About MsSusanB

Arts and technology writer who is in the know about the latest and greatest that New York City – and other places in the country – have to offer and the fossils that are being dug up around the world

The Corset that Changed Cultural History and the Man Who Made It

Posted on February 20, 2014 by MsSusanB

JPG’s creation for Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” segment of her 1990 tour. Made from vintage 1930s lame

Amidst the light, glamour, glitter, and mystery sending shock waves and awe through the masses crowding into the Brooklyn Museum’s show, The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, a hush falls as each person realizes they’re only an arm’s length away from the Icon’s icon. Lovingly crafted from vintage lame, JPG and Madonna had no idea (according to Madonna) what a sensation their underwear-as-outerwear statement would create in fashion, performance, pop, and culture when JPG designed her get-ups for the Blond Ambition World Tour. Get out to Brooklyn to experience this über-tribute before Feb 23.

Madonna’s lent her JPG corsets to the section of the show where the walls are covered in quilted satin, and JPG dug into his archives, too: You’ll see the series of illustrations he did to show the looks he would create for the tour, as well as JPG’s personal Polaroids shot during the initial fittings. If you’re very quiet in this part of the show, you’ll also hear visitors gasp when they realize that they’re looking back at artifacts from 1990!

Crowds listen to the mannequin sing in the Metropolis gallery during the show’s final week.

This genuinely theatrical tribute to JPG is chock full of corsets and cages made from silk, leather, raffia, wheat, and enough other stuff to win the Unconventional Materials challenge hands-down. O ye of Project Runway, worship at the mannequins of the Master!

At the entrance to the show, there are two small photo portraits of JPG taken by Mr. Warhol himself. They’re at a dance club in 1984 and JPG is in one of his Boy Toy collection outfits. Andy is quoted as saying, “What he does is really art.” It’s a curatorial anointment that offers a subtle, quiet, reflective moment to what you’re about to experience.

Dealing with the recent blizzards would have been more fun if you had shopped JPG’s Voyage Voyage ready-to-wear collection (2010-2011). These are styled with pieces from older collections.

Room after room of gender-bending, mind-altering, color-crazy, history-twisting looks, gowns, shoes, bodysuits, and haute handwork reminds us that JPG has been pushing the boundaries for over 40 years, inspired by French sailors, French culture, 50s TV, global culture, his grandmothers unmentionables drawer, and the ever-inspiring gritty street. How do you use embroidery, neoprene, stuffed silk tubes, tulle, and illusion in a subversive manner? Take a stroll through JPG’s master class.

You’ll find mermaids worn by Beyoncé, a French sailor-striped gown worn by Princess Caroline, red carpet looks worn by Ms. Cotillard, a Mongolian shearing coat sported by Bjork, and photos of supermodels and superstars sporting outrageous and inventive looks. The names of the collections alone tell you the scope of his interests – Haute Couture Salon Atmosphere, Ze Parisienne, Flower Power and Skinheads, Paris and Its Muses, So British, Forbidden Gaultier, and Great Journey collections.

Close-up of corset from JPG’s Countryside Babes collection, prêt-à-porter spring/summer 2006. Made of wheat and braided straw, created in 84 hours

The show features 140 ensembles in all, enough to fill the entire wing. Mr. Gaultier even tells us that he expanded it a little for Brooklyn’s gigantic space, adding a “Muses” section with American icons and runway looks for big-boned, curvy girls.

Oh, and did I mention that the mannequins talk? (We can’t even begin on that, so here’s a video to explain how that magic happened.)

Brooklyn is the last stop on JPG’s North American tour, which was organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Maison Jean Paul Gaultier.

If you can’t visit, take a walk through the show via our Flickr photos, and listen in on an hour-long discussion between JPG himself and the show’s curator Thierry-Maxime Lorio, where they talk about his “express yourself” philosophy.

The special promo video will give you a taste of the creative genius behind 40 years of memorable, challenging fashion as art:

Top of the Pop 80s Style at NY Historical

Posted on February 12, 2014 by MsSusanB

Keith’s “Into 84” exhibition poster inspired by choeographer Bill T. Jones (1983). Photo: Tseng Kwong Chi. © Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.; Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation

When you stand in line to get your tickets for The Armory Show at 100 at the New-York Historical Society, look up and you’ll see a piece of history from the era of Madonna and Danceteria right above you – the entire beautiful, embellished ceiling of one of the must-see stops during the raging Eighties club culture in NYC, Keith Haring’s Pop Shop as part of the special installation Keith Haring All-Over.

