| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 19 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz in the guise of a fierce warrior queen, with over-the-top makeup and headdress. |
Like many instutions of higher learning around the City, Hostos Community College has a small art space where they periodically mount public exhibitions.
Hostos’s small gallery resides on the ground floor of Building C, just past security, to the left of the door to the swimming pool. The small space boasts good lighting, high ceilings and large windows looking out onto the Grand Concourse.
Edgar Allan Poe, proto-goth, inventor of the detective story, writer of gruesome tales and horror-struck poetry, quother of the raven, had a hard life. Baltimore has largely claimed him as its own (just think of their NFL team). While he did live there for while, and died there in 1849, Poe was a New Yorker for a good chunk of his life. Indeed, he was only visiting Baltimore when he shuffled off his mortal coil in circumstances that remain mysterious to this day. For the last three years of his life Poe resided in a small rented cottage in what was then the village of Fordham in Westchester County, known today as the Bronx.
It’s furnished with a fair number of period pieces, three items of which are known to have been Poe’s: a rocking chair, a fancy gilded mirror, and the narrow bed where Virginia Poe passed away.
My guide during my visit was a local kid who really loved Poe and the place. His enthusiasm helped bring the cottage to life. 
Jesse Chun’s Landscape series. What look like stylized, slightly monochrome landscape prints and turn out to be extremely enlarged images from passport pages. They are beautiful, meaningful, and you can play “what country is that?” with them.
Lehman College occupies a lovely campus (built as the Bronx campus of Hunter College in 1931) in the far northern reaches of the Bronx, a couple of stops south of the terminus of the number 4 train. Like most colleges, its architecture is a mix of classical and modern, the former mostly beautiful, the latter mostly notsomuch.
Lehman College’s Fine Arts Building (modern) is home to a small museum space, divided into two galleries. On the day I visited, one of them was filled with propaganda posters from the first and second World Wars. It was also in the midst of having its floor painted, and therefore while I could peek in, I couldn’t enter without tracking paint all over the creation, which the painting contractors politely asked me not to do.
Space number two was the larger, arranged around a central column supporting the roof of the building, which sloped down from all sides to the column, in a modern show of form following function, of the sort that makes me think, “yes, it does, but you could’ve done it differently and gotten both better function and better form.”
I didn’t quite know what to expect from a community college in the far reaches of the Bronx. Lehman’s other current show, “Alien Nations,” surprised and delighted me. I’m used to contemporary art being hit or miss — everyone’s tastes are different, and mine are notably quirky, so in any show of young, contemporary artists I expect to see at most one or two pieces I really like, and rather more that I really don’t. This show fired on all cylinders. 
The museum occupies a modern building that has a very early-millennium feel to it (it opened in 2004). One of the things this project is giving me is a very strong sense of how hard it is to do a glass atrium for a museum that doesn’t age like a 1980s Marriott. The Bronx Museum has an atrium that must’ve looked fresh and modern when it opened, but already, not so much. It’s a real museum, though, with a tiny gift shop, a (lackluster) cafe, and expansive gallery spaces on the ground floor, and an event area and terrace on the second floor.
You enter the building into an oddly shaped (ah, the vogue for asymmetry in the early 2000s) space, containing the ticket/info desk and the cafe, as well as a ramp that leads to one gallery space and from there to stairs up to the second floor.
Something that’s stuck with me from my visit is this sign, a patient explanation in English, Spanish, and French about why you shouldn’t touch artworks in museums. My first reaction was that of a smug, overeducated museum veteran. And I wondered whether the sort of person inclined to touch a piece of art in a museum is the type of person who’d bother reading a sign that explains why that’s bad for the art. But on further reflection I see in it an indicator that this museum’s constituency isn’t generally me.
The Bronx has gone all in on Cuba. It’s currently running a show called Wild Noise/Ruido Salvage on contemporary Cuban art from the 1970s until now. This show is dynamite. Complex, diverse, and expansive, I came away from it feeling like I have a sense of the breadth of Cuban art today. I also feel like if this show were at say the Brooklyn Museum or even one of the smaller art museums of Manhattan, it would be something of a blockbuster. The museum claims that this is “the most extensive cultural exchange between Cuba and the United States in five decades” and also says that five years of work and research went into this. I believe it. Super timely, and canny in other ways, too: a significant number of the pieces in the exhibit are now part of the museum’s collection.
Finally there were some pretty colored acrylic abstractions by Arlene Slavin on the terrace, and a series of photographs by Clayton Frazier of the people of St. Dominique (aka Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
Oh and a chunk of the old Yankee Stadium. Because it is the Bronx.
All the front windows of the house have neat, scary terra cotta faces centered above them. This was apparently a Dutch thing to ward off bad spirits. Reproductions are available at the gift shop!
The Van Cortlandts in the early days were super-wealthy, and the house showed it. They were also super-Dutch, proud of their heritage as New Amsterdammers, and many of the details of the house (including a blue and orange color scheme for the china cabinets in the parlor) reflect that as well. Little that’s in the house today remains from the Van Cortlandts, but most of the publicly accessible rooms are filled with period furniture and knick-knacks that give a sense of what the lives of the earlier generations of the family might have been like.
When it opened as a museum, one room was redone to depict a modest city house, simulating how a much less successful Dutch family would have lived down in Manhattan. They’ve kept that to this day and while I would’ve liked the place to be as close as possible to how the family lived in it, the contrast is informative.
The Van Cortlandts lived a very different kind of life than the 
Halls of fame today are two-a-penny. Everyone and everything from minor league lacrosse to rock n roll has a hall of fame. But it wasn’t always that way. There had to be, at some point, a first one.