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

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.

Virtual Visit to the Met’s Punk Couture Show

Posted on July 19, 2013 by MsSusanB

Too hot to get over to the Met this weekend and climb up all those high stairs out front? Stay in the comfort of your air-conditioned home and take this virtual tour of the Met’s Punk: Chaos to Couture show (closing August 14).

Curator Andrew Bolton explains the real-life inspirations for much of the iconic looks in this show –people from music, pop, and celebrity worlds, taking you through the galleries one by one, emphasizing the importance of recycling and deconstruction to the haute couture designers of today.

Our favorites: Rodarte’s crochet looks alongside those of Westwood and McLaren, McQueen’s faux recycled trash bag dresses, Chris Bailey’s spiked Burberry ensemble, and the great finale – Comme des Garcon’s amazing collection with trousers, mutton sleeves, and disassembled pieces of clothing brilliantly attached for maximum punch to the runway models.

Look closely, remember, and enjoy.

Brooklyn Museum Reveals Sargent’s Master Strokes

Posted on July 17, 2013 by MsSusanB

Sargent’s masterful 1908 White Ships. Translucent and opaque watercolor and wax resist with graphite underdrawing, Source: Brooklyn Museum.

Sargent’s masterful 1908 White Ships that he likely painted in a day. Translucent and opaque watercolor and wax resist with graphite underdrawing, Source: Brooklyn Museum.

Back in 1909, John Singer Sargent’s watercolor show at Knoedler was considered a knockout, drawing discerning crowds in awe of his sensational technique. The images of Bedouin life, Venice, and boats on the Mediterranean were so compelling that the Brooklyn Museum raced in to buy 83 (nearly all of them), forcing Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to wait until 1912, when they could clean out his entire next watercolor show.

Bedouins (c.1905–6). Opaque and translucent watercolor, Source: Brooklyn Museum.

Walking into John Singer Sargent Watercolor on Brooklyn’s Fourth Floor, you can see why the two great institutions went crazy. With 93 of their finest Sargent purchases collectively displayed, it’s impossible for visitors to pick the most spectacular. They’re all exceptional – the Bedouin horses at rest inside the tent, Sargent’s niece wrapped in her cashmere shawl, the cliffs of the Carrara quarries, and the lush Medici gardens.

How did he make such magnificent work with such an unforgiving medium? How did he whip them out? The two museums asked a team of conservators and curators to put the works under the microscope and ultraviolet light to discern more about the master’s process – the sequence of paint application, the types of paint used, and whether he did a pencil sketch before applying paint to paper.

The team gives visitors insights to the scientific process used — an unusual twist at the back of the gallery that visitors poured through enthusiastically. Brooklyn’s digital team installed a 30-second video in which paper conservator Toni Owen asks visitors what more they’d like to know. Here’s the site where she answers with comments on Sargent’s use of gouache, soft-wax resist, yellow paints, and the difficulties of explaining false-color infrared imaging (FCIR) in limited-space wall text in the gallery.

Carrara: A Quarry (1911). Translucent and opaque watercolor and wax resist with graphite underdrawing, Photo: © 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

You’ll learn that Mr. Sargent painted very fast, did not rely on photographs, and did at least one watercolor sitting in a gondola.

Brooklyn’s integrating much more media into its visual art shows, and they’ve hit upon a winning combination here. Some videos show the gardens that were the subjects of Sargent’s work in Italy. Others explain the techniques that Sargent used in the painting next to it.

Listen as artist Monika deVries Gohlke reflects on the type of day Mr. Sargent might have experienced working on his 1908 Melon Boat painting. Watch as she prepares the watercolors, selects his colors, chooses his brushes, and attempts to recreate his “jungle” of shapes and impressions. Does her painting look like his? You be the judge and go get your own paintbox.

Warhol, The Queen, Madonna, and The Scream

Posted on July 14, 2013 by MsSusanB

Warhol’s 1984 silkscreen, The Scream (After Munch). Source: Part of the founding collection contributed by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to The Andy Warhol Museum; ©2013 AWFVA/ ARS, NY

Andy is kicking Mr. Munch’s Scream up a notch on Park Avenue, all to the delight of the Queen of Norway, in the Scandinavia House’s stellar exhibition, Munch, Warhol, and the Multiple Image through July 27.

Actually, Queen Sonja herself was one of Andy’s subjects in his Celebrity series, so it’s no wonder that she flew in to preside over Mr. Munch’s 150^th birthday at a New York show where his most iconic work is appropriated and reimagined by the Master of Pop.

Andy first encountered Munch’s woodcuts in Oslo in the 1970s, and took home reproductions. So, when a now-defunct 57^th Street gallery invited him to their 1982 Munch exhibition and offered him a commission to make 15 paintings and 30 silkscreens about the work, Warhol accepted.

The Scream was so iconic, Andy considered it almost a “ready made”, as ripe as any other pop culture image for his flat, unemotional, Day-Glo serial treatment. Ditto for Munch’s Madonna and Self Portrait with Skeleton Arm. He photographed reproductions of four Munch works, blew them up, traced on them, and rephotographed what he had traced. And then he turned it all over to a master silkscreen printer with suggested colors. So totally Andy.

Room full of Munch Madonna prints seen from gallery with Warhol silkscreens of same. Eileen Travell’s photo for Scandinavia House/The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 2013

With all the commotion earlier this year at MoMA over The Scream (like fans along the red carpet, jockeying to get their photographs taken with the world’s-most-anxious celebrity-on-a-bridge), this show deserves similar crowds. Because Warhol’s prints were never published, you’re seeing one-of-a-kind prints that are dispersed around the world and rarely on view.

The curators have also brought together (with the help of The Munch Museum in Norway) multiples created by Munch. It’s fascinating to compare the five controversial Madonna prints side by side, walk into the first Warhol gallery, turn around, and see both Munch and Warhol Madonna interpretations right in front of you. It’s a smart, immensely satisfying installation.

You’ll enjoy listening to what the Queen had to say (first 8 minutes of the video) and see photos of her younger self at The Factory with Andy and Mr. Rosenquist.

Oh, and the photo below isn’t a disco queen from Studio 54. It’s Andy’s wall-sized reinterpretation of Munch’s The Brooch, Eva Mudocci, a lithograph originally done in 1903 to celebrate the beautiful, talked-about violinist.

The last 15 minutes of the video features the curator showing the work of the two Modern masters who knew how to leverage print technology and multiples into fame, fortune, and icon status.

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Susan B's advice on what you shouldn't miss in NYC and other museums

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