The Most Lavish Natural History Show in the World

Posted on March 6, 2014 by MsSusanB

Remember 17th c. Dutch tulipmania? JAR Tulip Brooch 2008 made of rubies, diamonds, pink sapphires, garnets, silver, gold, and enamel. Private collection. Photo: Jozsef Tari. Courtesy: JAR, Paris.

Remember 17th c. Dutch tulipmania? JAR  Tulip Brooch 2008. Rubies, diamonds, pink sapphires, garnets, silver, gold, and enamel. Private collection. Photo: Jozsef Tari. Courtesy: JAR, Paris.

If you took the detailed observational field skills and plant-and-animal artistry of JJ Audubon and crossed them with the gold-and-jewels precision of a Fabergé master, you can understand the enjoyment, beauty, and wonder that await the luxury-lovers crowding into Jewels by JAR, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s tribute to the world’s most exclusive and reclusive jewelry artist. Meditate on his exquisite take on the natural world before it all goes back to the vaults on March 9.

Plenty of worshippers were wielding tiny flashlights last Saturday night, working their way meticulously through the darkened gallery perusing every detail of 400 tiny, sparkling, jewel-encrusted pieces by JAR (or, Joel A. Rosenthal as he was known growing up in the Bronx). He’s one of the world’s experts in the pavé technique and achieves subtle effects by painstakingly arranging miniscule diamonds, rubies, opals, and amethysts across gold, platinum, and silver surfaces.

JAR’s 2010 bracelet evokes snow on branches. Diamonds, silver, and platinum. Private collection.  Photo: Jozsef Tari. Courtesy: JAR, Paris.

Despite being one of the most sought-after jewelers in the world, JAR will not do commissions. Each piece is one of a kind, so the subjects that he chooses tell you a lot about him. Look closely.

The first case features bracelets, earrings, brooches, and necklaces fashioned into exact, delicate replicas of just about anything you can find at the New York Botanical Garden on a spring day — gardenias, roses, camellias, tulips, lilacs, carnations, wisteria, pansies, and even wild oats. Across the room, you’ll see perfect oak leaves and acorns (made from diamonds, platinum, silver, and gold) formed into dramatic rings, cufflinks, necklaces, and earrings.

Growing up, JAR loved roaming the halls of the American Museum of Natural History and the Met, which shows. He’s made one pair of pendant earrings (No. 83) from iridescent beetle wings, married with tiny emeralds, garnets, and diamonds set into silver and platinum.

JAR  Butterfly Brooch 1994.  Sapphires, fire opals, rubies, amethyst, garnets, diamonds, silver, and gold. Private collection. Photo: Katharina Faerber. Courtesy: JAR, Paris

Right next to that (No. 84) you’ll see his 1981 Egyptian-style faience earrings with emeralds, coral, and gold — a 20^th century take on the Middle Kingdom. He’s crafted stalactite earrings (No. 93) from diamonds and silver and found a heart-shaped pebble into which he’s set a perfect ruby surrounded by silver and gold (No. 283).

In the center of the room there are moon and stars pendant earrings (a tribute to Cole Porter) made of sapphires and diamonds (No. 274), and a box (No. 260) inspired by lightning (rock crystal and diamonds). JAR’s 1991 Phases of the Moon Bracelet, made of basalt, diamonds, silver, and platinum, makes you think he probably also hung out at the Hayden in his youth.

The finale to the gallery is the Met’s jeweled twin to the AMNH Butterfly Conservatory – a wall in which 22 of JAR’s beautiful butterflies take flight. OK, there are 2 dragonflies in there, too, but the overall message is butterflies.

A few animals are in the show, too. JAR Zebra Brooch 1987 made of agate, diamonds, a sapphire, silver, and gold. Private collection.  Photo: Katharina Faerber. Courtesy: JAR, Paris

Every person in the crowd seemed to pause here in the dark to choose which creature was the most beautiful before entering the bright, unforgiving lights of the gift shop. A personal favorite was the 1987 Dragonfly Brooch (No. 378) with double-layered rock crystal wings.

If you love nature, wit, color, and fool-the-eye magic, you’ll like getting lost in the dark among the billions of points of light that JAR has created in his glittering universe.

Mutu Takes Art-Lovers on a Fantastic Brooklyn Journey

Posted on March 3, 2014 by MsSusanB

Le Noble Savage, 2006. Ink and collage on Mylar (over 7 feet tall). Collection: Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg. Image: courtesy of the artist. © Wangechi Mutu

The Saturday night crowd at the Brooklyn Museum was intent on exploring every inch, sketchbook, plastic-wrapped ball, and cut-out supplied by the born-in-Kenya Brooklyn vision-artist in her one-woman show, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. Explore her world (installed right next to The Dinner Party) before March 9.

