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

I, YOU, WE: Art on the Front Lines of the 80s Culture Wars

Posted on August 21, 2013 by MsSusanB

Les Levine mounted his poster everywhere in the subway in 1981, a tough time in New York. Source: The Whitney © Les Levine for The Museum of Mott Art, Inc.

It’s not a comfortable art show, but the 1980s weren’t comfortable times. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s show I, YOU, WE resurrects art from a time when artists were protesting inequality and gentrification, the AIDS epidemic was raging, Wigstock brought gender shifting into the open air, and New York’s downtown community waited apprehensively for the next police crackdown on squatters, community gardens, and anyone flaunting an alternative lifestyle.

As it prepares to move to the High Line in 2015, The Whitney asked its curators to mine its permanent collection to see if there were periods of time that might have been overlooked in the shows of recent years.

I, YOU, WE is the answer: the difficult, searching, and searing work produced by the passionate and disenfranchised denizens of New York’s tumultuous 1980s and early 1990s.

No one could miss Alfred Martinez’s 1987 screenprint. Source: The Whitney. © 1986 by Alfred Martinez

Works feature the flip side of Warhol’s Interview magazine and Studio 54 – people struggling with identities, illness, injustice, and the consequences of Washington’s culture wars against edgy art.

The Whitney produced this video about the “WE” section of the show, when artists began protesting gentrification, how they used art as the lever to galvanize the East Village, and the battles that raged for the community. Other sections of the Whitney show focus on artists’ exploration of race, gender, religion, and the AIDS crisis.

Revisit the emerging street styles – graffiti, comics-inspired drawings, stencils, and posters – as Andrew Castrucci of Bullet Space leafs through one of the seminal art-protest pieces.

When you visit, make enough time to Nan Goldin’s 700-slide extravaganza that documents everything. Scroll down here to see installation views and other works in the show by Mapplethorpe, Basquiat, Currin, Wojnarowicz, and Ligon. Tough stuff, but not tougher than the lives these artists lived during that decade.

Congratulations to the Whitney for not forgetting, presenting this work to the next generation, and testing if the work still sticks 20 to 30 years later. The show runs through September 1.

Unicorn Natural History

Posted on August 19, 2013 by MsSusanB

Detail from The Unicorn Defends Itself (1495-1505), a large tapestry in the main gallery.

Who says unicorns aren’t real? Mr. Rockefeller’s tapestry unicorns have been the celebrity draw for the last 75 years uptown at The Cloisters, and are the cavorting centerpieces of the show, Search for the Unicorn. But it took some brave curators to finally display all the unicorn-themed stuff in the Met’s collection and truly reveal the place this beloved icon has held in science, medicine, and art for the last 2,000 years.

The small micro-show in the Romanesque gallery just inside the entrance presents ivory coffers, playing cards, etchings, a carved-bone parade saddle, and coats of arms featuring unicorns in all manner of activity.

But the surprises are loans from NYPL and the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda showing the unicorn’s inclusion in scientific texts, which attest to sightings and miracle cures from the impressive cloven-hoofed trotter.

Pome’s 1694 identification of species in General History of Drugs. Courtesy: US National Library of Medicine, Bethesda.

Conrad Gesner’s Histories of the Animals (1551), the most popular natural history book during the Renaissance, included the unicorn among its 1,200 woodcut images of the world’s quadrupeds. Gesner, who also published images of fossils for the first time here, was a stickler for documentation, and asserts that unicorns had been seen in Mecca by a reliable source. He wrote several pages about how to discern real from fake unicorn horns and told how it should be used to purify water, counteract poisons, and treat epilepsy.

General History of Drugs, which achieved global circulation after it was published in 1694, was written by Pierre Pome, the pharmacist to Louis XIV known for his expertise in medicines and treatments from exotic cultures. Pome gave unicorns their own chapter and described five species living in the Arabian desert and in proximity to the Red Sea. In Chapter 33, he correctly proclaimed “unicorn horn” to be narwhal tusk.

Narwahl tooth (a.k.a. unicorn horn). Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The narwhal’s gracefully shaped, unicorn-looking incisor tooth is given a place in the show, too. One from a private collector is in the Romanesque gallery alongside one of the tapestries, The Unicorn in Captivity (the one in the fenced-in pasture); the second stands behind glass opposite the rest of the tapestries in their usual gallery.

Fancied by rich and powerful in years gone by, Charlemagne, Suleyman the Magnificent, Charles VI of France, and Lorenzo de Medici all owned this Arctic collectible.

