art Archives - Page 3 of 11

April 16, 2018

Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning

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Time spent	21 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Joseph S. Bell-Bey’s abstract acrylics were pretty cool. I particularly liked his deep blue one. Joseph S. Bell-Bey, “Bye Bye Bluebird”

In the late 1960s a group of business and community leaders in Jamaica, Queens decided to do something to try to arrest the decline of the Jamaica Avenue shopping district. Among other strategies, they decided their neighborhood needed a new arts institution.

The City abandoning its beautiful, Italian Renaissance-style Queens Register of Titles & Deeds building around the same time created an opportunity for some adaptive reuse, and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning was born in 1972.

Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning Programming at JCAL heavily emphasizes the performing arts, film screenings and lectures. JCAL’s main building has a theater, and it manages a nearby church building as a converted performing arts space. Classes are also a big part of the mission, including workshops and after-school programs for kids.

The JCAL building also houses a pair of gallery spaces, where it puts on several art exhibitions each year. It’s in that capacity that I paid a visit. Continue reading “Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning”

April 2, 2018

Hunter College Art Galleries

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Time spent	205 Hudson: 21 minutes Leubsdorf: 12 minutes East Harlem: 17 minutes Artist’s Institute: 3 minutes Total: 53 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	At 205 Hudson, Dario Robelto’s “I Miss Everyone Who Has Ever Gone Away,” 1997 recreated 2007. Little airplanes folded from the wrappers of candies from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s famous candy-pile artworks memorializing AIDS victims. It’s artistic appropriation in the most unexpected and literal way.

I discovered early in this project that just about every college in New York City has some kind of public art gallery or museum. Some are extremely impressive, like NYU’s Grey Art Gallery. A few have a specific focus, like the Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art. And some of them are surprisingly impressive and hard to get to, like the Lehman College Art Gallery and the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College.

Hunter College boasts not one but four art venues, collectively the “Hunter College Art Galleries.” If this were earlier in my museum expedition, I probably would write about each of them separately. At this stage, though, I crave variety in my write-ups, to say nothing of efficiency. And Hunter itself thinks of them in the collective. So my review covers all four spaces in one. It gets four dots on the map, though. Continue reading “Hunter College Art Galleries”

March 24, 2018

Staten Island Museum

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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 15, 2018

Clemente Center

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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

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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 7, 2018

Center for Book Arts

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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 19, 2018

Living Museum

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Time spent	62 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	John Tursi’s prolific, colorful, abstractions, en masse, amazed me. John Tursi, Abstract Paintings A friend accompanied me to the Living Museum, and when Tursi asked her opinion of them, she replied unthinkingly, “This is crazy.”

I don’t believe in psychic powers. If they existed, we would have proved it by now. And yet, I can’t deny that some places have an inexplicable aura about them — a feeling indelibly embedded in the stones and bricks. Ellis Island, full of hopes and dreams from long ago. The library at Columbia, resonant with over a century of stress and study.

I mention this to set up my initial reaction to visiting the campus of Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. Even just driving by Creedmoor’s forbidding deco-institutional buildings along the Grand Central Parkway, it commands attention. You may not know what it is or what goes on there, but it has a hulking presence. For lack of a better word, it’s creepy. It comes as no surprise that it is a mental hospital.

The Living Museum, Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, Queens Creedmoor dates back to 1912, when an abandoned National Guard barracks was used to house a few dozen patients. At its peak in 1959, the sprawling facility housed an inconceivable 7,000 patients. Since then, the inpatient population has fallen, leading it to sell the farm (literally), and also to abandon some buildings, adding to the creepiness of the campus today. And at Creedmoor’s heart, in the ginormous former inmate cafeteria, lies the Living Museum.

Continue reading “Living Museum”

February 3, 2018

Williamsburg Art and Historical Center

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Time spent	32 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	Terrance Lindall’s “Carried Away by Night” typifies his fantastical, surreal, Bosch-ish work.

Close to the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge, though somewhat far from the trendier parts of Williamsburg, stands the impressive, imposing Kings County Savings Bank building, which dates to 1867.Since 1996, the building, in a charmingly shabby state today, has served as the home of the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (or “WAH Center”), a moderately sized gallery space on its second floor. Continue reading “Williamsburg Art and Historical Center”

February 1, 2018

Abrons Arts Center

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Time spent	28 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The best thing was a juxtaposition of Jordan Nassar’s white-and-blue embroidered designs and Joseph Shetler’s complex abstractions of blue pencil. I liked each, and they proved great complements to one another.

Lillian Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement in 1893 to assist, educate, and care for the poor of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. During its 125 years, it’s been responsible for many civic-minded “firsts” in New York City. These include the first nurse in a New York public school; several early playgrounds; summer camps; the visiting nurse service; low-income mental health services; and programs surrounding the arts.

Henry Street Settlement’s Arts for Living Center, founded in 1975, evolved into today’s Abrons Arts Center. Although the Abrons Center is primarily known for theater and performing arts, its rather unpleasant, semi-brutalist brick building also houses space for temporary art exhibitions.

Abrons Arts Center, Manhattan

Continue reading “Abrons Arts Center”

January 31, 2018April 11, 2021

Museum of Modern Art

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Time spent	221 minutes (3 hours, 41 minutes)
Best thing I saw or learned	It’s nigh impossible to pick a “best” at MoMA. But I feel a special love for Mark Rothko’s melancholy, soothing No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black) from 1958.

UPDATE APRIL 2021: This review is obsolete, as it was written before MoMA opened its most recent expansion (which I talk about a bit in the review below). I will hopefully publish an updated review…soon. A lot of my take from a few years ago is still pertinent.

The walls at the Museum of Modern Art don’t meet the floors. It’s a minuscule detail. I feel certain many visitors don’t even consciously notice it. I’m not sure why the architect did that. But think about the words that describe the collection: “groundbreaking,” “earth-shattering.” I like to think they decided MoMA’s treasures are too wonderful to touch something as mundane as a floor. So the art, and the walls on which the art is hung, don’t.

More mundanely, I also wonder whether (and how) they dust all those wall-floor cracks. Continue reading “Museum of Modern Art”