Wangechi has been turning out thought-provoking work for the last 15 years, and the show, originally created by the Nasher Museum on the Duke University campus, presents the gigantic collage images that made her famous with collectors as well as a brand-new video and on-site installation.

Ladies’ fashion lips, stiletto-heeled shoes, African totems, African animals, high-fashion eyes, and magical shapes and patterns are interworked onto large-scale pieces portraying Amazons that are pushed, puzzled, and probed in fantasy landscapes, surrounded by plants and creatures from different worlds.

She’s a visual virtuoso who knows that how things look from a distance are nothing like what you’ll see when you get up to her images very, very close. For example, when you come into the gallery, you see a wall-sized work that Wangechi created that looks like a she-centaur being chased by who-knows-what-in-3D flying into the frame. Up close, you’ll see that her “hooves” are collages of African sculptures and engine parts. The furtive creature flees atop a huge root system of “earth” created out of masses of folded felt. Take a look at how she assembled it:

Walking up to each piece, shapes shift right in front of you, conjuring mixed messages and forms associated with female beauty, African “otherness”, the fallout from colonialism, and the disassociation with the natural world. Wangechi wants everyone and everything to exist harmoniously, but her techniques constantly remind you of the dissonance and difficulty in achieving this.

Funkalicious fruit field, 2007. Ink, paint, mixed media, plastic pearls, and collage on Mylar. Collection of Glenn Scott Wright. Courtesy: Victoria Miro Gallery, London. © Wangechi Mutu

In a 2007 piece titled Funkalicious fruit field, the far-away feeling is organic, dense, watery, and surreal. But when you get right up close, you’ll discover three jackals, a sacred cow, and a white rhino floating around, and you’ll start scouring the weeds for more surprises. Her female portraits can sometimes feel scary as you recognize the genesis of some of the cut-up images creating the illusion – medical textbooks whose components aren’t pretty.

The crowd was captivated by her first animated film, The End of eating Everything. A female-headed magical creature belches volcano steam from her misshapen body, eating everything in sight. Thankfully, it has a bit of a surreal, happy ending as hopeful, intelligent heads eventually prevail, framed by a cloud-filled blue sky.

Listen to a discussion of her work at the Brooklyn Museum via YouTube, and enjoy this beautiful 9-minute documentary produced by Arise Entertainment 360. You’ll meet this fascinating artist, see close-ups of her collages, and experience what’s so great about this show:

Exquisite Journey Through Time via Modern Venetian Glass

Posted on February 28, 2014 by MsSusanB

Scarpa’s striped Rigati e tessuti glass pieces (1938–1940). Sources: private collection; Carraro Collection (Venice); European Collection

The gorgeous art and design show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932–1947, is deceptive.

It’s a tribute to one of the top innovators in Murano glass, stepping visitors through more than two dozen styles and innovations that he brought to glass-making, but it also provides a brilliant introduction to the virtuosity that characterized decorative luxury items as far back as the first century B.C. See it before March 2.

Scarpa was inspired by 18th c. Chinese porcelain. Source: The Met

Scarpa, a trained architect, began working as an artistic consultant at Paolo Venini’s glass factory in Venice right after he graduated, but soon his creativity and vision catapulted him into the job of artistic director and into the spotlight with every new collection he debuted at the Venice Biennale.

At the start of the show, you’ll see his Bollicine group (1932-1933) with tiny air bubbles incorporated into each white, blue, black, and green piece. In awe of the artistry of Eastern Asia, he fused this modern technique with a reliance on traditional shapes from one of his favorite periods of Chinese porcelain – the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), where ceramic artists crafted bold, dramatic single-color works. Check. Let’s take a page out of that book and put it to use in creating sleek, modern icons of Italian design.

At the far side of the circular Lehman Wing gallery, the Met curators have put together a shelf that fools you from a distance. You’ll think that the gorgeously modern works are all opaque glass masterpieces by Scarpa, but only half are. The rest are beautifully arranged works from 18^th and 19^th century China from the Met’s own collection.

Scarpa’s bubble-glass liqueur set (1935). Source: The Met.

Venini and Scarpa felt it was important to document the specific silhouettes that they created, and the Met has matched the archive shape with many of the modern glass works in the collection.

Just look at each label and wonder what the 18^th century Chinese ceramicists would think of their shapes being transformed into glass marvels.