We couldn’t take photos inside the show, but don’t worry. The Met’s done a fantastic job documenting everything online, so take time to peruse all the items in the show. Then click on our Flickr site to see the famous Unicorn gallery and glimpse the Cloisters on a perfect summer day.

Do you have 13 minutes? If so, you’ll enjoy the hilarious introduction to the show by curator Barbara Drake Boehm and her speculation on why it took the Cloisters 75 years to mount a show on unicorns. The natural history of unicorns starts around 3:40, and she’ll take you through all the key library materials. Watch to the end to find out where the unicorn was last sighted in the 21^st century. It wasn’t Toys ‘R’ Us.

Vote for Plain or Fancy at The Met

Posted on August 12, 2013 by MsSusanB

Our vote for best “fancy” object: A beach shell embellished with enamel and gold by Barnabe Sageret around 1745.

You wouldn’t think that a presentation of luxury items would emphasize democratic participation, but that’s just what the Metropolitan Museum has embedded (on line and onsite) within its thought-provoking, beautiful show, Plain or Fancy? Restraint and Exuberance in the Decorative Arts, on view on the first floor through August 18.

The curators of European Decorative Arts have assembled “plain” objects to the left side of the gallery, “fancy” ones on the right, and…well, they’ve asked you to decide about the ones in the middle. Tablet screens in the exhibition and the Met’s web site have an interactive that lets you choose if some of these are to your taste and how you’d classify them. You can enter a comment about each that shoots off to the show’s Twitter feed.

Our vote for best “plain” object: The obviously expensive porcelain bowl used by Marie Antoinette at her “fantasy” dairy farm. The curators tell us that the head of the Sèvres Manufactory was worried that his other clients would think it was too “barbaric.”

The whole idea of the show was to gather some of the greats from the European Decorative Arts collection and ask the viewers to consider their own feelings about “plain” and “fancy” (derived from “fantasy”). If something is “plain”, do you feel more noble admiring a piece’s elegant simplicity? If you see a grandly embellished bauble, does it make you cringe, or give you a sense of relief that someone else’s purchase is stimulating the economy?

The curators don’t refrain from hammering these gems into their socio-political contexts. One of the “plain” porcelains is a Sèvres bowl used by Marie Antoinette as she cavorted with friends on her fantasy dairy farm pre-Revolution. Several “plain” pieces of silver tableware were likely made from melted down “fancy” pieces after Cromwell’s 17^th-century reformation in England. The photos on our Flickr site let you in on what the curators said about many of our favorite items.

Is it “plain” or “fancy”? A clean design on a giant 1635 glass goblet inscribed with a detailed cartography of the course of the Rhine River. J.P. Morgan liked it and gave it to the Met.

Items range from the 1400s to the 20^th century. One of our favorites in the “fancy” imagination department is a snuff box made from a beach shell decorated lavishly with enamel and gold. Who wouldn’t want to look at that? Another is a gigantic Dutch glass goblet that has been engraved with a detailed map showing the entire course of the Rhine River. Amazing.

The show is filled with Wedgwood, Sèvres, Wiener Werkstätte, and other surprises. Although you can see the items in the show on the Met’s website, it’s much better to examine these items up close in person and read what the curators had to say about each.

Better yet, think about how you feel about the designs, and weigh in on Metmedia and Twitter. What do you choose?

Last Call for Global Kitchen at AMNH

Posted on August 9, 2013 by MsSusanB

Japanese cube melon. Photo: AMNH/D. Finnin

Ever wonder what story is told by the food on your plate? It’s all explained in the show at the American Museum of Natural History, Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture, now in its final weekend.

It’s a fascinating walk-through of how food is produced, transported, and consumed by cultures all over the world. You’ll see examples of the zillions of varieties of potatoes archived by the Peruvians high up in the Andes and interesting twists like cube-shaped melons grown in Japan.

Diorama of the Aztec Tiatelolco market in 1519, just before the Conquistadors arrived. Photo: AMNH/R. Mickens

What’s everyone’s favorite part of the show? Most people can’t get enough of the interactive light table where you can watch the hands of master chefs making some incredible ethnic dishes and the Aztec market. The latter is a full-scale diorama of what shopping was like in 1519 down in Mexico City just before the conquistadors arrived. The market is vast, with an amazing array of items, all neatly arranged in sections, not unlike Eataly’s adventurous stalls near Madison Square.

You’ll get a glimpse of what was on the table of Gandhi, Roman royalty, the Great Khan, and other historic celebrities. The best is seeing what Otzi, the mummified Ice Man was packing as he crossed the Alps about 5,000 years ago.

