FIT Grad Students Give Everyone the Boot

Posted on April 1, 2013 by MsSusanB

Curvy, red-lined leather “it” boot of 1900 by Jack Jacobus Ltd. Austrian fashion, gift of the V&A.

As part of FIT’s program in Fashion and Textiles Studies, the grad students have mounted a gem of a show about fashionable footwear — Boots: The Height of Fashion, running just a few days more.

The museum’s side gallery tells an interesting story about how boots went from practical to glam, and from guy wear to girl fashion, beginning with some thought-provoking high-buttoned “look at me” boots from 1900, following on to the boot-clad flappers, and taking us straight through boot history to the heyday of the Warhol factory.

The students have rummaged through the FIT collection to show us their picks to demonstrate “boots as a second skin” (David Evins, Charles Jourdan, and silk Louboutins), the rebel look, fashion-tribe style, and over-the-top luxury.

Fantasy-meets-luxury suede and shearling creation by Manolo Blanik (1997, UK). Gift of Ruffo.

Among our favorites are the 1922 Ball Brand flapper galoshes and everything from the collection of Warhol superstar Baby Jane Holzer – 1963 Davide Beatle boots, 1969 Guccis, and 1971 embroidered boots from The Chelsea Cobbler.

The students also gave us a behind-the-scenes look with two cases about boot conservation. One case features pairs of boots (baby boots and high-buttoned shoes) with one shoe “conserved” and the other in its deteriorating state. The second case shows how the museum is preserving those famous “second skin” David Evins polyurethane leggings from 1960s, which sadly have broken down due to the atmosphere and light.

Although the following video is not associated with the show, it certainly shows that form-fitting high-style boots did not originate with Mr. Evins. Enjoy:

Second-skin Louboutin satin boots (1994-95 Fall collection)

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:

Celebrity Robot Says Good-Bye to Upper East Side

Posted on March 26, 2013 by MsSusanB

As musician Lois Kendall shows him red roses and green leaves, Elektro tells her the color of each. Source: NYPL

If you love the future, you have to see Elektro, the celebrity robot, who once held court in the Westinghouse pavilion at the 1939 New York’s World’s Fair, before he leaves the city once again. He’s the star attraction in the Museum of the City of New York’s Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s exhibition, closing soon.

We couldn’t take photos inside the show, so here’s a publicity picture of Elektro back in 1939. He walked, talked, smoked cigarettes, as you’ll witness in this 1939 YouTube clip. This sensational moto-man used vacuum tubes, a 78 RPM record player, photoelectric cells, and telephone relays to wow the crowds.

But Elektro is only the tip of the Trylon of how fair design and engineering shaped modern American style. The show introduces the industrial design engineers that shaped products that grace MoMA’s design collection and insinuated themselves into everyday life – streamlined appliances, nylon stockings, Herman Miller clocks, Greyhound buses, and superhighways. Check out the MCNY’s excellent Tumblr feed for their visions of the future.

Postcard of the General Motors Futurama, NY 1939 World's Fair. Source: MCNY

Postcard of the General Motors Futurama, NY 1939 World’s Fair, that resembles BPC today. Source: MCNY

Among the show’s highlights are clips showing the GM Futurama, where New Yorkers waited in line for hours to see what the city of 1960 would look like. “Sound chairs” moved them along a conveyor belt where they could witness a vast scale model of modernized America, with superhighways soaring over canyons and cutting through mountains, and urban/suburban cloverleaf interchanges to keep traffic moving.

Afterward, people would exit into a full-scale World of Tomorrow where they would see what the urban intersection of the future would be – filled with pedestrian overpasses, department stores, and unimpeded whizzing traffic. It sure looked a lot like the view of Battery Park City along West Street.

Suggested Exhibit for NY 1939 World's Fair. Watercolor & gouache on board. Source: MCNY

Beautiful watercolor/gouache from MCNY collection: “Suggested Exhibit for NY 1939 World’s Fair.”