Although the Pop Shop closed its doors on Lafayette Street in 2005, it achieved worldwide pop-culture recognition for being the most iconic sites where art, music, dance, graffiti, celebrity, and the street mixed. Haring, whose Radiant Baby and other works ubiquitously plastered subway station walls in the 80s, decided to put Warhol’s commerce-as-art philosophy into practice. He created an art-filled shop downtown where the international art collectors, celebrities, club kids, and graffiti artists would feel comfortable.

Installation view of the Pop Shop ceiling over the cash registers at NYHS, right behind a video wall of Oertel’s Pulling Down the Statue of King George III. Courtesy: NYHS/John Wallen

The walls were covered in Haring’s instantly recognizable doodle-cartoon figures and stuff to buy, so when the Haring Foundation gave the ceiling to NYHS, it did so with the stipulation that it be hung somewhere where money is exchanged. So, right inside the door in the same beautiful entrance hosting the treasures of Revolutionary New York, is the ceiling from a place where music blared, fun was had, all-night parties raged, and Downtown 80s life was celebrated.

Take the elevator to the Luce Center to see the rest of the show, which is on loan to NYHS by the Haring Foundation, which Keith established just before he succumbed to AIDS in 1990. Go to Keith’s website to see him in action in the subway, galleries, and performance and click through images of his amazing body of work in digital form by decade. It’s all here.

Keith’s “Radiant Baby” buttons in the NYHS collection, gifted by Roy Eddey.

But back upstairs at NYHS, you’ll see Keith’s 1985 repeated-pattern design for a fabric run right above two NYC mile markers from the 1800s, a Haring-painted black-and-pink leather jacket (done with graffiti artist LAII), and Jeremy Scott’s Haring-inspired sneakers for Adidas. The NYHS is also screening some vintage video in the little 80s space, right next to the classical busts of New York’s 19^th century high and mighty. Hang out to see Madonna’s 1984 performance of Dress You Up for the Keith’s Party of Life and the 1986 Grace Jones video I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect For You), which Keith co-directed.

The show is tiny, but it’s a great little secret spot to time travel back to the Eighties. For more Keith, visit the Fales Library at NYU for Keith Haring: Languages through February 28 and NYPL’s Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism through April 6. The NYHS installation is an open run.

Hey, and don’t forget to shop in the online Pop Shop, where revenue from (RED) items goes to combatting AIDS.

Must-See Skytop Panorama of NYC Past & Present at The Whitney

Posted on February 3, 2014 by MsSusanB

The installation view of T. J. Wilcox: In the Air, 2013. Photo: Bill Orcutt

If you want to enjoy a beautiful view of Manhattan from the roof, don’t worry about the snow, rain, or cold weather. Go over to the Whitney Museum before February 9 and take in the film installation T.J. Wilcox, In the Air, that features a beautiful panorama (from the roof of Wilcox’s Union Square studio) that dreamily introduces six stories about the past and present of life, art, energy, fame, events, and cosmic forces that ebb and flow continuously below.

The big, in-the-round screen circles around you (duck and just walk into it), so you can really take in the view, all the way from the Battery to beyond the Empire State Building.

Still from T.J. Wilcox’s panoramic 2013 silent film installation, In the Air. Image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

The film cycles from dawn to dusk, but along the way, Mr. Wilcox takes you on little journeys as you enjoy his movie panorama. The experience is one where you begin to see New York through his eyes, past and present together.

After a few minutes, one of his panorama screens fades you see a short, reflective, poetic, subtitled NYC story-movie. It’s a quiet experience — bringing you back to the Thirties when the Empire State Building was contemplated to be used as a zeppelin-docking station, to the present when 14th Street is one of the best vantage points to contemplate the out-of-this-world spectacle of Manhattanhenge, and the days of glitter, glamour, and grit of Warhol, Gloria Vanderbilt, and fashion-industry icon, Antonio Lopez.

Watching Wilcox’s Gloria Vanderbilt vignette from outside the installation. Photo: Bill Orcutt.

He reminds you that Gertrude Whitney, the museum’s founder, long ago succeeded in a custody battle to care for little Gloria. The film takes you to her apartment and reflects on the fact that Gloria was “in the public eye from birth” and celebrates her vibrant artistic, business, and family accomplishments (re: plenty of shots of Anderson Cooper). Another mini-film focuses upon a nano-second in Warhol’s life, when his Factory crew unfurled Mylar balloons to welcome the arrival of the pope-mobile to New York City in 1965.

Weegee’s Variant of Untitled (Striking Beauty) is hung in an adjacent gallery. Courtesy: Whitney Museum

In his musing on the film about fashion-illustrator extraordinaire, Antonio, Wilcox reveals his surprise that Antonio’s studio was located right next to his own building, takes pleasure in asking us to gaze out over the community where so much magnificent art was made, careers enlivened, and life lived.

