Tag: art

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BRIC House

Edification value  
Entertainment value  
Should you go?  
Time spent 39 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Glendora Buell has had a public access TV show, A Chat with Glendora, since 1972.  At over 44 years and 11,600 (!) episodes, it’s the longest running public access show.  She’s 88 years old.  God bless!
Built like a BRIC…um…House.

BRIC House is a flexible arts space including a theater, ballroom, and an exhibition space in an artsy part of downtown Brooklyn (right next door to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater).

It took a while to figure out what “BRIC” stands for:  Brooklyn Information & Culture.  Or, “stood for.”  According to their website while that’s where the name comes from, officially it doesn’t stand for anything right now.

Anyway, the organization has been around since 1979 under various names–it started out as the Fund for the Borough of Brooklyn, and so in some alternate universe I suppose I visited FFoBB House instead of BRIC House.  In this universe, it only moved into its new space, a shiny refit of the old Strand Theater, in 2013.

BRIC organizes a major free festival every year (Celebrate Brooklyn!) and its BRIC House home base gives it space to put on a whole array of arts programming.

The “museum” space is an airy, high-ceilinged open space that goes down well below street grade but thanks to a large swath of half-height windows is flooded with light.  There’s an informal stair-seat space that BRIC uses for talks and lectures, with the gallery space behind it.

The current show, Public Access/Open Networks celebrates public access TV as the original user-generated video form. It includes a piece by Nam June Paik, so you know its arts bona fides are in place, but looks at a variety of public access shows, extending to the modern day with Youtube videos as the new “public access.” 

“Public Access is the mother of all social media, the original uncurated social art.”

In addition to Glendora Buell above, one standout was a waffle restaurant that doubled as the studio of a talk show–walk in for waffles and you might be a guest, or possibly even the host. And there’s a taste of how different subcultures and interest groups have used public access to gain a voice, though I might’ve liked a bit more focus on that.  Also, no Robin Byrd?  No Wayne’s World?  I question the curatorial judgment.

Almost better than the content was the array of antique tube monitors they scrounged up to show the video on.  It’s been long enough that these bulky, cubical relics are starting to look alien to me.  TV was so much better on one of these fuzzy old behemoths, said no one ever.

BRIC House also houses a cafe, so if you’re in need of an upscale coffee, it’s yet another reason to stop in.  As with a lot of places, whether you should stop in or not is going to depend on what’s on exhibition.  I’m skeptical it’s worth a special trip.  It’s more like if you’re going to BRIC for an event, check out the gallery while you’re there.  Or if you’re seeing a show nearby, or taking a glassblowing course (Brooklyn Glass is right upstairs), visit for a coffee and some art. 

For Reference:

Address 647 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
Website bricartsmedia.org
Cost Free
Other Relevant Links
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Museum at FIT

Edification value  
Entertainment value  
Should you go?  
Time spent 29 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Utterly unsurprisingly, there were four references to Michelle Obama in the text for the Black Fashion Designers show. Because I really miss having her in the White House, I’ll pick the Laura Smalls sundress Mrs. Obama wore on Carpool Karaoke.

Museum at FIT, ManhattanIf I think about the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), it’s generally in terms of the building — the brutalist concrete pile that jumps over 27th Street at 7th Avenue, the anchor tenant of the Garment District.  I’ve walked by it many times and surely I’ve seen the sign that said “museum” — it’s pretty evident.  But not being especially a part of that world, I probably just glossed over it, edited it out, walked on.  The Museum Project ensures that doesn’t happen anymore.  My museum-dar is now top-notch.

In any case, I finally had a reason to visit the Museum at FIT, and I was very favorably impressed.  The museum space occupies a narrow, cave-like gallery on the ground floor, as well as a much larger space downstairs.  It’s all very dark, with spotlights to better to highlight the garments on display.  And of course, black is always fashionable.  Where museum walls go, black is the new black?

The cumulative space is larger than I expected it to be.  Not just some leftover rooms they needed to do something with, it earns the name “museum” (even without a gift shop or cafe).

There were two shows on the day I visited.  The first was called “Black Fashion Designers.”  Refreshingly straightforward, non punny title.  And a good show to boot.  This show could not have been more different from the Center for Architecture‘s show on black architects I recently visited.  I realize buildings can be harder to show in a museum setting than clothes are, but even from an organizational perspective, the Black Designers show had a thoughtfulness and narrative to it that the Architecture Center’s display sorely lacked.

