Whitney Expansion Carping
Home sick enjoying (through my nyquil haze) Roberta Smith’s snarky critique of all the NYC art museums architecture. For some reason I thought everyone liked the new MOMA but me. I’m sure I could do much better at designing galleries…. Caper, fetch me my crayons! Charette time.
Bizarre Animals in Cambridge this Friday
In Support of Idiosyncrasy
In Support of Idiosyncrasy. Why do museum exhibits so often look and feel the same? What makes a memorable museum? How can we center our institutions in our communities?
Horses and Skateboards
We braved a stormy Saturday to reach 1 Battery Park and the old customs house that houses the New York branch of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The grand steps were windswept and the umbrellas that passersby wrestled with seemed to be more trouble than they were worth. I love these old buildings with their marble brass, high ceilings and grand staircases. There were just three exhibitions, one on horses and the native experience, another on skateboarders and a third on skin, contemporary work by native artists. My favorite work was by Sonya Kelliher-Combs thousands of needles strung with thread 8 feet up a stark white gallery wall, the lighting making geometric fabriclike shadows on the wall. The back of the wall, if you follow the thread, shows all the loose ends hanging down.
Let’s meet here at 3:00PM Saturday March 13th. Then we can find afternoon tea/beer and burgers in this downtown region. Anyone have ideas of good things to eat around there?
Below Sea Level by Pawel Wojtasik @ MassMoCA
Below Sea Level comes from the tradition of cycloramas, or panoramic paintings spanning 360 degrees. In Pawel Wojtasik’s technological update, viewers enter the thirty-five foot diameter, twelve-foot tall cylindrical structure, and, once inside, experience a video panorama composed of a revolving, watery landscape with the skyline of the city of New Orleans in the distance.
In the center of the cylinder there was a round bench and after a few moments the piece captivated us. We sat back to back turning our heads this way and that as the action moved from oil rigs to bayou to levee to parade. Nearly wordless, the film built tension and emotion by pulling in to different neighborhoods and then pulling back, an underlying watery music tying the realms together. This was the best piece in the museum. The screen took advantage of the museum’s acreage- so many different pieces playing at once, but this had its own darkened room up a back staircase.
MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA
The Panorama of The City of New York
The Panorama is the jewel in the crown of the collection of the Queens Museum of Art. Built by Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair, in part as a celebration of the City’s municipal infrastructure, this 9,335 square foot architectural model includes every single building constructed before 1992 in all five boroughs; that is a total of 895,000 individual structures.
The Panorama is housed in a moodily lit gymnasium sized room in the QMA. If you live or have ever lived in New York City and have not been, I must insist that you go immediately. Admission: $5. Museum Club spent a long time staring down at the five boroughs, enraptured, spotting where we grew up, our first apartments, where we used to work, the scope of the city laid out below us. A single plane silently takes off and lands at LaGuardia in a meditative loop. There’s Rikers: so big- and all the islands and coastline.
The Museum is looking for sponsors: for fifty dollars you can buy your apartment! Last year the artist Damon Rich used it to physically map foreclosures in the city, a use in line with its original purpose as an urban planning tool.
The quiet and dim lighting reminded me of a medieval cathedral. The Panorama is a place to worship New York, where one is reminded that although your little studio and daily commute to your workplace and favorite bar or coffee shop is represented; it is so small. Each person’s city is different, still encompassed by the panorama.
A Cold Clear Sunday in Queens
New-York Historical Society to Add Children’s History Museum
Read about it here.
Emily