Here’s the informative introductory video for this thought-provoking and mouth-watering show.

Native Americans Rock Pop Music

Posted on August 5, 2013 by MsSusanB

Link Wray in the 1950s and the guitar that introduced the power chord, wah wah, and distortion to rock ‘n’ roll

It’s not all flute music. Did you know that Link Wray, a Shawnee rock innovator, created the wah-wah, the power chord, and distortion echo that all rock superstars since the 1950s adopted? It’s just one part of the story told by Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in Popular Culture, up through August 11 at the National Museum of the American Indian down at New York’s Customs House.

Don’t take our word for it. Take a seat in the comfortable bandstand-lounge inside the show and watch as Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and The Edge discuss the importance that Wray’s innovations had on them and everyone in the scene.

The show doesn’t ignore jazz, blues, or rap but a lot of the pizzazz is seeing the stuff associated with folk, rock, and country stars alongside quotes (on the walls and in video clips) from legends like Slash, Ringo, Townsend, and Dylan testifying to the ties they had to fellow artists like Robbie Robertson, Jessie Ed Davis, and others. The show has historic (and beautiful) guitars and that famous multi-colored coat worn by Jimi Hendrix. You’ll really be amazed at the profusion of talent and historic connections.

Installation view with photos of Stevie Salas, Jessie Ed Davis, and Randy Castillo.

You don’t normally associate Jimi Hendrix with the tribes, but the NMAI scholars reveal that his paternal grandmother was Cherokee who once played on the vaudeville circuit. It’s also a surprise to see Randy Castillo’s drum set from the last Mötley Crüe tour suspended reverently overhead. (Randy replaced Tommy Lee.) Check out our Flickr site for views of the show.

The NMAI scholars, as usual, did a stellar job digging out the facts behind the men and women honored. Like reminding us that Jessie Ed Davis first met John Lennon at The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus and that Johnny Cash was one of the first pop music voices singing out on behalf of the Native American cause back in the 1960s.

The Hendrix coat of many colors

The heart of the show, however, is the music. NMAI made sure that there’s plenty of opportunity to listen in to why these stars were great. You can sink into big, red settees throughout the space and snap on headphones, relax in the bandstand-like lounge room to watch 20 film clips, or play with iPads in the listening gallery. You’ll enjoy hearing Buffy sing “Universal Soldier”, Kristofferson and Coolidge performing their Grammy-winning duets, Link Wray rocking out with “Raw-Hide” during the American Bandstand days, and Illinois Jacquet’s swinging tenor sax on “Stompin’ at the Savoy”.

The NMAI did an incredible job not only with the show itself, but also with its fascinating run-of-show blog, which includes articles on how the Hendrix coat was loaned to the show, jazz great Mildred Bailey, and recollections contributed by the show’s visitors.

Enjoy this walk through music history and reconnect with some of the best in the business. A truly wonderful slant on what makes American pop culture so great. If you’re in New York, get down to see Rita Coolidge in person at her free NMAI concert at 6pm on Thursday, August 8.

Patching Up the Emperor’s Carpet

Posted on August 2, 2013 by MsSusanB

Installation view of the Emperor’s Carpet, second half 16th century. Iran, Safavid period (1501–1722). Source: The Met.

If royal guests had walked all over your Persian carpet for the last 600 years, how many repairs would you need? Before coming to the Met, the 16^th-century Emperor’s Carpet, covered in animals and poetry, was once owned by the Shah of Iran and the Hapsburgs.

Since this large, beautiful carpet arrived in New York 60 years ago, the Metropolitan Museum was only able to display it twice because it was in such fragile shape. When they turned it over, they saw it had been patched over 700 times. How could they stabilize it and install it in their expansive New Galleries of the Art of the Arab Lands on the second floor?

You’ll find out all about the behind-the-scenes work analyzing, stabilizing, patching, and repairing it in the micro- show, Making the Invisible Visible: Conservation and Islamic Art.

Restored corner of the Emperor’s Carpet.

The show features all manner of science, technology, and process that the magical conservators put to work for other pieces, too – ceramics, tapestries made of gold and silver threads, wood, and works on paper over the last 2,000 years. One of our favorites is the child’s coat made from antique pashmina. They also have examples of the natural materials that were crushed and pounded into pigments for all these beautiful dyes and paints.

Although the gallery is tiny, the Met decided to send visitors on a treasure hunt by providing a brochure through which seekers of conservation wizardry can locate the Emperor’s Carpet and other works throughout the dozens of Islamic Art galleries. See the details on these and more our Flickr site.