Working your way around the gallery, you’ll experience astonishing artistry resulting from dozens of technical approaches – for example, glass with rough, irregular surfaces (Corrosi 1936-1938), glass blown from thin slabs made of alternating clear and colored glass rods (Mecca filigrana 1934-1936), boldly striped pieces, and iridescent glass (Iridati, 1940). The variety and effects are astonishing and it’s easy to float dreamily through this art for art’s sake show.

Luxury Italian modern glass from the early 1st century A.D. Source: The Met

The curators also make use of the Met’s vast collection of ancient glass to remind modernists that the glassmaking tradition extends back nearly two millennia along the Mediterranean and Adriatic shores.

Be sure to look for the Met’s cast glass created in Greece between the 2^nd century and 1^st century B.C. and in Rome from the late 1^st century B.C. to the early 1^st century A.D. Glass was a super-high-end luxury item back in those days.

You’ll be blown away by how modern it all looks.

This mosaic glass dish may look like Italian 1980s, but it’s Greek from the 2nd-1st century B.C. Source: The Met

The Art of ElBulli’s Culinary Genius

Posted on February 24, 2014 by MsSusanB

Notebooks and menu drawings from ElBulli’s kitchen displayed in front of a mural of Ferran Adrià and staff in Roses, Spain in the most famous kitchen in the world. Courtesy: elBullifoundation, The Drawing Center

If you weren’t able to visit the famed ElBulli restaurant on the coast of Spain before it closed two years ago, don’t worry. Pop down to Soho to meet the man, his team, and his legacy through The Drawing Center’s provocative show, Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity, running through February 28.

Even if you can’t taste the world-renowned creations, you’ll feel as though you’ve entered his kitchen during the six months per year that his team worked on R&D through up-close looks at experiments, plating, techniques, codes, inventions, and graphic treatises. Take a look at the installation on our Flickr feed.

Close-up of large working board of photo and diagrams document the plating and components of each dish. Courtesy: elBullifoundation

Last weekend, the Wooster Street space was jammed with visitors eager to see glimpse the genius behind the magic of the famed elBulli – notebooks filled with diagrams of exacting platings of food, a room inside the gallery evoking elBulli’s Barcelona archive, huge storyboards pinned with drawings and photographs of artist-inspired dishes, and glass-topped tables containing inventions that created some of the most amazing food–art in the world.

Examples: the apparatus that turns cheese into “spaghetti”, the glass bowls used to serve diners “edible air”, or the cocktail device that literally sprays a dry martini right into a diner’s mouth.

240 plasticine models used to standardize recreation of the sizes and shapes of various portions of food used as components in his highly inventive, artistic dishes. Courtesy: elBullifoundation, The Drawing Center

240 plasticine models used by staff to recreate precise shapes and portions of artistic dish components.

And how do you keep the beautiful dishes consistent? By making little plastic sculptures so that the kitchen crew knows how to duplicate forms for delicate platings precisely on everyone’s plate. When you’re delivering identical 40-course dinners to guests who have flown halfway around the world to join you for dinner, precision counts.

Improvisation may have happened during the six months of the year that elBulli shut down to devote itself to R&D, but not so much during dining-season crunch time. Just look at the large wall drawing that Adrià sketched for this show — Map of the Creative Process: Decoding the Genome of Creativity. Organization is key.

Last weekend, there were no empty seats in the downstairs video viewing gallery, as visitors sat mesmerized by 1846, the 90-minute film co-produced by The Drawing Center, showing every dish Adriá ever served at elBulli (1987 – 2011).

Plasticine model of the 1994 Le Menestra dish composed only of textures, including cauliflower mousse, basil jelly, almond sorbet, avocado, and numerous other components.

Photos of gorgeous, glistening food on plates, rocks, and wood lilted by to an opera soundtrack punctuated by the sounds of water lapping on the shore near the restaurant. Plates of vegetables, seafood slices, sprigs, and flowers wafted by. What are those spoons filled with? What appeared to be “hatching” out of that egg? What was the egg? What was perching on a stalk like an insect? The effect made you feel as if you were seeing life on Earth evolve…biomorphic shapes surrounded by foam.

You could tell that these art-and-food lovers had absorbed the exhibit upstairs when there was a collective gasp of recognition when the real-life version of La Menestra (accurately and lovingly represented in plascticene upstairs) floated onto the screen.

Since he shut the most desired and famous restaurant in the world, Adrià has been hard at work making sure that his thoughts, processes, philosophy, and research were well documented and translated to digital form. Although it’s still in beta, he’s incorporating it all into an online encyclopedia of gastronomic knowledge.