In a tiny back-room gallery, the Whitney has installed a few other reflections on skies over the City – Weegee’s lightening strike behind the Empire State Building and Yoko’s Sky TV, are two – but the big “wow” here is Mr. Wilcox’s ability to take us on a 35-minute journey in and among the streets and skyline that from his quiet, contemplative perch.

It’s quite a collage of memory, reflection, mythologies, politics, history, and beauty. Click here to see the Whitney’s slide show of the storyboards in Wilcox’s studio, and listen to him talk about it this beautiful work in this YouTube video:

Avant-Garde Designers Give High Fashion Ethnic Twist

Posted on January 29, 2014 by MsSusanB

Striking a pose in an “Eskimo” hide, fur, and sinew coat in 1916. Source: AMNH

What if you took a group of young designers to a major NYC museum, threw open the doors to one of the largest textile and costume collections in the country, let them try on furs and dresses in the archives, seek inspiration, sketch, and create something that a major retailer could sell to a fashion-forward buyer?

It’s hard to imagine that FIT or the Met’s Costume Institute would ever agree to this (even under Tim Gunn’s watchful eye), but it’s exactly what happened in 1915 when a “fashion staff” inside the Anthropology Department of the American Museum of Natural History encouraged American designers and manufacturers to probe the AMNH collections to view the images, patterns, textiles, embroidery, beadwork, furs, and clothing of indigenous Great Plains, Mesoamerica, and the Andes people.

Mary Tannahill batik dress inspired by South Sea Island Art. 1919. Photo: Julius Kirschner. Source: AMNH

The Bard Graduate Center has seized upon this heretofore unknown fragment of museum and NYC history to create its own mind-bending reality show, An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915-1928, that weaves together fashion, industrial, museum, and scientific plot lines. Take this journey in person before February 2 or via the excellent digital site that BGC Digital Media has created.

In the wake of the 1913 Armory Show, three AMNH anthropology curators (Clark Wissler, Herbert J. Spinden, and Charles W. Mead) and one of Fairchild’s Women’s Wear journalists, M.D.C. Crawford, (who also held a Research Associate position at the museum) got a bee in their collective bonnet about leveraging AMNH’s extensive textile collection to convince designers that native Americas design could offer as much inspiration as Europe or primitive art from Africa.

M. D. C. Crawford, co-founder of the Costume Institute, with artist-designer Ilonka Karasz (1916-1919) Courtesy: Brooklyn Museum Archives.

After the top brass from H.R. Mallison & Co. began visiting AMNH’s Peruvian textile collections for inspiration on how to improve their silk fabric line, it wasn’t long before other business managers, designers, and mill experts were delightedly poking around behind the scenes, too. Why look to William Morris arts-and-crafts style from Europe, when you can offer something “American” to the consumer? Didn’t Aztec, Hopi, Cherokee, or Mesoamerican culture have something to offer? Soon, Wanamakers was hosting in-store displays of Mayan textiles and out-of-town retailers were heading uptown to the AMNH collections on their NYC buying trips.

Bard has plucked many of the inspirational items from the AMNH collections for this show (like the stunning Koryak dancing coat and another embellished waterproof topper made entirely of embroidered and appliqued salmon skin), adding samples of the fabrics they inspired, gorgeous dresses with evocative trims and prints, design sketchbooks, multimedia interactives, and a fashion slide show — perhaps an hour’s worth of perusing inside their tiny fouth-floor Focus Gallery. It’s quite a story.

Max Meyer’s hooded evening coat, inspired by the AMNH Koryak coat. Source: AMNH

Crawford recounts the Museum’s foray into industrial-arts inspiration in two 1917/18 articles in The American Museum Journal, which you can read in the digital flipbook that Bard has on its website and inside the exhibition, which documents the original artifacts that inspired each retail look. (Check out our Flickr site to see some of the items you can find for yourself your next ramble through the AMNH second and third floors.)

Soon after, Stewart Culin opened the textile study room in the Brooklyn Museum, and by 1919, AMNH mounted the Exhibition of Industrial Art in Textiles and Costumes. Take a look at the silks, industrial embroidery display, tea gowns, and ultra-modern bohemian-style batik dresses on the Bard multimedia site. See silks inspired by Plains Indian war bonnets, gowns inspired by South Seas batik prints, and numerous other designers, stories, ethnic looks, photographs, and industrial wonders.

Koryak woman’s dancing coat from Kushka, Siberia; fur, hide, bead, cloth, sinew; acquired 1901 by AMNH.

