Fluffy AMNH Animal Superstars Win Webby

Posted on April 23, 2013 by MsSusanB

Steve Quinn, diorama master

Steve Quinn couldn’t send them to the L’Oreal Paris hair and make-up room like Tim Gunn does on Project Runway. They’re just too big, too famous, and too fragile. We’re talking about the furry animals that populate the 43 dioramas on Floor 1 of the American Museum of Natural History’s in the Hall of North American Mammals.

So how do you buff, puff, make up, color, groom, blow dry, restore eyelashes, color brows, and repair noses on New York superstars that have been in the (literal) spotlight since the early 1940s? That’s the subject of AMNH’s YouTube sensation, Restoring Dioramas in Hall of North American Mammals – a 16-show reality series that won a prestigious Webby Award earlier this month. Download the North American Mammal app (with before and after looks at the enhanced fur).

No more “demon” eye in the baby Mountain Goat, who is surrounded by thousands of flowers refurbished by AMNH volunteers

Steve Quinn leads a team of accomplished artists to, well, perform makeovers on the animals, plants, and background paintings that reside inside some of the most famous 3D attractions inside the AMNH. Steve told us that the first step was to update the decades-old lighting inside each case with state-of-the-art illumination that would inflict much less damage on the mammal coiffures.

His team engineered wooden platforms that extended into each scene so that leaf-turning and snow repair could occur with minimal disruption to the diorama floor. If you watch the 4-minute videos, you’ll see how they fixed a bison’s nose, put whiskers on cougars, restored the grass on the Great Plains, and restored the jackrabbit’s ears. The runaway hit of the series is Updating the “Moon Shadow” in the Wolf Diorama. With over 8,000 views, it’s not going to knock Dr. Neil off the AMNH charts any time soon, but Steve’s magical artistry is something to savor.

Go to the AMNH YouTube channel and scroll down to find the North American Mammal diorama series, depicting Steve and his crew at work. Check out this series trailer:

Just before Steve retired the other week, he gave us a special Night at the Museum, walking around and visiting his favorite dioramas after the visitors left.

Steve, you’re a total rock star. Thanks for all your spectacular work at AMNH over the years, and congratulations on the Webby.

Elvis has left the building.

Surrealists Get Out Pencils and Scissors at The Morgan

Posted on April 21, 2013 by MsSusanB

César Moro’s Adorée au grand air (1935). Source: The Getty Research Institute.

Automatic drawing, games, rubbings, collage, and dreams are all chronicled in the spectacular Drawing Surrealism show closing today at The Morgan. It’s an encyclopedia of what you can do with a scissors and pencil and demonstrates that these forms of play were critical to the most famous Surrealist works by superstars Ernst, Dali, Masson, and their European colleagues.

Some of the off-the-wall creations born out of the Surrealist’s drawing games eventually made their way into big-time oil paintings. The curators also contend that the monochrome grey-scale of some famous paintings is actually a tribute to the importance they attached to charcoal and pencil media.

The show, co-organized with the LA County Museum of Art, is the first time that Surrealist drawings have been the subject of an exhibition, and curators make quite the case for drawing technology transfer by showing us how these techniques (especially collage) spread to the rest of the world.

Man Ray’s Safety Pin (1936). Ink and pencil on paper. Source: MoMA. © 2013 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

One of the genuine revelations is the work and importance of César Moro, a Parisian-trained Peruvian who brought Surrealism to Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

You can’t help but be struck by the forerunners of Pop: Man Ray’s Safety Pin sure looks like a precursor to Claes Oldenburg’s 1970s Clothespin, and there’s no question about the influence of Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1940s Surrealist-influenced collages: He and Richard Hamilton invented Pop Art in Britiain.

When the show was installed at LACMA, several contemporary artists were asked to create Surrealist-inspired works. Listen as Alexandra Grant, Mark Licari, and Stas Orlovski show and tell how European mind-and-hand games of the 1930s inspire work today:

Get Out into the Fresh Air (in Italy and France)

Posted on April 15, 2013 by MsSusanB

Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny’s Edge of a Wood (1850). Oil on canvas done northeast of Paris. The flattening technique was developed with his hiking companion, Corot.

There’s nothing like stepping out into the fresh air to get a little perspective – exactly the view taken by the group of landscape painters featured in the Met’s exhibition, The Path of Nature: French Paintings from the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785-1850, on display in the Lehman Wing for a few more days.

Most of them feature Italian or French landscapes, and you’ll be surprised to know these tranquil, beautiful visions of nature were considered a little bit radical at the time. Apparently, there once was a time when painters didn’t travel beyond the studio, and certainly did not work outdoors.