The second show was on Parisian fashion in the 1950s and 1960s.  Apparently the conventional wisdom is Parisian fashion houses were sort of stuck in the past at that point, and UK and American designers really stepped to the fore; this show examines and seeks to correct that misapprehension.  It takes up the two basement spaces, one a low-ceilinged rectangular room that my notes again call “cave-like.”  But the other space was quite different.

Parisian Midcentury Fashion, Museum at FIT, New YorkThrough a door, the second room opened upward and outward, to about triple height, a real surprise given the subterranean location.  Again black, but this was a wide-open, encompassing space filled, tastefully and carefully, with islands of beautifully dressed mannequins stretching into the distance. “Zou bisou bisou” (but not the Mad Men version) playing in the background quietly set the tone.  I’ve discovered I like museums that use music subtly and cleverly to set a tone or convey a time.  Here it works particularly well.

Museum at FIT, ManhattanI didn’t spend a lot of time at the Museum at FIT, but that was mainly because I had a meeting to get to.  Even with my fairly limited knowledge of and interest in clothing, I could’ve spent another 15 or 20 minutes.  Both shows were expertly and lovingly curated and beautifully presented. I have no doubt that FIT has the resources to deliver an authoritative exhibition on any fashionable topic it cares to. And both exhibits zoomed in on subjects that the Met Fashion Institute, with its more general audience, probably wouldn’t do.

Fashion design being a topic of fairly narrow interest, I wouldn’t say everyone should go.  Obviously anyone who is a fashionisto or fashionista (fashionistx?) should make a pilgrimage to the Museum at FIT.  Indeed, I  suspect that one reason for the museum’s existence is so that the fashionable who don’t actually get into FIT have a place to which to make a pilgrimage.  But if you go, I’m confident you’ll see something beautiful and interesting.Museum at FIT, New York

For Reference:

Address 227 W 27th Street, Manhattan
Website fitnyc.edu
Cost Free
Other Relevant Links
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El Museo del Barrio

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 50 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A haunting and beautiful photograph by Cecilia Paredes, a Peruvian artist.  In her work, she has her body painted to match fancy floral wallpapers or fabrics, and then photographs herself in front of them.  My photo is at the end of the post.

El Museo del Barrio is currently the northernmost of the “Museum Mile” museums, occupying a stately building on Fifth Avenue, just across 104th Street from the Museum of the City of New York.  According to its website, it  started in the early 1970s as a cultural center focused on Puerto Rico.  It has since expanded its focus to cover all Latin American and Caribbean art and artists.  After bouncing around East Harlem a bit it found its current home in the Heckscher Building in 1977.

The building dates to 1921 when it was built as an orphanage, and includes a spectacularly beautiful theater, now run by El Museo and called Teatro Heckscher.

I was a little disappointed in El Museo.  I was expecting a survey of that Latino experience in New York City, as told through art as well as other sorts of artifacts.  The museum has a permanent collection of 8,000 objects, so I’m sure they could tell that story.  In practice, though, El Museo is a small art museum, showing work by Latino-Caribbean artists.  It’s in a large building, and I always assumed it was a rather large museum, so I was surprised to realize the exhibition space is confined to six rooms on the ground floor.

The main show when I visited was of video art by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, as well as selections she chose from the museum’s permanent collection.  I run hot and cold with video art. On the one hand, two of the best, most memorable works of art I’ve seen in the past two years were video pieces. On the other hand, I am bored to tears with the vast majority of it. Muñoz’s work, largely non-narrative, did little for me.  I lacked the eye or knowledge to understand how her selections from the permanent collection clicked with what she’s trying to do.

The other show featured recent acquisitions, definitely a common and valid theme for a museum, although given the small space available, I didn’t find it very edifying as far as key current trends in Latin or Caribbean art.  I liked some of the pieces, but I also thought much of the work on view wasn’t especially “Latin.”

It’s like my rhetorical question about the Leslie-Lohman‘s acquisition strategy:  will they collect anything just because it happened to be made by someone LGBTQ?  Or do the themes and topics and content of the art have to also reflect that world somehow?

Catalina Chervin (b. 1953, Argentina) “Songs 1-6” from the Canto portfolio, 2010.

Based on the recent acquisitions show, I’d tentatively say that El Museo opts for the broad approach:  they’ll acquire anything by an artist with the right name or country of origin.

That’s a perfectly valid collection strategy.  However, given their minuscule space it directly impacts the likelihood that a visitor to El Museo del Barrio actually learns something about el barrio. I’d therefore argue the museum needs to be clearer about its brand or purpose.