Kudos to Brett Littman and his team at The Drawing Center for mounting a show that pays tribute to food-as-art and shows us how creativity, inspiration, and documentation (in the hands of an genius, or team of geniuses) can turn experiments in a kitchen on a small Spanish seaside cove into a global digital export of wisdom and innovation for the next generation of chefs.

Take a look at Bullifoundation’s promo video to see what’s in store:

Happily, this show is going on the road in the United States before it leaves for The Netherlands in 2016: See it at the ACE Museum in LA (May 4-July 31), Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland (September 26-January 18, 2015), or Minneapolis Institute of Art (September 17, 2015-January 3, 2016).

Here’s a link to Documenting Documenta, a 2011 film about Adrià’s life, inspiration, work, and participation in Documenta 12, an international cultural festival in Kassel, Germany that happens every five years.

The Armory Show: One Ends, One Begins

Posted on February 21, 2014 by MsSusanB

Mr. Duchamp’s 100 year-old icon exits NYHS on Central Park West after seeing the show.

Challenging, ground-breaking art from all over the world under one roof, fashionable crowds, and buyers looking for the next big thing. On March 6, the 2014 edition of The Armory Show opens at the Hudson Piers 92 and 94; but for art-history lovers, there’s just a few days more to travel back in time to experience the 1913 edition that inspired it all at the New-York Historical Society’s show, The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution, closing February 23. Check out the spectacular online exhibition site.

NYHS has gathered together 100 of the great art works that rocked Manhattan 100 years ago downtown at the 69^th Regiment Armory on Lexington and 26^th Street, where the Fighting Irish rented out their parade hall for a month to the newly formed Association of American Painters and Sculptors to show 1,400 works representing the latest trends in modernism.

One of the many postcards sold at the 1913 show’s merchandise table. Source: Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin, and Munch were there in all their shocking glory – the first time many of these Europeans had been shown stateside. Take a look on the NYHS site and see what chaos ensued in the popular press. Even T. Roosevelt himself wrote an editorial about it.

NYHS not only shows us the work, but puts it all in the context of the times – the bohemian life in Greenwich Village, upstart galleries with an interest in the primitive and new, dissatisfaction with the confines of taste at the National Academy, and New York tastemakers yearning to make their mark on a world stage.

In the little low-light gallery next to the library, you’ll find all sorts of interesting ephemera – letters by the organizers of the show, registration cards with the insurance value of now-famous works, postcards for sale at the show, and a scrapbook of satirical telegrams read by the organizers at their celebratory dinner. This is where you can marvel at Gauguins selling for $8,100, Redon for $810, an oil by Braque for $200, a plaster Brancusi for $200, and Cezanne lithographs for $20 to $40. No wonder Stieglitz amassed such a great collection at these prices!

He had to have it. Stieglitz bought Kandinsky’s 1912 The Garden of Love (Improvisation Number 27) as soon as he saw it. Source: Metropolitan Museum/ © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris

It’s interesting that the show would not have been such an affordable-art extravaganza without mega-dealer Vollard riding to the rescue, shipping crates of color lithographs and drawings to New York from Paris a scant three weeks before the show. Kuhn and his co-organizers devoted three galleries to works on paper. Works by Gaugin, Cezanne, Lautrec, and Munch flew off the walls, and when the show closed in New York, half of all the works sold had been supplied by Vollard.

Check out the price list and who-bought-what online. You can also probe the Smithsonian’s archive of Armory Show-related materials here.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art (a.k.a. Armory Show) installed in the 69th Regiment Armory at 25th & Lexington. Source: Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Kuhn family papers.

The NYHS show is organized according to the original layout, including the grouping of Cubists with Mr. Duchamp’s iconic Nude Descending a Staircase, and the Fauve-Brancusi area – otherwise known in New York critic circles as the “Chamber of Horrors.” Looking at Matisse’s Blue Nude today, it’s hard to imagine that Art Institute of Chicago students found Matisse so shocking that they held a mock trial for him and burned it in effigy when the show arrived in the Windy City in April 1913.

And speaking of Chicago, the Armory Show was a huge success there – attracting over 180,000 art lovers, nearly double the attendance in New York. See the Art Institute’s gorgeous web site of exactly how everything looked in its grand galleries on Michigan Avenue. Everything really got the royal treatment. In turn, AIC can say it was the first museum in North America to show Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp, and Brancusi. No second-city status there.

Kuhn kept Picasso’s 1912 list of which artists should be shown. Source: Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Kuhn family papers.

Buy your ticket to this Armory Show before you buy one for the next one and feel what it’s like to walk through a turning point in American art history.

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.

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

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.

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