It’s surprising to discover that so many really sharp fashion photos were buried deep within the AMNH photo archives. The digital images, originally on lantern slides, look like they were taken yesterday.

The curators say that the AMNH initiative withered a few years later when some of the staff left and Mr. Mead passed away. But this museum-fashion story didn’t really end there. Mr. Spinder went to the Brooklyn Museum and worked with John Sloan and Abby Rockefeller to elevate tribal art’s status in the fine-arts world. Mr. Crawford, who became Women’s Wear design editor, co-founded the Met’s Costume Institute in 1937 and was a key advocate within the Brooklyn Museum to establish its influential Design Lab, which debuted in 1948. (Hello, Charles James!)

Curator Clark Wissler with the AMNH Anthropology accessories wall.

Could anyone imagine how much those sparks flying 100 years ago among AMNH’s and Mr. Boas’s snowshoes, bows, baskets, headdresses, teepee covers, and 19th-century Siberian armor would ignite such bright lights in fashion way out in Brooklyn and across the Park?

Thanks for unearthing this fashion story, Bard.

Tiny Natural History Show Has Eyes Bugging Out

Posted on January 26, 2014 by MsSusanB

Asaphus, from St. Petersburg, has eyes bugging out (Ordovidian, 490-440 mya). Photo: ©AMNH/R.Mickens)

Confined to a tiny case in the “canoe” rotunda at the American Museum of Natural History, some extinct species from more than 400 million years ago are putting on quite a show, thanks to two trilobite lovers from the heavy-metal music and vert paleo worlds.

Andy Secher and Martin Shugar went through their massive trilobite collections (Andy has 4,000 in his Manhattan apartment and Martin turned over 200,000 fossils and shells to AMNH) and picked out fifteen “best of the best” from each of the six geologic periods that hosted these little waterway critters – from the Cambrian to the Permian (521 to 240 million years ago). It’s quite something, considering there are over 20,000 recognized species lingering in 281 million years of rocks around the world!

When the exoskeleton of Dicranurus disintegrated in the Lower Devonian, it left a fossilized cast that is so perfectly prepared you think you’re watching him in action

When the exoskeleton of Dicranurus disintegrated in the Lower Devonian, it left a fossilized cast so perfectly prepared you think you’re watching him in action

The tiny show, which is in an open-ended run, is a “wow” due to the spectacular preservation and preparation of each of these little snubs of rock containing fossilized “casts” of animals whose exoskeletons disintegrated soon after they expired millions of years ago. The state of preservation of even the most delicate features is pretty remarkable.

Consider Asaphus kowalewskii from Ordivician rocks near St. Petersburg (490-440 mya), whose long eye stalks are truly a wonder of nature, evolution, and behind-the-scenes prep that make this character’s eyes pop. Trilobites invented complex, multi-lens eyes, and this Asaphus provocatively suggests the ability to check things out above the sediments where they burrowed, sort of like a horseshoe crab equipped with a modern submarine periscope.

The little Olenoides on display hails from British Columbia’s famous Burgess Shale and has long antenna curving back along its sides. He’s also found in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Utah, and other places in Cambrian rocks 450-490 million years old. For all those AMNH visitors asking where they can see the Burgess Shale, here’s your chance to commune with a critter and some rock from the same formation that so inspired uber-naturalist Stephen Jay Gould.

Olenoides of British Columbia’s Burgess Shale (Cambrian 450-490 mya)

Walliserops has a full trident sprouting out of his head –a unique apparatus that adapted him for who-knows-what in Devonian life in what-is-now Morocco. Is this where Neptune got the idea of what works best down under the sea?

The hometown favorite is Arctinurus boltoni, first found in upstate New York in the early 1800s during the construction of the Erie Canal. The AMNH has an entire website showcasing these upstate wonders from the Rochester Shale. See them all and take a peek behind the scenes into the AMNH collection drawers on the image gallery.

Andy and Martin’s enthusiasm for trilobites puts them in good company. Tom Jefferson and Ben Franklin are said to have collected them. Trilobite fossils were hawked on 15th century European streets and several trilobite websites say that 25,000-year-old European burials were found with these fossils, too.

Trilobites with tridents and horns. Walliserops is found in Morocco’s Lower to Middle Devonian strata.

Although AMNH has terrific trilobite blog and a page with “Twenty Trilobite Fast Facts,” why not go for the slick YouTube video tour? Watch as AMNH’s Neil Landman, Andy, and Martin talk about their passion and show the cabinet-sized exhibit in close-up. You really need to come, meet the trilobites, and journey back to a time on Earth before animals had even colonized land.