The museum also features Side Park Cafe, a large and decent looking bar/restaurant.  Without at all wanting to seem stereotypical, I bet they make great margaritas.  Apparently it’s fairly new:  there aren’t enough reviews on Yelp to get an objective margarita quality metric.

Should you go to El Museo?  I don’t really recommend it.  If you have to choose between going there and extending your visit to the Museum of the City of New York, the latter is probably the better use of your limited museuming time.  Naturally, as with many places I’ve visited, it comes down to your interest in the current exhibition. If you have a chance to go to the theater there, definitely seize the opportunity. 

Cecilia Paredes (b. 1950, Peru) photograph

For Reference:

Address 1230 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan
Website elmuseo.org
Cost Suggested Donation:  $9
Other Relevant Links

 

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Brooklyn Museum

 

Edification value  
Entertainment value  
Should you go?  
Time spent 185 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned

I felt I should pick something from the permanent collection. Having seen several 1800s-era houses so far, I have been wishing there was a historic house museum from the 1920s.  I don’t think one exists, but this period room, the 1928-1930 Weil-Worgelt Study, done in glorious art deco, makes that feeling all the stronger.

Brooklyn Museum With Cherry TreesIf you aren’t a local, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Brooklyn Museum is all about Brooklyn.  There is a museum about Brooklyn, but this isn’t it.  The Brooklyn Museum is Brooklyn’s answer to the Metropolitan: huge beaux arts building covering the full sweep of art across times and places.  It traces its history back to 1824, making it one of the oldest cultural institutions in the city, and the current building was started a couple of years before the 1898 consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York City, when New York and Brooklyn were cultural and to some extent economic rivals separated by a small river.

Of course the rivalry is still true of Manhattan and Brooklyn today, but when they were separate cities, having a comprehensive art museum in Brooklyn was a point of civic pride.

Here’s the thing.  The Brooklyn Museum can’t compete with the Met.  It doesn’t have the resources, it doesn’t have the brand, it doesn’t have the collection.  It’s strong in some things– fantastic Egyptian, great Asian, superb American art.  But the Met outclasses it mightily.  It used to try to compete, though.  And did pretty well of it, at least sometimes.  But starting a little over a decade ago, Brooklyn decided to change the game, move the goalposts.  It would be populist, accessible, earnest, and reach out to its community in a way that the Met, as a global museum that happens to be in New York, maybe can’t do as well.

This has been at best a mixed success. There’s a Columbia Marching Band fight song that mocks Brown students for lax academic standards–the lyrics say that they “take seminars in spider-man/and raisin bran/if it’s pass-fail they’ll take it.”  I think of that song when I think of the Brooklyn Museum — it’ll put on exhibits on anything.  If it thinks it’ll get a body through the door, it’ll do it.  The exhibit on “Star Wars” as art in 2002 –as “Attack of the Clones” was in theaters–permanently reduced its stature in my eyes. 

But rather than an exhaustive historical essay on the success or failure of specific populist shows, let’s look at what’s on now.  That won’t be directly relevant to your future decision of whether to visit or not, but it will help you understand what to expect.  From worst to best:

Iggy Pop: Life Drawings.  Some dude named Jeremy Deller had Iggy Pop pose nude for 4 hours in front of a bunch of amateurs.  Drawings from that…experiment…are on display along with some pieces Deller selected from Brooklyn’s collection that feature the nude male form.  The result is as horrible and sensationalist as I can imagine.  You get to see some bad (and, admittedly, a few quite good) drawings of naked Iggy Pop, and a seemingly random assortment of other naked guys.  It’s neither edifying nor entertaining, unless you like looking at sketchy renderings of a famous old guy’s junk.

Infinite Blue.  The exhibition space on the main floor is devoted to the color blue.  Things drawn from the Brooklyn’s collection that happen to be that color.  There’s nothing wrong with this idea, but the execution fails.  This is an opportunity to juxtapose objects to highlight how different cultures see the color and what it means to them.  Instead, pieces are segregated by origin, so that there’s a Hindu corner, an Egyptian vitrine, a Chinese porcelain cabinet, a European sector.  Put a 16th C. painting of Mary, with her ubiquitous blue mantle, right next to a blue-skinned Krishna:  blue representing purity versus blue symbolizing Krishna’s infinite power via the color of the sky and sea. That’d be thought-provoking.  Both those pieces are here, but a visitor has to walk a ways to see them.  Quite a few cultures and languages have blurred blue and green together.  Why is that?  This show won’t tell you.