Child’s coat from India on display in the show. Tailored in the late 19th c., but but fabric woven late 18th c. The textile is from Kashmir and is likely pashmina.

One of the shockers is seeing what the conservators reckon are the true colors of the 1707 Damascus room, long a favorite of Met period-room fans. The science showed that the darkened panels that we’re so familiar with were once bright, bright blue and gold.

If you can’t see the conservator’s showcase before August 4, read about all the science and technology on line at the special web site. You’ll find links to the stories of rehab for the carpet, the child’s coat, the gold-weave chadar, and more.

If you have eight minutes, take a look at three years of work on the royal carpet by the Met’s magicians:

All Smiles at The Mouse Museum on 53rd St

Posted on July 29, 2013 by MsSusanB

View of Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing at MoMA. Photo: Jason Mandella. © 2013 The Museum of Modern Art

Is it the best museum in the world? One of the happiest places to be in New York right now is Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing, currently installed in MoMA’s atrium as the scene-stealing companion to the Fifth Floor exhibit, Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store, which ends August 5.

You’ll want to take your time contemplating the Pop master’s 1970s curated collection of average, everyday stuff that he showcased inside a geometric mouse-head structure, originally a design he proposed for Chicago’s (then unbuilt) Museum of Contemporary Art.

In the mid-1960s, Oldenburg began collecting souvenirs, rubber toys, and crazy stuff he found on his wanderings and storing them on shelves of his 14^th Street studio. An early idea was a display of artificial vegetables and other food with Fluxus genius George Maciunas. It never happened, but luckily some of the 1960s-style replicas repurposed here in the Mouse collection.

Inside view. On loan from the Austrian Ludwig Foundation, since 1991. © 1965–77 Claes Oldenburg. Photo by MoMA Imaging Services Dept. © 2013 The Museum of Modern Art

Oldenburg decided to submit his museum to Documenta 5, whose theme was “inquiry into reality—today’s imagery.” He washed off his dusty collection (you can hear the tape of that inside) and he and some friends organized 367 objects into display categories. For Documenta, the little building itself was fabricated in Germany.

What’s really inside? In a riff on the classification systems that were then in vogue by conceptual artists, Oldenburg “classified” all his fun stuff – landscape, human beings, food, body parts, clothing (including makeup), tools, animals, buildings (including monuments and souvenirs), money containers, smoking articles, and studio remnants.

Here’s MoMA’s take on the importance of this little museum and its Ray Gun Wing:

Now, enjoy a virtual walk-through to examine this tiny museum’s treasures, shot by Christian Zurn when it was on display at MUMOK in Vienna last year. Do yourself a favor and go see this spectacularly funny, whimsical collection for yourself.

Want to spend some time with Claes himself? Here’s a YouTube of the master recollecting his life in the Sixties, travels to LA with Warhol, and how his soft sculptures came to be, click here.

Shimmering Curtains of Liquor-Bottle Caps Hung in Brooklyn

Posted on July 27, 2013 by MsSusanB

Installation view in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery on the Fifth Floor. Brooklyn Museum photo: JongHeon Martin Kim.

They’re big, they’re from Africa, they’re hung in one of the most spectacular art spaces in the City, and you need to see them before August 18. If you’re going out to Brooklyn to see the Sargent show, be sure to see the spectacular contemporary installation, Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui.

The one-man retrospective of London-trained Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (his first) takes up half of the Brooklyn Museum’s Fifth Floor, but really shines under the skylight in the Iris and B. Gerald Gallery.

You might have seen his large piece hung in the African gallery on the First Floor of the Met or his installation in the 20s on the High Line, but in Brooklyn you’ll see 30 big, shimmering pieces arranged on walls and suspended under the dome. They’re all made out of scrounged metal material and wire from garbage dumps near his home, but the experience of seeing these big, beautiful pieces could not feel further from the source.

Hung from the ceiling, the metal-and-wire pieces look like open-weave textiles fabricated on a grand scale. Visitors wander through Anatsui’s hangings, silently gazing, stepping up to look close, and then move further back to wonder how he creates such a lightweight, effortless illusion from years of collected, flattened, punched bottle caps and stuff.

Two more galleries feature other large-scale works, arranged and pinned on walls, bunched like beautiful fabrics. Anatsui creates his gigantic constructions, carefully sorting the different colors of metal from the various brands of beverages. He says it’s like doing a watercolor wash, and when you view the work in person, you’ll be stunned by the variety of color, pattern, and lovingly arranged metal tapestries.