Oh! Wallace Harrison, one of the architects of the Trylon and Perisphere actually did the master plan for Battery Park City…and Lincoln Center and the UN Headquarters building and Time-Life on Sixth Avenue!

So, no wonder Elektro feels right right at home in 2013 Manhattan. In 1939, he already could see what it would look like, right from his pavilion!

Take a spin around Elektro’s world, courtesy of the New York Public Library:

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:

Look at This, It’s from the Crusades!

Posted on March 19, 2013 by MsSusanB

Catapult projectile hurled at Montfort Castle by Baibar’s military engineers in 1271

The Metropolitan curators are at it again. Just when you thought it was safe to walk back through the Arms and Armor hall, admire the century of work that went into building that collection, weave around the people checking out the Colt revolver in the case at the end of the hall, and hang a hard right to the faraway cul-de-sac…BAM! You’re headed even further back in the time machine.

It may look like an asteroid or that lumpy moon model on Dr. Neil’s Scales of the Universe at AMNH’s Planetarium, but it’s something even more amazing — a projectile shot from a catapult in 1271 as part of the Crusades. Apparently it worked, since the German knights holed up in the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s Montfort Castle surrendered to the invaders.

The simple hunk of rock is right out there with a “do not touch” sign at the entrance to the tiny Gallery 380 where the Met is honoring Bashford Dean, who began the Arms and Armor collection 100 years ago. It may look all alone, yet it has one of the best, most exciting stories to tell – tales of Teutonic Knights, sieges, Mamluk invaders, grand expeditions, monumental excavations, and private enterprise.

1926 excavation photo showing three projectiles

Apparently Dean thought that the keep inside the ruined Crusade-era castle in Upper Galilee might have Teutonic armor and other stuff from the 1200s. In 1925, he mounted a privately funded expedition to dig it up. He never found what he was after, but he did find day-to-day castle stuff (pottery, glass) and a few catapult projectiles (three are in the photo) lobbed in there by the invaders during the siege.

Looking through the Met’s online database, only about 100 items date from the 1200s, mostly from the Islamic countries. So, go take a look at this unique memento, sitting alone at the foot of the stairs in the furthest corner of the Met’s universe, and thank the curators and crew, who hoisted it out again into daylight 750 years after it met its mark.

1250 Crusader fashion

Don’t be Sad, He’s Irish!

Posted on March 16, 2013 by MsSusanB

Apatosaurus holds court on the Fourth Floor of AMNH. Source: Scott Robert Anselmo

There’s no way to count the number of times that people get upset because his actual scientific name is no longer Brontosaurus.

He’s one of the most famous dinosaur celebrities in the world and you may know him as Brontosaurus from your Flintstone days, but his real name is the Apatosaurus.

So just think about it….It’s the perfect day for you to learn to say his “Irish” name — A-PAT-o’saurus. Isn’t that better? Go over to wish him well this weekend.

He’s the largest dinosaur on display in New York. He came here all the way from Wyoming, and he’s been standing here since 1905, when J.P. Morgan and the AMNH crew unveiled him. It was the first time that a really big dinosaur was ever mounted in 3D anywhere in the world.

To the left is the “architect’s model” that the 1905 crew used to figure out how to weld together enough steel to keep the tons of rock up in the air. A-PAT-o’saurus, Happy Irish Day!

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.

Red Carpet History at Grand Central

Posted on March 5, 2013 by MsSusanB

If you’ve ever wanted to see where the red carpet began, run over to 42^nd Street and take a left into Vanderbilt Hall to gaze upon the plush surface upon which so many famous, fabulous, and acclaimed celebrities and moguls trod – the red carpet that was spread daily to the lucky ones who could afford to board the 20^th Century Limited from New York to Chicago.

It’s all part of the New York Transit Museum’s spectacular exhibition Grand by Design: A Centennial Celebration of Grand Central Terminal, running through March 15.

