Baums’ decision makes sense — the place was already partly a museum, and had a resident audience likely to enjoy and appreciate their collection.

I mentioned the sculpture garden previously. That too enriches the environment for residents and visitors alike.

Hebrew Home Sculpture Garden, Riverdale, Bronx — Bull Sculpture on the Hudson

A Trip to the Retirement Castle

Derfner Judaica Museum, Riverdale, Bronx

Sad to say, most of my knowledge of senior assisted living comes from TV: the Springfield Retirement Castle, where Abe Simpson lives. So my view is jaundiced, biased, and not very positive. Having the museum and the art help residents immensely, I think.

I’ve written about “gateway museums” — places like the Bronx Museum of the Arts that serve people who may not have much museum experience. I reckon the Derfner is the opposite: for many Hebrew Home residents, it’s the last museum of their lives.

I spent some time talking with Emily, the assistant curator at the Derfner Judaica Museum. She spoke thoughtfully about the role that art plays in the lives of residents. She observed that sometimes the most impactful items in the collection aren’t its one-of-a-kind treasures. Rather it’s something like a pair of mass-produced Shabbat candlesticks that prompt a visitor to remember that their parents or grandparents owned the same pair.

If you have to get old, and you have to live in assisted living, it’s a blessing if you can live in a place full of art.

Should You Visit the Derfner Judaica Museum?

Derfner Judaica Museum and Hebrew Home, Riverdale, Bronx If you’re looking for Judaica, there are better and more convenient institutions to visit. However, the collection gains unique significance by virtue of its location. Jewish or not, if you’re planning to grow old someday you might find it worthwhile visiting the place, the art, and the residents.

For Reference:

Address	Reingold Pavilion, Hebrew Home at Riverdale, 5901 Palisade Avenue, Riverdale, the Bronx
Website	riverspringhealth.org
Cost	General Admission: Free
Other Relevant Links	A bit about art at the Hebrew Home