Wool Smart Art Covers Guggenheim

Posted on January 20, 2014 by MsSusanB

Wool’s untitled 2000 work, silkscreen on linen on the top-floor gallery. © Christopher Wool

Wool’s gigantic 2000 silkscreen installed on the top-floor gallery, a cool, hands-off approach to large-scale work. © Christopher Wool

The Saturday night art crowd packing the free Guggenheim night for the last weekend of the Christopher Wool retrospective was drinking in the cool, edgy dissonance of this savvy, art-world action artist. Check it out in person before January 22, or download the new free Guggenheim app and take the tour on your iPhone.

Gazing down from the third or fourth floor, the smooth rungs of Mr. Lloyd-Wright’s spirals punctuate tiers of Mr. Wool’s own spirals, splatters, wipe-outs, word art, and grids of gritty photos. The massive crowd of locals, tourists, and moms with tweens provided a lively audience for work originally germinated in the rough-and-ready Lower East Side during the days when NYC was not-so-nice.

Just up the ramp in the two-story mini-gallery, the curators hung pieces that sum up Wool’s lifetime achievements – large-scale enamels on aluminum using gigantic, ironic gestures and banal advertising-art flowers; channeling the down-and-out feel to 80s New York with cool word-and-letter art evoking graffiti; and appropriating phrases from revolutionary texts that seem to be about one thing but are actually heady philosophical and literary references that only super-smart people would “get.” The work is stunning.

Wool’s 2010 untitled enamel on linen uses erasures, spray, and wipeouts. © Christopher Wool

Wool’s 2010 untitled enamel on linen uses erasures and spray. © Christopher Wool

Then a slightly more chronological journey begins through the rest of the museum. Wool began appropriating rollers used by painters to paint tenement walls and halls to apply decorative patterns methodically across his own giant canvases – taking a bit of the decision making out of the act of painting. At the time, it was an in-you-face comment directed toward more lyrical, or expressive gestural painters. Of course, he would screw up the pattern just a little to add a little extra dig at the current scene. Oh, yes, he mostly kept the color palette to black and white. Smack!

By 1987, he injected letters, words, and texts onto the white canvases and began collaborating with other artists in the “no wave” Downtown scene, which was rife with 8mm filmmakers, performance artists, and musicians reacting against the more commercial artists emanating from CBGB or other clubs. He collaborated making books, always an ephemeral, revolutionary choice.

Hydrant photo that resembles the above work, from East Broadway Breakdown, one of 160 inkjet prints, 1994–95/2002. © Christopher Wool

Hydrant photo with spilled water whose shape resembles the silkscreen above. Photo from East Broadway Breakdown, one of 160 inkjet prints, 1994–95/2002. © Christopher Wool

In the 1990s, the street was used as a start point for both his own photo books, which were shots of lonely urban areas that he photocopied over and over to obtain the I-don’t-care-about-glossy-quality look of the published work. When accessing the iPhone audio track in front of the 1990s photo piece, East Broadway Breakdown, Mr. Wool and the curators pretty much knock your socks off by blasting the superb Nation Time by Joe McPhee right through the earbuds. Thanks to them, you can hear the masterwork music that inspired Wool at the time, jolting you back the mean streets of Chinatown and East Broadway that sparked so much creative juice.

Installation view of Wool’s provocative all-word 1989 Black Book Drawings. Photo: David Heald.

The top rungs of the show are gorgeous, even though that was probably not the original intent – cool, monumental works that are layered, blotted out, white-washed, and splattered over. If a line is blotted out, do you still see the line? If you do your painting on rice paper, is the end result different than when you do it on a canvas?

When you get to the final gallery way, way up top, Wool has digitized fragments of many of these earlier gestural images and silkscreened them onto the giant pieces of stretched linen. Very, very cool and covered in micro-dots from the silkscreen mesh. Check out the works on the Guggenheim website.

Stunning installation of Christopher Wool’s work in Mr. Wright’s building. Photo: David Heald.

If you don’t know Wool’s work, using the iPhone guide provides a valuable context, showing you the works while you listen to the audio and watch other artists talk about Wool. Access some samples here.

But most of the people we saw on Saturday were standing in awe before the gigantic gestural canvases without the aid of an interpretive guide. Thousands of people were examining the curator notes, and moving forward and back within Mr. Wright’s bays to take it in from all angles…the kind of slow, deliberate, thoughtful face-to-face encounters that Mr. Wool likely treasures from cool admirers.