Docents give tours on the half hour, and they’ll tell you that the care taken with passengers right here at Grand Central was the origin of the phrase “red carpet treatment”. You’ll see an original destination sign, menus, and photos of the glamorous train (which will itself make an appearance at GCT on May 10-12). Take a look at the Flickr photos.

You’ll also be entertained by stories of the engineering, architectural, and pop-culture history of the terminal itself, and remember the stories about the chandeliers, stonework, ramps, and restoration every time you pass through. Get over to see all the memorabilia, trunks, engineering plans, and videos in person from 8am to 10pm daily before they are gone.

Some of the surprises are the “Ask Me” kiosks scattered throughout the hall, descriptions of how GCT changed the course of Midtown real estate, the story of how CBS and Walter Cronkite used to broadcast from here, and the size of that tunnel boring machine creating access for the LIRR to get into GCT 18 stories below. It’s all amazing, including the 1855 view of Midtown looking south from 42nd Street, lent to the show by the New-York Historical Society.

For a prequel, check out the NY Transit Museum’s historic timeline that lets you flip through online photos of various GCT incarnations since 1831. It’s really good, but not a substitute for seeing the red carpet, power-switch control panel, restored lamp post, and clips from movies that were filmed right where you’re standing. About 750,000 people pass through here each day, and from what we can tell, a lot of them are stopping to take a free 25-minute tour and check out the red carpet that started it all.

Artists Occupy Bank in Queens

Posted on March 1, 2013 by MsSusanB

Installation view of Keiko Miyamori's typewriters-in-resin (2012) with Ghost of a Dream's The Price of Happiness mural (2011) made from US and Chinese lottery tickets.

Installation view of Keiko Miyamori’s typewriters-in-resin (2012) with Ghost of a Dream’s The Price of Happiness mural (2011) made from losing US and Chinese lottery tickets.

Just as they did in the Bronx last summer at the Andrew Freedman Home, No Longer Empty has invited artists take over the former Bank of Manhattan in Long Island City and let us contemplate the meaning of currency and exchange in today’s troubled times.

Get over to see how 26 artists from 15 countries think about the American economy in How Much Do I Owe You, which is right next to the Queens Plaza subway station in the Clock Tower Building (29-27 41^st Avenue). There’s lots of thought-provoking stuff from the moment you enter the door, like Ghost of a Dream’s The Price of Happiness mural. It depicts a typical American house made up of losing US and Chinese lottery tickets, and was made by the group during their stay in China. Check out more pictures of our favorites on Flickr.

Installation view of Coleen Ford's Saving for our Future (2010), glass piggy banks stuffed with lottery tickets.

Installation view of Coleen Ford’s Saving for our Future (2012), glass piggy banks stuffed with lottery tickets.

Erika Harrsch’s Mao Dragon Kite and several US Dollar Kites fly overhead. Keiko Miyamori’s typewriters-sunk-in-resin evoke historic systems and intractable problems. Susan Hamburger adorns a faux “bank” space (formerly where the bank tellers worked) with an old-style, symbol-filled mural that lays out relationships among Wall Street and Euro financial actors in the Greek debt crisis.

Downstairs by the bank’s vault, installations have a more private feel. Enter a small room to see and hear the results of Nicky Enright’s survey of the financial status of 80 artists in his Money Talks video (it’s not pretty). Enter a small alcove to watch Ana Prvacki’s amusing video of literal money laundering – in the guise of a “smelling good” household product commercial (think Wet Ones), she cleans and smells dollars in the hopes that she can bring about “a clean money culture”

When you round the corner to enter the open vault, you’ll be completely absorbed in watching Orit Ben-Shitrit’s mysterious performance video, Vive le Capitale, which was shot in HD among the vaults of the old Bankers Trust building at 14 Wall Street.

Last weekend, the gallery was packed for a round-table discussion – one of several live events that No Longer Empty has scheduled here until closing on March 17. Alert: Lots of cool things are planned for the space on March 8, Long Island City Night of Armory Arts Week, so catch a tour or a provocative conversation.

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