Unknown artist, “Death Cart,” 1890-1910, Taos, New Mexico

But then there’s Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas, a small show drawn from the museum’s collection of Native American art, that’s  instructive, interesting, and a little macabre.  An exhibit after my own heart.

Marilyn Minter's "Food Porn" at Brooklyn Museum
Marilyn Minter, “100 Food Porn,” 1989-1990, enamel on metal

And a great Marilyn Minter retrospective.  I sort of knew her but not well.  Some of her work is over the top for my tastes, but I hadn’t ever seen her “food porn” series from 1990 (as opposed to her just-plain-porn series) and I found it delicious.

Georgia O'Keeffe Show at Brooklyn MuseumThe biggest show on currently is Georgia O’Keeffe: A Living Modern, portraying her more as icon than as artist.  It blends some of her paintings with clothes from throughout her life, and photographs of her taken by everyone from Alfred Steiglitz to Cecil Beaton to Karsh to Richard Avedon.  It’s fascinating to see how so many different photographers viewed one individual, and how easy it is to tell those with whom O’Keeffe clicked, and those with whom she didn’t.  It’s also fascinating to see how carefully she controlled her own image from the start of her career.  By her later years, you don’t even need to see her head.  Gnarled hands holding an animal’s skull against a black, belted dress lit by harsh desert light communicate exactly whom you are looking at.  This is the Brooklyn Museum doing something different, fresh, unexpected, and doing it well.

And then there’s the permanent collection.  If you’re an Egypt fan, you have to go just for those galleries alone.  Asia was being reinstalled when I visited. 

Brooklyn’s Egyptian Collection, all to myself on a Friday afternoon

The Brooklyn has its share of masterpieces, but opted to use the collection differently, as a lens on history and sociology.  Who created art and who wanted art and what it expressed about society at the time.  The Brooklyn is quite good in that respect, and it gives them a chance to leverage objects that don’t necessarily qualify as top hits.  But sometimes you just want to see a great piece of art, and those aren’t always readily on display.

Chauncy Bradley Ives, “Pandora,” 1871

In most other American cities, the Brooklyn Museum would be the must-visit art museum. The Brooklyn has tried earnestly to attract new audiences, which I respect.  And it has tried to differentiate in a city that, as my statistics show, is overcrowded with art museums. I respect that too.  But in my opinion, it errs in its willingness to entertain at the expense of edifying. 

And its efforts have alienated at least some of its core audience –i.e., me.  Prior to this visit, I hadn’t gone since a Takashi Murakami show in 2008.  It hasn’t done anything to make me want to go.  Should you go? Yes.  But go knowing that some of the Brooklyn Museum’s efforts at being edgy, innovative, or populist are terrible, and therefore it isn’t as good as it could or should be.

Brooklyn Museum, Interior Court

For Reference:

Address 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
Website brooklynmuseum.org
Cost General Admission:  $16 suggested donation.  Special exhibitions $20 mandatory (includes museum admission)
Other Relevant Links
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Onassis Cultural Center

Edification value  
Entertainment value  
Should you go?  
Time spent 57 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned A grave stela for a “lovable pig, victim of a traffic accident” from Edessa in Macedonia from the 2nd or 3rd century AD.  That was some pig.  He was radiant.  And humble.
Olympic Tower

CLOSED. The Onassis Center no longer has an exhibit space in New York City. (Updated June, 2025.)

The Onassis Center is a medium-sized subterranean gallery space accessed via the public atrium in the lobby of the Olympic Center. It’s the Greek answer to the various cultural forums and societies that dot the city, and thanks to its benefactors, it has the resources to put on really interesting shows of high-end art from the Hellenic world.

The current show has pieces from Greece, along with things borrowed from other notable museums around the world (including thet Met), so the Center clearly has some standing among the bigger guys.  Always a good sign in terms of whether it’d be worth randomly dropping by.

Without a doubt the Onassis Center was good for my vocabulary (which is very good to begin with).  I picked up six new-to-me words, at least five of which I am sure I will find opportunities to use in the near future.

  • apotropaic: having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck
  • nympholepsy: the condition of believing one has cavorted with nymphs
  • phimosis: a medical condition involving an overly tight foreskin
  • prothesis:  in this case lying in repose/viewing a body, part of ancient Greek funeral rites

And the last two terms distinguish between kinds of desire.