Brooklyn Museum Shows What Rich Americans Buy to Impress

Posted on January 6, 2014 by MsSusanB

Miguel Cabrera oil (1760) of Dona Maria de la Luz Padilla y Gomez de Cervantes sporting velvet beauty marks and bling

Conspicuous consumptions is nothing new, according to the Brooklyn Museum’s spectacular show, Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home 1492-1898, and they’ve gathered (mostly from their collection) four centuries of blindingly beautiful stuff to show how earlier generations of status-seekers showed off how special and rich they were. Catch it before January 12.

The Fourth-Floor show fills two huge galleries that have been partitioned by the curators into areas corresponding to rooms in a traditional Spanish-American home, where they’ve displayed the stuff that the colonial high and mighty would have put there. Although two-thirds of the United States was once under Spanish rule, the paintings, furniture, textiles, and other treasures you’ll see are from homes south of the border, including the Caribbean and south of the Isthmus. Check out our Flickr feed.

Giant 18th century silver status pins for women, slightly Incan-style

First, you’d dress to impress and make sure that everyone knew that you were somehow aligned with the upper classes back in Spain. The show puts English and Spanish-American portraits side-by-side in the first gallery to illustrate that the latter weren’t shy about applying ostentatious tiaras and pearls to themselves, slapping on the velvet faux-beauty marks, and shoving royal proclamations into the frame to convey your wealth, status, and privilege. Wealthy English colonials and their portrait painters took a more austere, understated approach.

Second, if you were of mixed race but possibly had some Incan royalty in your blood, you’d hang gold-flecked portrait series of Incan chieftains where everybody could see them in your home. The lady of the house might wrap herself in a locally woven textile sporting mixes of South American deities with that oh-so-familiar-to-Europeans Hapsburg double eagle. Then she’d bling it up with a giant oversize pin made out of solid silver.

Visitor inspects painted screen in exhibit area with the objects from the grand reception room of an upscale home.

Third, you’d emphasize your casual elegance by actually draping the rugs and tapestries all over the floor, stairs, and risers in the ladies’ sitting room. After gold, silver, and jewels, textiles were about the biggest luxury anyone could find, and Spanish Americans made and bought a lot. In British America, carpets were only used to cover tables, so the casual distribution of so much wealth below your feet was something only Spanish Americans could afford.

Because the Caribbean and coastal cities of South and Central America were right in the center of shipping and trade routes for centuries, wealthy people could buy pretty much anything they wanted and the curators show it to us – gorgeous Japanese screens, custom-printed Chinese porcelain, English-style sitting chairs, and Turkish rugs. No pennies were pinched in upwardly mobile, Spanish-speaking homes.

Peruvian bed of gilt wood (1700-1760) that would be shown off in a state bedroom.

And let’s not forget what treasures were produced right inside the Spanish protectorates – silver shaving basins, polychromed statues of the saints, gigantic gold-framed “statue paintings”, gilded beds, embellished leather traveling trunks (to go to your country home), solid mahogany furniture, and custom-made books of your family’s geneaology. We won’t even get started on the private chapel décor.

This show throws open a window on the first wave of high-status interior design and decoration – a story that is normally confined to the castles in Europe or the palace at Versailles, and one that is perfectly suited to be told by Brooklyn’s extensive Latin American holdings with a couple of key pieces from the sumptuous collections uptown at the Hispanic Society of America.

Chinese import: 1770 porcelain featuring South American animals, purchased by Ignazio Lemez de Cervantes

If you want to do a deep dive into upscale living of past centuries, visit the exhibition archive on the Museum’s website and click on the Objects tab. Or, see it all in person when it goes on the road: it opens at the Albuquerque Museum on February 16, the New Orleans Museum of Art on June 20, and the Ringling Museum in Sarasota on October 17.

And congratulations to Brooklyn for making it onto the cover of the winter edition of Humanties, the NEH magazine.

Medieval Enthusiasts Throng to See Departing Treasure

Posted on January 2, 2014 by MsSusanB

Hildesheim’s large cast 1226 baptismal font installed in the great Medieval Hall

Before the Metropolitan Museum of Art takes down the Baroque Christmas tree, take a look at what’s sitting right behind it – a large, beautiful cast baptismal font that’s one of the treasures of a cathedral in Saxony that’s been transported to New York for the exhibition, Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim, closing January 5.

Like the medieval hall surrounding you, it will take you back to the Middle Ages, along with the manuscripts, castings, croziers, and spectacular rock crystal ornaments in Gallery 521, a few steps away in the special exhibition space that you pass going toward the Lehman wing.

During the holidays, the small space was packed with medieval-art lovers relishing the fact they were seeing treasures from a unique UNESCO World Heritage site right in the heart of Manhattan – the first time they have left Germany.

