| 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.
The publisher Harper Brothers proposed to seal Mark Twain’s memoirs until 2000. Then they would be published by subscription (quoting the exhibit’s text) “in whatever mode should then be prevalent, that is by printing as at present, or by use of phonographic cylinders, or by electrical methods or by any other method which may then be in use.” The show has Twain’s 1900 letter agreeing to these terms. No doubt he didn’t want his meeting with the crew of the Starship Enterprise to mess with the timeline too much.
The Harper brothers started out as printers, but with their 1817 publication of an edition of Seneca’s Morals, they launched one of the most famous publishing concerns in American history.
The octagonal gallery had an exhibit documenting the history of gay student life at Columbia, from the time when homosexuality violated the law, through the AIDS crisis, to today. I’m proud to say Columbia was home to the first gay student group on a college campus — the Student Homophile League — dating to 1967. Second most interesting thing I learned there.
Grey Art Gallery is the public art museum of New York University. It consists of a small ground floor space and another subterranean gallery across the street from Washington Square Park.
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. 
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.
If 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.
Through 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.
I 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.
If you wake up one day and want to be an interior designer, there are worse places you could learn your new trade than the New York School of Interior Design. Occupying a midtown building that runs through the entire block, the school has a gallery that’s open to the public.
The ground-floor space is great, with large windows looking out onto both Fifth Ave. and 13th Streets.