Installation view of The Gate to the Temple of Luxor (1836) by La Bouëre. After Napolean invaded Egypt, the exotic Middle East became all the rage. The missing obelisk ended up in the Place de la Concorde.

The artists in this collection (gifted to the Met 10 years ago by Mr. Whitney) literally went on the road, took to the hills, and created spectacularly perfect outdoor oils to record a bit of the exotic, wild, and ruined visions they experienced. And it all happened long before Monet went outside to serialize his haystacks.

If you’ve ever wanted to take a Grand Tour of the wonders of Europe and the Middle East, now is your chance. Check out the Met’s online gallery of these works, and enter the mountains, hillsides, parks, ruins, and vistas with new 18^th and 19^th century friends.

If you have some time, you can listen to the Met’s curator, Asher Miller, discuss how adventure travel inspired a generation of painters to break the rules.

Abstraction All-Stars Featured in MoMA’s LinkedIn

Posted on April 13, 2013 by MsSusanB

Installation view of the network behind the birth of abstract art, according to MoMA and Columbia Business School

As soon as you arrive at Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925, MoMA’s soon-to-close extravaganza featuring the relationships among painters, poets, composers, and dance innovators, you encounter a big, bold infographic on the wall – a web showing who was collaborating with, influencing, viewing, and reading each other as “abstract art” was born.

The stunning exhibit is a who’s who of modern art, with work by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Malevich (of course), but pulls in works from lesser-known early innovators from Britain, Poland, Italy, and America (hi, Georgia!) and across disciplines. So many connections, so little time! The show has books, music, pioneers of modern dance…just about everything.

If you can’t get to it, don’t worry. MoMA’s put it all on the web so you can explore all the connections yourself. The highlighted names show the artists with over 25 connections, like an early 20^th century LinkedIn or really popular Facebook friends. Who knew that Russian fine-art diva Goncharova was more connected than, say, Malevich or El Lissitsky? I guess inventing Rayism and designing sets for the Ballet Russes paid off in getting her positioned in this MoMA pantheon.

Created by MoMA curators, designers, and pros from the Columbia Business School, the interactive web highlights every artist featured in the massive MoMA show. The infographic allows you to zoom in to see how the buzz, particularly in 1911-1915, brought abstract art into being. No matter which name you click on, you’ll get to view the works, play the music, and watch the dances – a web-based multimedia tour-de-force.

Now dive into one of the best art-websites ever, and get to know the network and likes of the hot, emerging artists who made the art world of 100 years ago into what we know today.

Watch how this show and web project were brought to life with Excel, great minds, and graphic design. And be sure to check out Paul Ingram’s views on the value of networks at the MoMA video site.

Allen Ginsberg’s Time Machine Walkabout at NYU

Posted on April 4, 2013 by MsSusanB

Myself seen by William Burroughs, Kodak Retina new-bought 2’d hand from Bowery hock-shop…, 1953, printed 1984-97. National Gallery of Art, Gift of Gary S. Davis.  Images © 2012 Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.

Walking through the Grey Art Gallery’s show Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg is pretty much a stroll through the neighborhood circa 1953 – Tompkins Square Park, Avenue B, three-room apartments for $29 per month.

This incredible tribute to all things Beat was initially mounted by the National Gallery, but the best place to see it is NYU’s gallery in the Village, just steps away from where it all happened. Get to Washington Square to see what it was like to be young, broke, ambitious, and at the edge of a generational shift in America.

Allen Ginsberg had just gotten a $13 Kodak camera in a Bowery pawnshop and began taking photos of himself and his friends – Jack Kerouac, William S. Boroughs, and Gregory Corso. No one was famous yet. About thirty years later, Ginsberg found the snapshots, printed and enlarged them, and wrote in the margins his memories of sharing the flat, living on nothing, and breaking the rules.

The photos tell quite a coming-of-age story – the first publication of Howl, Ferlinghetti’s bookstore in San Francisco, emerging Beat sensibility, and life in a flat at 206 East 7^th Street while Kerouac took to the road. The earlier photos were all taken from 1953 to 1963, but later photos of his from the 1980s include Dylan, Larry Rivers, Francesco Clemente, and even Madonna.

As an extra bonus, Grey Art Gallery interns developed a walking tour of Ginsberg’s East Village haunts, so you can actually experience Café Reggio, Café Wha?, and over 25 other spots where it all took place. Download the PDF tour inside the Beat Memories site and walk the walk of literary and cultural rebellion.