  • pothos: longing for something lost or distant
  • himeros: desire for something new or unexpected

I bet we discussed those at some point in my liberal arts, great-books based college education, but if so I’d forgotten about them.  It’s a great distinction.  Whereas I’d say equally I’m “in the mood” for my college-era pizza place or to try a well-regarded Laotian restaurant in Jamaica, in reality I’m feeling pothos for one and himeros for the other. I think.

The Onassis Center is beautifully designed, filtering a lot of natural light down into the basement level space, and features a fancy glass staircase and a small water feature, architectural details for which I have a weakness.

The show didn’t allow photography, so I don’t have any of the inside of the gallery itself.  But the current exhibit was interesting, on how the ancient Greeks processed and depicted emotions. It features sculpture and painted vases and masks, but also tablets inscribed with curses and requests for the gods, and other humbler, day-to-day items.  It explores emotions not in the obvious “happiness, sadness, anger” way but rather through the lens of location:  emotions in the home/private, emotions in public, emotions in the graveyard and on the battlefield. 

The one exception was around wrath, where there was a corner of the exhibit devoted specifically to depictions of Medea, who of course pretty much cornered the market on the topic.  The one non-classical work on display was a large-scale projection of a still photo of Maria Callas as Medea in a La Scala production from 1961.  Not at all classically Greek, but very very wrathful.

The Onassis Center has been under my radar right up until I started this project.  I’m glad it’s not anymore.  You still need to visit to the Met if you want an encyclopedic grand tour of Greek art, but I trust them to do amazing shows scaled right for their impressive space.  I highly recommend it. 

Finally, a planning note, the Olympic Tower is right across 52nd Street from the Austrian Cultural Forum, so those two spots form an easy (and free, and uncrowded) art-filled couple of hours in midtown.

For Reference:

Former Address Olympic Tower, 645 5th Avenue, Manhattan (PERMANENTLY CLOSED)
Website onassisusa.org
Cost Free
Other Relevant Links

 

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Austrian Cultural Forum Gallery

Edification value  
Entertainment value  
Should you go?  
Time spent 21 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Mark Dion’s “Humboldt Cabinet,” (2013), a beautiful wooden construction containing postcards painted by Colombians with random everyday things: a cat, a bug, a light, a toy airplane, fish hooks…  It’s simple and beautiful and speaks wittily and intelligently to the urge to collect and categorize the exotic.

Stairs detail, all metal and glass

The Austrian Cultural Forum is housed in a remarkable contemporary building, skinny and super tall.  The forum formerly lived in a townhouse on a standard Manhattan lot of 25 feet wide by 100 feet deep.  When they decided they’d outgrown that space, like so many Manhattanites before them they tore it down and built up.  On a footprint of 25 feet by 81 feet, architect Raimond Abraham designed a 24-story building, including a multilevel exhibit space at and slightly below ground level. The new building opened in 2002.

 

Skylight over a bright, exotic, reptile- and flamingo- infested swamp

The gallery space is super.  The tower is slightly set back from the rear of the building such that there’s a skylight, and it’s therefore bright and airy.  The different levels flow together  well, and while the total space isn’t large, it gives them a lot of flexibility for small-scale shows.

The current exhibit is called “Constructing Paradise,” pretty self explanatory.  I was surprised and intrigued by the breadth of artists — a handful of young contemporary Austrian and American artists contribute pieces but there’s also a print by Gauguin (perhaps the granddaddy of exotic-paradise-seeking-or-constructing artists). Basquiat and Kara Walker and Oscar Kokoschka are represented too.

The show ends (if you view it from lowest to highest) with a computer-generated tropical, palm-strewn sunset Mathias Kessler, a very timely take on invented paradise.

This is a great space for art, and assuming this show is typical, I really like the way they program it. I’d say absolutely visit if you happen to be in midtown and need an art fix.  The Austrian Forum and the Onassis Center are across 52nd Street from one another and make a great double bill.

For Reference:

Address 11 E 52nd Street, Manhattan
Website acfny.org
Cost Free
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Newhouse Center of Contemporary Art

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 11 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned The building’s stained glass is a treasure of nautical and celestial themes.
Sailors’ Snug Harbor

The Newhouse Center is a challenge to review.  Like its neighbor the Noble Maritime Collection, its name creates a very wrong impression.  You think gallery, permanent collection, and with a name like Newhouse, it’s probably good stuff.  No, wrong, and not quite.