In the late 12th c., Bernward of Hildesheim, commissioned a dazzling new cover for the Gospel Book, which dates from the late 900s

While renovations were being done at Hildesheim Cathedral, 50 amazing treasures were sent here to give their spiritual heft to the Met’s already hefty medieval holdings. Check out our Flickr site for some of our favorites.

The 1226 baptismal font is a true masterpiece of casting, along with the magnificent eagle that has sat upon a cathedral lectern since 1220. The Jesus figure of the Ringelheim Crucifix at the center of the exhibition is one of the most important (and awe inspiring) large-scale wood sculptures surviving from the post-1000 era in Europe.

The chalices, reliquaries, croziers once held by medieval bishops, and bound books of the gospels and sacraments will stop you in your tracks. Seek out the bejeweled cross with what was once believed to be a relic of the True Cross.

As quiet crowds milled around last weekend, savoring the beauty, one youngster came upon the Gospel Book that had been rebound in the second half of the 12th century and asked in a whisper, “Are those real jewels?”

A processional cross, made between 1170 and 1190, which is said to hold relics of the True Cross

Many of these treasures, including the bogglingly beautiful Gospel Book, were commissioned by Bishop Bernward of Hildesheim (960-1022), whose aesthetic vision transformed the cathedral into the must-see pilgrimage spot that it remains today.

One out-of-towner told us that they traveled to New York simply to see this show. See the baptismal font and the other works for yourself, and you’ll know why.

If you want to know more or if you’re a fan of the Middle Ages, take the time to sit in on this hour-long presentation about medieval alchemy, metalwork of the 1100s, and how these treasures came to New York:

AMNH Honors America’s Super-Early Explorers

Posted on December 30, 2013 by MsSusanB

Ronnie Cachini’s 2006 acrylic, Ho’n A:wan Dehwa:we/(Our Land), Source: AMNH/ of A:Shiw A:Wan Museum

Long before John Wesley Powell steered his boats down the rapids and mapped the Grand Canyon for the US Geological Survey, another set of intrepid explorers had walked, mapped, documented, and guided travelers through the entire Colorado River system. Climb up to the hidden Audubon Gallery on the Fourth Floor of the American Museum of Natural History before January 12 and get a fresh perspective on pueblo cartography in the special exhibition, A:shiwi A:wan Ulohnanne: Zuni World.

The show features 31 paintings by seven contemporary painters from the Zuni Pueblo of New Mexico – one of the ancient tribes whose ancestors built the cliff dwellings and multistory wonders of the Four Corners.

Installation view in the “quiet gallery” on the Fourth Floor of AMNH

After 500 years of seeing their sacred places renamed by the conquistadors, Spanish land owners, government mapmakers, and the National Park Service, Zuni cultural leaders thought it was high time to start creating maps that reflected traditional Zuni place names, stories, and symbols. They asked some leading Zuni artists to choose the story, sacred sites, and landscapes that would “map” Zuni cultural history. According to some of the artists in the show, the exercise required them to look at what they knew in an entirely different way.

The Zuni people consider their place of origin to be the Grand Canyon. Back in deep time, the Zuni ancestors were instructed to find “the Middle Place”, so groups set out in journeys to the north, south, east, and west. The northern group, for example, settled in what is now called “Navajo National Monument” and eventually built multistoried dwellings inside the most spectacular red-rock shelter in the American Southwest.

Cliff dwellings in Betatakin alcove, a NPS site at Navajo National Monument where pueblo elders continue to hold sacred ceremonies. Photo: Dan Boone/Ryan Belnap, Bilby Research Center, Northern Arizona University

Cliff dwellings in Betatakin alcove at Navajo National Monument, where pueblo elders travel to hold sacred ceremonies. Photo: Dan Boone/Ryan Belnap, Bilby Research Center, Northern Arizona University

Each painter’s style is different, but when you take it all in, the exploration story is one of fairly mind-blowing proportions – the Zuni ancestors explored the entire Colorado River system, carved petroglyphs in canyons to point travelers to nearby communities, and even journeyed south to the “land of endless summer” –Central America’s coastal communities.

Although the paintings depict myths and symbols in the Southwestern landscapes, East Coast art-lovers should be aware that the Zuni expedition story isn’t fiction: Chaco Canyon’s great archeological sites contain the evidence — tropical shells, stones, Scarlet macaw skeletons, cacao, and the network of banked, engineered roads (circa 850 – 1100 A.D.) that actually lead to many of the places depicted by the Zuni painters.

