Tag: art

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Parsons – The New School Gallery

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Should you go?
Time spent 32 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A wall hung with hundreds of backpacks found in the desert, lost or left by migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

As befits a school of design, Parsons has some great gallery space in its old building on Fifth Avenue.  Named the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery and the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, the two spaces host a variety of art-and-design shows.  The ground-floor space is great, with large windows looking out onto both Fifth Ave. and 13th Streets. Continue reading “Parsons – The New School Gallery”

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Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 62 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Edward Hochschild’s “Vial Cross” from 1994.  A wooden cross studded with test tubes filled with pills, sand, hair, and bodily fluids.  I don’t think I’ve seen another work of art more eloquently sum up the suffering of the AIDS crisis.

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. 

Founded by Charles W. Leslie and Fritz Lohman, longtime collectors of art by LGBTQ artists, the museum has a substantial collection, and will be curating 6-8 shows annually.  Though the space is brand new, the museum and foundation have been around a while, and in fact they’re inaugurating the new location with a survey show, “Expanded Visions: Fifty Years of Collecting.”

The two words that leap most quickly to mind when I think about the place are “diversity” and “penises.”  The collection endeavors to cover an impressively diverse array of artists, and many different kinds of people are represented.  But at the same time, really, there were a lot of penises.  A lot.  I should’ve counted them.  But perhaps it’s better that I didn’t.

I’m not entirely sure I get what “LGBTQ art” is.  I mean, I’m not that naive, I get it in the simplest sense.  A bronze torso, like a Greek statue, of an incredibly buff dude with his t-shirt pulled up and jeans open and fallen to this taut, muscular thighs fits the bill.  But many, many gay artists have made art that I wouldn’t necessarily consider gay.  Mapplethorpe’s flowers, Hockney’s landscapes…I don’t think this museum would collect those. Based on the works on display it seems most accurate to say “LGBTQ art” involves some fuzzy triangulation between artist, subject matter, and intended audience to count. 

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.

Kitchen notwithstanding, it’s an airy, pleasant space with the requisite good lighting and beautiful wood floors.  I’m looking forward to seeing how the museum uses it over time.

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.

For Reference:

Address 26 Wooster Street, Manhattan
Website leslielohman.org
Cost Free

 

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New York Earth Room

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 18 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A large room full of dirt

In 1977 Walter De Maria constructed the New York Earth Room, a site-specific artwork commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation.  De Maria took a second floor space in a typical SoHo building on Wooster Street and filled it, throughout, with 250 cubic yards of earth.  That’s a 22-inch depth of material across the whole space.  280,000 pounds of art!

And if you know where to go, on days when it’s open, you ring a bell and get buzzed in and walk up to the second floor to see a large room full of dirt.

Continue reading “New York Earth Room”

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International Print Center

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 23 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A couple of black and white, square, surreal architectural prints by Brandon Williams.  This project is not supposed to be about shopping for art for me, but I would totally like to own them.

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.

Continue reading “International Print Center”

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Nicholas Roerich Museum

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Time spent 69 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Nicholas Roerich was a major collaborator with Stravinsky on “The Rite of Spring,” helping him sketch out the plot and designing the costumes and scenery. He did a ton of other things, too, but for me, this notable contribution to the most scandalous classical music event of the 20th century is  huge.

Nicholas Roerich and his wife were Russians by birth (he was born in 1874), seekers and spiritualists by inclination.  He had a varied education and early career, but started painting based on Russia’s long and mystical past.

nicholas roerich museumAnd 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.

Architecturally, the Nicholas Roerich Museum is a place after my own heart.  It’s a beautifully intact rowhouse, three stories of which are open to the public, with lots of period detail–fancy fireplaces, beautiful ceiling moldings, a terrific staircase–that in most similar New York buildings was lost during apartment conversions long ago.  The big windows on the parlor floor are blocked out, so that the former living room functions better as a gallery space.  But the museum conversion was very gentle and you can clearly see the house’s past in its present.

nicholas roerich museumRoerich’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.

Nicolas Roerich, “Star of the Hero,” 1936. Tempera on canvas.

There’s also something Georgia O’Keefe-light about some of his works, which sounds somewhat like a criticism, and I guess it is that, although I also mean it as a compliment as well.  Both worked to convey in paint a sense of place distilled down to its essence in color and form.

nicholas roerich museum
Roerich himself, painted by his son, in the land he loved

But my favorite thing about the way the museum is curated is the mix of objects from the Roerich’s travels alongside his work.   Buddhas, Native American ceramics, Russian Orthodox icons, and a gigantic geode all happily and serenely coexist in the syncretic world Roerich’s paintings create.  A painting of St. Francis right above one of Kuan-Yin makes perfect sense.

nicholas roerich museumThe 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…

Eventually their wanderings took them from New York to India, where they lived in the Himalayas and studied and explored the region, and, judging by the number of mountainous paintings, thoroughly loved the place.  Roerich died there in 1947 and the museum was founded in New York in 1949.

nicholas roerich museumI’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.

For Reference:

Address 319 West 107th Street, Manhattan
Website roerich.org
Cost  Free
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The Grolier Club

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 67 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned 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 New York Yacht Club, the Grolier puts on free exhibits a couple of times a year that nonmembers can visit.

Exhibits are often inspired by the collections or obsessions of members, and hold to the Grolier’s general theme of printing and the art of the book.

The club is currently buried under massive scaffolding as a new skyscraper is built next to and over it, but happily it remains open despite that.

There were two exhibits the day I went, one on the Aesthetic Movement, and the other called “Images of Value: The Artwork Behind U.S. Security Engraving, 1830s-1980s.”