Continue reading “Newhouse Center of Contemporary Art”

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Noble Maritime Collection

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 57 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned John Noble made his art in a houseboat studio that he cobbled together, Frankenstein’s Monster-like, out of sundry boat bits and bobs over years.  The Collection acquired his studio, restored it beautifully, and moved the whole thing into a room in the building, where you can peek inside.
Sailors’ Snug Harbor

This museum suffers from a misleading name.  I walked into the Noble Maritime Collection expecting a dark basement full of dusty old nautical stuff, with a stuffy aristocratic bent. Instead, the collection occupies three light-filled, airy, beautifully restored floors of Building D at Sailors’ Snug Harbor.

It covers four main topics:

  • The life and art of John Noble, for whom the collection is named and who primarily made prints and drawings that captured the life of the harbor.
  • The founding and establishment of Snug Harbor in the early 19th century
  • The lives of sailors who retired to Snug Harbor
  • Robbins Reef Light, and Kate Walker, the remarkable woman who served as lighthousekeeper for over thirty years.

Continue reading “Noble Maritime Collection”

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New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 54 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned Given my weakness for fancy-dressed skeletons, I was tempted to pick the Red Death costume from “Phantom.” But I will instead say Julie Taymor’s  costume/puppet designs from the Lion King are the best thing currently at the library, and still the best thing (visually) on Broadway.

The New York Public Library’s branch at Lincoln Center is easy to overlook, tucked in between the Met and the Vivian Beaumont Theater.  It puts on a number of free exhibitions throughout the year, and has a fairly large space for doing so.  I saw a great show celebrating the 45th anniversary of Sesame Street there a few years back. Continue reading “New York Public Library for the Performing Arts”

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American Folk Art Museum

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent 52 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned I’m impressed by the sheer blackness of the Folk Art Museum’s gallery space, as designed for the Gabritschevsky show.  It’s super different from anywhere else I’ve seen art yet.

CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, In April of 2025 the American Folk Art Museum closed for renovations to its building. The museum expects to reopen in 2028.

I have a problem with the idea of “folk art.” In my mind, it always translates as “art that’s just not very good.” The naive stuff, the outsider stuff, the untrained stuff, the stuff made by people not right in the head…always it feels to me like there’s some qualifier that attaches to the creator or the work that sets your expectations lower. And for me art is all about high expectations.  I know there’s a Museum of Bad Art, and that’s cool.  Badness can, if it’s bad enough, be instructive and entertaining. But I wouldn’t want to go to a museum of mediocre art.  So I’d never been to the Folk Art Museum.

The Folk Art Museum also has one of the sadder recent histories among the city’s cultural institutions.  The museum built itself a large and beautiful home down the block from the Museum of Modern Art back in 2001.  However, demand to see folk art is apparently far smaller than they figured, and they couldn’t pay back what they borrowed to build it.  So the museum sold its building to MoMA in 2011 and moved uptown to a much, much smaller space in the white marble monolith that houses the Church of the Latter Day Saints diagonally across from Lincoln Center.  MoMA has since controversially demolished the old building, which really was striking, to further its own relentless expansion.

This is particularly sad because the museum has a substantial collection, but nowhere to display it.  When I visited, all of the small yet cavernous space was devoted to work by two artists, both in the “not right in the head” category. 

Eugen Gabritschevsky was Russian born and well on his way to a promising career in the biological sciences, including postdoctorate work at Columbia, when in 1931 he was institutionalized in Germany.  Carlo Zinelli was born in Italy in 1916 and committed to a psychiatric hospital in Verona in 1947, where he lived the rest of his life, until 1974.  Aside from both being in mental institutions, the two men and their art had little in common that I could see.

I’m going to be looking at more art by institutionalized people when I go to the Living Museum, at some point in this project.  It often feels uncomfortable, like it’s exploitative, or like there’s so little basis for understanding what the artist was thinking that any interpretation on my part is presumptuous.

Gabritschevsky, Untitled, no date
Zinelli, Untitled, no date

But should you go to the Folk Art Museum?  They know what they’re doing.  The two exhibits were beautifully installed, they used iPads cleverly, wall texts were generally great, and I really liked the way they suspend frames via cables, so that they float in the air.  But I’m not sure the museum in its current incarnation is going to win any hearts and minds.  If you already have a deep love of folk art, you should go.  Everyone else can feel just fine skipping it.

For Reference:

Address 2 Lincoln Square, Manhattan – TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS (THROUGH 2028)
Website folkartmuseum.org
Cost Free
Other Relevant Links

 

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