| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value | |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 61 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned |  I was just talking about taking a drawing class, and The Society of Illustrators holds $20 figure drawing sessions, with a bar and live music! Naked people, alcohol, music, and art. I mean, what more could one possibly want? |
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.
But what they have is fascinating, including portraits of illustrious illustrators hung in the aforementioned stairways, and temporary exhibitions. One of their gallery spaces is tucked into a narrow hallway that currently is painted bright red. It really worked for a show of the work of graphic novel artist Tony Harris, but I hope it’s that way all the time. I’m pretty sure it’s the most exciting room I’ve visited on this project to date.
All the gallery spaces are enjoyable, if much less zippy than the Red Hallway. They are extremely well suited to the types of work they show. You can tell the Society has been doing this for a long time, albeit under my radar.
And the current show is a stunner, a retrospective celebrating the 100th birthday of Will Eisner, possibly the most influential comic artist, well, ever. In many ways he created the form, and it’s fascinating to move from pieces of his very early work, where he still worked within the then-standard grids of 12 boxes per page, to where he literally thought outside the box, and reworked pages into this extremely expressive medium we know today. He didn’t coin the term “graphic novel,” but he is considered the father of the form. Eisner was a relative rarity in that he both wrote and drew, so his books are his through and through. Most modern comics take 3-6 people to produce, which is in no way meant to discount the talents of those who create them, just to emphasize how unique Eisner was.
I definitely recommend visiting the Society of Illustrators. It’s a great space, with a neat, sometimes undervalued area of focus.
For Reference:
| Address | 128 E 63rd Street, Manhattan |
|---|---|
| Website | societyillustrators.org |
| Cost | General Admission: $12; free on Tuesday evenings |
| Other Relevant Links |
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 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.
Perched up on the fifth floor of an old industrial building in the middle of the High Line / Chelsea art gallery district is the International Print Center New York, a non-profit that puts on regular shows on the art of printmaking.
And for reasons that I have yet to quite figure out, a brownstone tucked away on a side street in Morningside Heights is home to a museum of his art, along with works he collected in his journeys.
Roerich’s early paintings led to him working on stage design for operas and ballets for the many of the great late 19th/early 20th century Russian composers, including Stravinsky as mentioned above. His stage work extended to Wagner and designs for plays by playwrights outside Russia as well. Even his later paintings often have a sort of backdroppy, set designish look to me. His landscapes are very still and serene, often distant mountains. It’s easy to imagine great events unfolding in some unpainted foreground.
The Roerichs moved around a lot during the tumultuous 20th century. They got into yoga and developed their own brand of theosophy, creating a group called the Agni Yoga Society, which was (quoting from the museum brochure) “dedicated to the recording and dissemination of a living ethic that would encompass and synthesize the philosophies and religious teachings of all ages.” Small dreams…
I’m amazed it’s taken me this long to go to the Nicholas Roerich Museum. I live literally three blocks from it, I have no excuses. Is it mind boggling? Does everyone have to go? No, and no. But it’s a perfect example of how this city hides treasures behind anonymous rowhouse facades on anonymous streets in random neighborhoods. If you’re nearby and feeling stressed, take 30 minutes and drop in. I wager you will leave feeling better for it.
A lovely custom-made wooden set of drawers holding a collection of tiny, beautifully bound books. I had no idea that tiny, beautifully bound books were a thing, much less a collectible thing, and this was like a treasure chest of wonderful suprises.
The Grolier Club is one of the surprisingly large number of private clubs scattered throughout the city, but unlike say the 
Yesterday was both International Women’s Day and the start of Asia week and so it was appropriate (though if I’m being honest, unplanned) that I celebrated by going to the Korean Cultural Center to see a small show on the life and art of Young Yang Chung, a contemporary female Korean embroiderer.