Get to this show right now in New York, or catch it in San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum later this year. If you can’t do either, poke through the online photos with Ginsberg’s commentary at either the Grey or the National Gallery sites (at the latter, you can enlarge the photos to read Ginsberg’s addendums). Here’s a promo from WNET:

Easter Parade with Horses at Grand Central

Posted on March 29, 2013 by MsSusanB

GCT security keeping an eye on the red horse

The colors, crowds, finery, and promenade in Grand Central is every bit as celebratory as the famed Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue, except there’s live music and horses. It’s all part of Nick Cave’s monumental performance Heard NY going on each day at 11am and 2pm in Vanderbilt Hall.

Get there early and take your cameras to see The Ailey School students don the two-person horse costumes, created out of raffia, to whoosh and swirl away to the drums and harp. Take a look at the Flickr photos of yesterday’s 11am performance.

Creative Time and MTA Arts for Transit have decided to use both sections of Vanderbilt Hall for simultaneous performances, so you have lots of options to see the 30 magnificent horses close up. Afterward, you’ll see the volunteers grooming the horses, so there’s lots of opportunity to check out the loving detail that Cave has given each of them.

Half of the 30-horse herd

The raffia flies, the dancers whirl, and it’s breathtaking to see the horses come alive before your eyes and cavort about with their distinct personalities. Even if you go to the Easter Parade at St. Patrick’s on Sunday, you’ll still have time to catch their final 2pm performance. If you want to see another example of Nick’s work, check out our post on The Armory Show a few weeks ago. For now, enjoy this wonderful promo:

I Sat in the Saarinen Chair

Posted on March 23, 2013 by MsSusanB

The 1956 Saarinen Tulip chair at the Met

If you’ve been to the Metropolitan Museum’s Modern Design gallery on the first floor, you’ve seen the iconic Eero Saarinen chair sitting on its platform at the back of the gallery with a “do not sit” sign prominently displayed.

Too bad you aren’t down in Wilmington, North Carolina at the Cameron Art Museum, where a tribute to three famous local artists provides you with an opportunity not only to sit in one, but at a Saarinen table with four of them, all surrounded by classy contemporary art in a setting only an artist can create. It’s a recreation of Claude Howell’s apartment 44, collecting and making art and holding salons for his entire life. Check out the Flickr photos of his fantastic place (yes, it’s a recreation, right down to the views of the Cape Fear River outside!).

The Cameron invites you to sit down to enjoy Claude Howell’s beloved Saarinen set

It’s part of the fantastic tribute “From Gatehouse to Winehouse” that is extended to April 14. Besides Claude’s apartment, the curators have also built the ramshackle botanical garden gatehouse where Minnie Evans sold tickets and created her visionary masterworks from 1948 to 1974. (By the 1970s, her work was displayed at the Whitney.) Take a look. The surrounding gallery walls are filled with projected “visions” and crayon drawings hung on a line. The third studio belongs to mysterious, mystical woman of the 1920s, Elisabeth Chant (and Claude’s art teacher.)

Claude at home in his salon-studio. Source: Cameron Art Museum

Enjoy seeing how Claude lived and worked with his museum-quality dining set, and if you are anywhere near Wilmington, be sure to go sit in the chairs for real. Claude would be glad to have you over!

70s East Village and Catholic School Mash-Up at MoMA PS1

Posted on March 20, 2013 by MsSusanB

Glittery details from Thomas Lanigant-Schmidt’s 1986 collage, The Infant of Prague as a Personification of Liberation Theology. Source: International Collage Center.

As a young gay runaway in the 1960s, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt landed in New York City, looked at the trash littering the East Village streets where he roamed, and felt a strange attraction to the cellophane wrappers, fabric, and other dumpster treasures he retrieved. This is the jumping off point for the glittery art retrospective at MoMA PS1, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Tender Love Among the Junk.

From his years of Catholic schooling and altar-boy duty, it wasn’t a stretch for Lanigan-Schmidt to use his street stuff to create glimmering duplicates of chalices, patents, and other altar accouterments. Or to work in the occasional high-school or East Village gay-life reference.

Soon, dozens of precious tin-foil creations were filling his walls. Why not go for an entire transformation? He hung diaphanous painted veils, dressed in drag as a “Czarina Tatlina” (an art-world reference to Russian Constructivism), and began to offer tours of his Gilded Summer Palace to friends. Word of this trash-to-fantasy performance spread, and he soon had a group of fans, including downtown theater innovator Charles Ludlam and famed Metropolitan Museum curator Henry Geldzahler.

Installation view. © MoMA PS1. Photo: Matthew Septimus

Get out to PS1 for this trip. The installation photo here gives you an idea of his brilliance. The area is decorated as a chapel with icons, pilgrims, brownstones, and 1950s school posters. The devotional ledges are packed with tennis figures, aerosol-can consumer products (Secret, Wizard), and Perrier bottles. The walls are filled with Smurf and Miss Piggy plates with bugs in between. And there’s a sort-of East Village Gregorian chant playing in the room.