Geddy Epaloose’s 2006 acrylic, The Middle Place. Source: AMNH/ of A:Shiw A:Wan Museum and Heritage Center

Geddy Epaloose’s 2006 painting The Middle Place features an aerial view of Zuni’s Middle Village with sacred trails spiking out in all directions. Colorado River by Ronnie Cachini includes the edge of the distant ocean. Other paintings include the Zuni’s version of their Great Flood, the spiritual importance of their salt lake, and even unmarked lines representing some modern paved roads. Unless you’re Zuni, you’ll have to read the captions on each of the paintings.

Hunted deer is honored with a Zuni necklace

AMNH has one of the largest collections of Zuni artifacts in the country, and has a good, close working relationship with that pueblo. Entering the Audubon Gallery on the Fourth Floor feels like a sacred space. You’ll be greeted by a hunted deer honored with a necklace of precious stones and ceremonial rods festooned with pieces of traditional Zuni clothing loaned by the painters and their children for us to see while their work is on display in New York.

Make a pilgrimage to this hidden gallery on AMNH’s Fourth Floor and learn about some remarkable people, places, origins, and cartography. (And stop into the First Floor rotunda to see some of the museum’s Chaco Canyon treasures.)

Enjoy this short YouTube video featuring Jim Enote, the director of A:Shiw A:Wan Museum and Heritage Center, who describes the exhibition when it debuted iat the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.

“Love” Artist Given Same in Whitney Tribute

Posted on December 28, 2013 by MsSusanB

Aluminum panel of the career-stopping work. LOVE, 1968. Source: Whitney Museum of American Art. © 2013 Morgan Art Foundation, ARS, NY

The Whitney has mounted the first US retrospective for an artist who did one piece of work that became so popular that it sort-of ended his fine-art gallery career for a while. The show, Robert Indiana: Beyond Love, presents the full range of work done by this 1960s pop superstar, which was eclipsed in popular consciousness after he designed a Christmas card for MoMA in 1965.

Indiana’s famous Love image went viral, appearing everywhere and on everything for years — US postage stamp, mugs, pins, and posters. Everyone loved LOVE. Even right now, New York visitors are standing in line to photograph themselves in front of Mr. Indiana’s monumental LOVE sculpture at Sixth Avenue and 56th Street. Did he actually make another work of art?

Scrounged wood assemblages hold court with Indiana’s numbers and cruciform arrangement of Demuth-inspired canvases. © 2013 Morgan Art Foundation, ARS, NY Photo: Sheldan C. Collins

Installation view of Indiana’s numbers and early wood assemblages. © 2013 Morgan Art Foundation, ARS, NY
Photo: Sheldan C. Collins

You bet he did, and the Whitney’s giving you until January 5 to see it.

After graduating from Chicago’s Art Institute and studying in Edinburgh, Indiana left for New York in 1959; moved into some busted Coenties Slip lofts near Pearl Street; met neighbors Rauchenberg, Johns, and Kelly; and changed his surname to “Indiana”, which reflected his Midwestern roots and showed that he was unafraid of embracing of Americana at a time when big-idea Abstract Expressionism was trending in galleries.

Four-panel 1962 work, The Black Diamond American Dream #2. Source: Museu

Surrounded by broke pre-Pop experimenters and collage-makers, Indiana found a materials Nirvana. Wall Street construction was booming, so he could scrounge construction-site refuse bins to find his materials instead of spending money in art stores (where he worked). He cobbled together wood, bolts, pegs, and wheels into small, painted totems inspired by American folk art and in-your-face advertising graphics. The first gallery in the show is populated with them.

Indiana let his mind wander back to the 18^th century, when his neighborhood was America’s most bustling seaport, inspiring Whitman and Melville to write classics. The iconic Brooklyn Bridge towering a few blocks north reminded him of the great painters and poets of the early 20^th century, who immortalized it.

Indiana uses Mr. Demuth for inspiration in his 1963 oil, The Figure Five. Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource ©2013 Morgan Art Foundation, ARS, NY

Room after room in the retrospective shows how Indiana took these inspirations, locations, and words and shot them through a hard-edged prism. There are dozens of diamond-shaped canvases hung alone and in pairs channeling short, bold words (e.g. “TILT”, “EAT”) with bold colors and forms and the occasional Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, or Marsden Hartley reference. New York place names, art-history allusions, literary puns, social commentary, and no-gesture, hard-edge style on serial canvases are telltale signs that you are gazing at an “Indiana.”

The super-famous LOVE canvases are confined to a small room at the end of the show. The popularity of those images might have daunted Mr. Indiana mid-career (as in “Am I turning into Peter Max?”), but the Whitney’s showcase puts LOVE – 48 years later – into just the right context – a creative artist who delivered a lifetime of word-art experimentation, everyday-advertising satire, and “less is more” social commentary.

Listen as curator Barbara Haskell gives you the full story on one of the world’s best-known icons:

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