The engraving show was great, and eye-opening.  At least two firms of professional engravers existed to create libraries of stock images (pun intended) for use on securities certificates, bank notes, etc. They’d also do custom work as well, if you wanted your bank’s president, or a particular picture. Engravings — especially  the human face– were important to make valuable documents prettier, but also to make them harder to counterfeit, so the fineness of the engraving was important.

The show included examples of the original art, sometimes the actual engraving plate, and one or more uses of the engraving on actual currency or tickets or stocks.

It went chronologically, and showed the work of individual engravers in different eras, right up until the demise of fancy stock certificates and the rise of electronic media that spelled the end of the industry.

Just a few highlights:

Martha Washington was the first woman on US federal currency, in the late 19th century.

 

A set of bank notes for the Canadian Bank of Commerce, designed by A. E. Forrester around 1914 and featuring allegorical scenes of the Greek pantheon, are perhaps the most beautiful currency of the 20th century.

Want to see me on your corporation’s stock certificates? Just ask how!

And finally, at some point around midcentury, someone thought that a naked dude covering himself with a circuit diagram and contemplating some kind of atomic vacuum tube, while Armageddon starts in the background, would be a great image for a technology company stock certificate.

There’s no accounting for taste.

The other show, on the Aesthetic Movement was great too, full of beautiful books reflecting a design moment that took a whole bunch of exotic things and threw them together to create trendy and interesting combinations.  It also created the aesthete him (or her) self,  the hipster of the day, which led to much mockery of “nincompoopiana,” a word I intend to use at the first opportunity.

The Grolier has a great space and a focus that I find fascinating, making this  one of my happiest discoveries in this project so far. I’ll definitely keep an eye on future exhibitions there.  Should you visit?  The only reason I gave the Club 3 stars rather than 4 is because book arts are just a little specialized as a field.  So it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

19th century “aesthete” teapot

References:

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Korean Cultural Center Gallery

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 19 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A set of embroidered Bodhisattvas and Buddhas,  inspired by statues in a particular grotto. Spectacular and almost three-dimensional even though they’re flat pieces of textile

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.

The Korean Cultural Center has a small space for art tucked away on the eighth floor of an anonymous office building on Park Avenue in Midtown. Still, it’s well appointed and well lit and good for a small-scale show like this one.

It was interesting to me that Dr. Young does both very contemporary-looking pieces and much more traditional ones as well. Her large screens with deer and flowers and fish and such are impressive technically and in terms of the time it must’ve taken to make them.  But I was much more partial to her more experimental, contemporary pieces. In addition to the Buddhas I mention as the “best thing I saw,” the show included a series on Venice that consisted of pieced fabric and quilting and embroidery that were just beautiful, and a fairly adorable frog based on a Japanese woodblock print by Kitagawa Utamaro.

The larger point of the show is that embroidery was always considered “women’s work” and not really “art,” and people like Dr. Young have done much to show that there’s high aesthetic and artistic value in it, and it shouldn’t be overlooked.  It’s a good example that you don’t need a big show, or a large exhibition space, to say something interesting and important.

Should you go?  I liked the space.  If “The Movement of Herstory” is a good example of how well they curate it, I’d definitely recommend checking out future shows there.

Reference:  The Korean Cultural Center

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Socrates Sculpture Park

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 28 minutes (it was chilly)
Best thing I saw or learned Bryan Zanisnik’s “Monument to Walken” (2016) A bunch of cement heads of Christopher Walken, sprouting from the ground like malevolent mushrooms.  If I had a garden, I would absolutely want one or two for it.

Socrates Sculpture Park is a fantastic place to see, well, sculpture.  Located on the East River waterfront in Queens, it hosts changing exhibitions of works designed for an outdoor environment. Continue reading “Socrates Sculpture Park”

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Isamu Noguchi Museum

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 100 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned It’s surprisingly difficult to pick a favorite! But I will call out Walking Void #2 (1970), which is a highly finished piece of granite, utterly harmonious and balanced.Isamu Noguchi Museum, Walking Void #2

Noguchi. I’d always meant to visit the Isamu Noguchi Museum in Queens.  I love Japan, and it always sounded like a good little museum to visit.  But then again, I only really knew Noguchi from blocks of stone that looked unfinished to me, like the sculptor gave up halfway through, and that famous curvy wood and glass coffee table from the 1950s.

So it never made it to the top of my to-do list.

To sum up, it’s amazing. I won’t look at or think about his work the same way again.  Seeing it in its own company, and understanding how it evolved, or how he evolved, was joyous and eye-opening. Continue reading “Isamu Noguchi Museum”

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The Frick Collection

Edification value
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Should you go?
Time spent 125 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Contemporary critics weren’t always kind to JMW Turner, accusing him of being “unrealistic” and using “blinding” light effects. So he painted the story of Regulus, a Roman general who was captured by Carthage and (among other tortures) had his eyelids cut out and was forced to stare at the sun until he was blinded, before being killed. Turner painted a port where you can barely make out Regulus, and dominating the painting is light, light light.  Touche, Turner.

UPDATE APRIL 2021: The Frick Collection’s 5th Avenue mansion is closed for the next several years for a major renovation. The good news is Mr. Frick’s art has an temporary home in the old Whitney Building, the former Met Breuer, giving it a chance to recontextualize the art and juxtapose and present its art in exciting new ways. I’ll be writing about it soon, I hope. Spoiler alert: I love it!

This is going to be a hard one to write.  I’ve been going to the Frick Collection regularly for over 20 years.  I’m a member there.  It’s my second favorite museum in New York City (the Cloisters is number one).  Everyone needs to go to the Frick Collection. 

Henry Clay Frick may have been a plutocrat industrialist, but he had such an eye for art.  And the Frick, like the Gardner in Boston or the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, is his collection of art, much of it hung as he liked it, in rooms that were his rooms, now open to the public. 

Continue reading “The Frick Collection”

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