You’ll enter the recreation of his Czarina’s Gilded Summer Palace and Sacristy of the Hamptons (1969), see many gold-foil Rats (yes, there was a time before gentrification on Ave B/C!), and read through his actual Catholic school workbooks. You’ll love the vibe of experiencing this in an old public school building, too.

As soon as you walk in the door, you’ll find a piece of paper with a copy of his 1989 essay “1969 Mother Stonewall and the Golden Rats”, his first-hand recollection of the night that made history. So, take a walk back in time by seeing this important, unforgettable retrospective. In the meantime, enjoy a virtual visit with this former altar-boy/chronicler of the East Village past in his studio today:

Met Uses Dress to Deconstruct Matisse’s Creative Process

Posted on March 13, 2013 by MsSusanB

Finished product and earlier stage of Matisse’s The Large Blue Dress (1937). Source: Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

After walking through gallery after gallery of spectacular Matisse works, it’s a little shocking to turn enter Gallery 6 and see the actual skirt that his model wore to inspire one of his most loved works. Maybe it’s not so shocking, considering how much he loved textiles.

This surprise is just one part of a fascinating eight-gallery blockbuster that deconstructs the master’s creative process – the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show Matisse: In Search of True Painting.

The show features nearly 50 works from Matisse’s career, chosen especially to reveal his thoughts behind selecting the colors, shapes, and patterns that we know so well. They’ve brought together versions of the same work and hung them next to one another. The Met’s website has views of each gallery.

The Gallery 2 view shows how the Met has displayed some of Matisse’s 1906 experiments. Check out this video narrated by curator Rebecca Rabinow:

Since Matisse liked to have visual reference points, by the 1930s he began more formal documentation of the various stages of each work. His famous Large Blue Dress painting (1937), lent by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, not only features photos of the painting’s stages but the actual blue dress made and worn by the model, Lydia Delectorskaya. Let the curator tell you more about it:

Take a look at some of the selected highlights of the show on the web, but get over to see it all in person to experience fully the power of Matisse’s color and light in a unique, exceptional, and illuminating context.

The Armory Show 2013: It’s a Wrap

Posted on March 11, 2013 by MsSusanB

Nick Cave soundsuit (2012) and video featured at Jack Shaniman Gallery booth at the Armory Show’s Contemporary pier

Nick Cave soundsuit (2012) and performance video featured at Jack Shaniman Gallery at the Armory Show’s Contemporary pier

One hundred years ago, The Armory Show blew the roof off New York City as Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Seurat, Lautrec, Kandinsky and The Eight made history at Lexington and 26^th Street. It was the beginning of Modern in America, and even Whistler’s Mother showed up.

This week, the 2013 edition of The Armory Show glamorized the West Side with its wall-to-wall extravaganza of modernist and contemporary sculpture, painting, and installation art at Piers 92/94. Take a walk-through of both shows via our Flickr photo feed.

Tributes to the original were in view in the Modern portion of the show, such as Munch’s intense woodcut Vampire II (1895-1902), as were edible Parisian imports from the Laudrée macaroon cart just inside the entrance. The show began right at coat check, where a few people were walking around carrying flattened-out versions of Andy’s Brillo boxes. Around the bend, there was the source: a silver chamber where the Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum was inviting art-lovers to sit in front of a video camera to record a Warhol screen test. Obviously, the box carriers had claimed their 2.5 minutes of fame.

All-important champagne bar at the Armory Show’s Contemporary pier

The Modern show featured a mix of new and old, but everything certainly looked fresh. People were even taking turns having their pictures taken with a large Basquiat painting at the Tokyo’s Galerie Sho Contemporary Art booth.

The Contemporary pier was filled with twice as much art. Although there were no actual performance installations on Saturday (as there were in last year’s show), two booths attracted lots of bystanders with performance videos – Marlborough’s Shade Composition video by Rashaad Newsome (evoking 80s Harlem ballroom voguing) and one of superstar Nick Cave’s soundsuit performances on a sharp, clean screen mounted right behind an actual, riotous soundsuit. (Be sure to catch his “horses” performing at Grand Central March 25-31 for Creative Time/MTA Arts for Transit.)

Other hits from the Contemporary pier (besides the champagne bar) included Tony Tasset’s snowman made entirely from inert material, right down to the bronze twigs and leaves (Kavi Gupta Gallery) and Kysa Johnson’s monumental recreation and embellishment of a Bank of America waiting room at Morgan Lehman, layered with the calculated, rational precision of Piranesi’s perspective.

Take a look, because it’s all being packed up and shipped back to Dusseldorf, Istanbul, Oslo, London, Paris, and Chelsea today.

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