Here’s a time-lapse video of the Brooklyn crew installing the show, initially mounted at the Akron Art Museum. Anatsui says that he enjoys giving installation crews and curators a lot of leeway in how they hang his work, and he was a little surprised (in a good way) about some of the choices by the crew in Brooklyn. See for yourself. The big, shiny silver sculptures snaking across the floor are made of milk tin lids.

Amazing Baby Shoes Under the Met’s Stairs

Posted on July 25, 2013 by MsSusanB

Infant-size palm leaf sandals (only 2 x 5 in.) made at the Kharga Oasis, Byzantine-era Egypt (4th-7th c.)

Will all the excitement over babies this week (the Royals and the Fallons), you might want to sneak a peak at some of the most perfect infant shoes ever, on display at the Met’s micro-exhibit, Objects from the Kharga Oasis, right under the grand staircase just past security until August 4.

Back in the 1930s, Metropolitan Museum archaeologists found this pair of infant sandals crafted beautifully from palm leaves at an oasis in the western Egyptian desert that was one of the earliest frontier Christian communities serving the trans-Saharan caravan routes.

The shoes are tiny – only about 2 x 5 inches – and were made during the Coptic (Byzantine) era sometime between 300 AD and 600 AD. There are also 1,500 year-old linen tunics and caps for kids and adults nearby, too. It’s amazing that the clothing survived at all.

Totally wearable Kharga bracelet. Iron from 4th-7th c. Egypt. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Besides building churches (and there are plenty of photos and illustrations in the show), the communities around Kharga were busy growing grains, sesame, olives, and grapes. They apparently had a huge business making and exporting wine to the thirsty Egyptians 150 miles east along the Nile and 400 miles northeast in Cairo.

Drawing upon a ceramic craft tradition that was happening at the oasis since Old Kingdom times (2600 BC), potters cranked out transport jugs for the vino (shown here) and decorated them with grapevine paintings. The show has jewelry, tombstones, and photos of early Christian churches, but the brand-new-looking baby shoes are really the stars of the show.

Among dozens of ceramic items dug up by the Met are grapevine-decorated earthenware jugs to transport locally made wine from the Oasis to the Nile and upriver to Cairo.

First Ladies of Spanish Dance at NYPL Performing Arts

Posted on July 23, 2013 by MsSusanB

There’s no way to cool off the Spanish heat you’ll experience at the dance-til-you-drop exhibition Flamenco: 100 Years of Flamenco in New York, currently in the last weeks at NYPL’s Library of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (until August 3).

NYPL gives us videos, recordings, a few costumes, and other memorabilia, but mostly you’ll hear the castanets and rapid-fire footwork of the best of the best. Who knew that the first woman to appear in front of Edison’s movie camera was Carmencita, the Spanish sensation who debuted at Niblo’s Garden in 1889, and had a fairly good run at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall on 24^th and Sixth Avenue. Her portrait by Sargent is at the Musee d’Orsay and her portrait by Chase at the Met. Here’s a link to Edison’s 1894 flick.

Carmencita’s fan photo (c. 1890). Source: NYPL Billy Rose Collection

This first Spanish-dance craze was further fueled in 1916 by the arrival in New York of La Argentina (Antonia Merce), Spain’s first modernist dance artist who fused classical dance, regional styles, and Flamenco. A decade later, she returned with a full company and presented New York’s first full-length Spanish dance-theater piece. By then, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, and Ted Shawn were already incorporating Latin moves, gestures, and rhythms into their performances, and La Argentina’s company had a spectacular run. Here she is in a solo.

Although there’s lots more to the story, one of the best parts of the exhibition features photos, albums, videos, and recordings of the fast footwork of Carmen Amaya, who Sol Hurok billed as “The Human Vesuvius” in her 1941 New York debut. She could kick the 15-foot train of her dress right into the air.

Amaya’s innovation is that she injected a bit of the Gypsy style into Flamenco and was somewhat of a Spanish-dance rule-breaker – sporting tight-fitting trousers to show off her super-fancy footwork. Superstars Dietrich and Hepburn were also wearing trousers at the time, but it was a first in Amaya’s field of work.

Good move, Carmen, as shown in this clip from Follow the Boys, a 1944 all-star vehicle released by Universal to boost morale during the War. It’s like watching a great jazz tapper at work. Move over, Riverdance people.

Source: Archival clip, Follow the Boys, from the DVD, Queen of the Gypsies, A Portrait of Carmen Amaya.

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