Sinclair Dinosaur Sneaks In and Out of Grand Central

Posted on November 2, 2014 by MsSusanB

Entrance to the show, featuring the 1964 monorail, transport of the future

Although he’s featured at the back, the famous Sinclair dinosaur from the 1964 New York World’s Fair has generated a lot of attention inside the New York Transit Museum’s show Traveling in the World of Tomorrow: The Future of Transportation at New York’s World’s Fairs, closing today.

Drawn in by the spectacular photo of the monorail, commuters and tourists visiting Grand Central have been roaming through the gallery and gift shop, checking out the photos, murals, and Dinoland movie that whisk them back to the transportation pavilions of the history-making 1939 and 1964 New York world’s fairs. What’s a dinosaur doing in the World of Tomorrow? It’s all about the car.

The 1939 World’s Fair was built on top of the Corona garbage dump during the height of the Great Depression, putting visionary architects and day laborers to work.

A 1964 New York Times photo of the Sinclair Dinosaur and Stegosaurus passing by the Empire State Building on their way to the Queens fairgrounds

A futuristic subway station was built to deliver visitors to the fairgrounds from the A Line. You could enter a spaceship-shaped Flash Gordon amusement ride and watch the first 3D Technicolor movie ever produced inside the Chrysler pavilion.

The best was the legendary Futurama, where people could imagine a time where everyone owned their own car. The ride took them to the faraway year of 1960. Superhighways and curly exit ramps bisect acres of tall skyscrapers, with cars traveling on autopilot at the amazing speed of 55 miles per hour. Incredible!

Dinoland brochure from the Queens Historical Society

Fast forward: The Sinclair dinosaur is part of the 1964 experience. By then, every family owned its own car. Sinclair’s long-necked, supersized Brontosaurus was a familiar icon to any family stopping to gas up along the newly completed interstate highway system, so why not mix a little magic, promotion, and science?

Sinclair built Dinoland and populated it with life-size replicas of nine dinosaurs. The exhibition has plenty of Dinoland souvenirs along with a movie clip of families seeing the Jurassic giant for the first time.

Robert Moses and Walt Disney look at the model of the 1964 World’s Fair. From MTA Bridges & Tunnels archives

The show also pays tribute to the man who also brought another group of Mesozoic superstars to life inside the fairgrounds. Walt Disney designed four of the fair’s animatronics displays, including the robot cavemen and dinosaurs glimpsed in the Ford Motor Company’s “Magic Skyway” ride. There’s a terrific photo of New York’s Robert Moses alongside Walt, looking out over the model of the 1964 fairgrounds, and you can see the actual model itself, right inside.

Missed the show? You won’t see all the movies and hear the soundtracks that made the exhibition so exciting, but you can take a look at the galleries on our Flickr feed.

The 1964 car that everyone wanted — the Ford Mustang, which debuted at the fair

Poison Packs Punch at AMNH Night at the Museum Adult Sleepover

Posted on August 2, 2014 by MsSusanB

The sleepover site under the Blue Whale

The first-ever adult Night at the Museum sleepover at the American Museum of Natural History last night was a hit, thanks to the enthusiasm and star power of Dr. Mark Siddall, the curator of the fantastic exhibition, The Power of Poison, closing August 10.

Early in the evening, Siddall mingled with sleepover guests at dinner in the Powerhouse and later in a series late-night talks from the Victorian theater inside the Poison show where costumed performers normally show visitors how to gather clues to solve a period murder mystery involving poison. (Think “I’ve got poison in my pocket” from A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.)

After dinner, the adventurers, some in costumes themselves, made quick trips with their stuffed animals to the cots under the Blue Whale and bounded up the stairs through the low-light galleries to reach the shark IMAX, live animal demos, fossil tours, and Siddall’s Poison briefings.

The Victorian theater inside Poison. Photo: AMNH/D. Finnan

You had to pass through the always eerie Hall of Reptiles and Amphibians (hello, Komodo dragons!) to enter the magical kingdom of the Poison galleries.

Once inside, you were transported to a tropical rainforest, with golden poison-dart frogs under a dome, huge models of dangerous insects, and a toxin-eating Howler Monkey lurking on a branch.

Beyond the tropics, the show morphed into a land of make-believe…or was it? Tableaux with a sleeping Snow White, the witches of Macbeth, and the Mad Hatter were captivating, with the label copy bringing you back down to earth by explaining the role played by poisons and toxins in these scenes and what exactly witches’ brew contained.

Supplies for the toxic witches’ brew. Source: AMNH

A Chinese emperor (the one with the terra cotta army, no less!) ingests mercury in one diorama, thinking it’s going to give him immortality. Wrong move. Glancing down, you find out that as recently as 1948, mercury-laced teething powder was still being used on babies in the United States.

A spectacular illusion along the way is a magical set of Greek vases whose painted figures came to life to tell stories of how poison helped Hercules and doomed Ms. Medea.

The lively vases are a prelude to the exhibition team’s greatest wonder – the Enchanted Book – a gigantic tome where ancient illustrations leap to life as you turn big, think parchment pages. Visitors could not get enough of that magic book. Somehow the AMNH digital team replicated it on the website, so click here to take a look at The Power of Poison: An Enchanted Book and turn the pages on line.

Here’s a glimpse of one story from the belladonna page, providing the backstory on how witches fly:

A lot of Siddall’s spectacular, magical, immersive, theatrical exhibition explains the science behind venoms, the “arms races” in the natural world, poison’s role in children’s stories, and how to analyze clues in solving murder mysteries.

Check out the Victorian-style introduction to Poison with Dr. Mark Siddall, its creator, and get a little taste of what the sleepover guests saw and heard.

To ward off any bad dreams about toxins or creepy crawlers, a lot of the late-nighters nestled in to watch vintage Abbott and Costello and Superman films and post Instagrams from the cozy, pillow-lined pit in center of the Hall of Planet Earth.

See the Today show’s recap (video after the commercial).

PS: If you can’t get to this show before August 10, download the iPad app, Power of Poison: Be a Detective that allows you to experience the last portion of the show. It’s been nominated for a 2014 Webby Award in the Education and Reference category.

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.

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:

When Whales Walked Explained at AMNH

Posted on December 11, 2013 by MsSusanB

Whales exhibit tells the evolution story. Courtesy: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

Right inside the exhibit, Whales: Giants of the Deep, the American Museum of Natural History answers two questions that have stumped centuries of nature lovers – how did the world’s largest sea-loving mammals ever evolve from land animals, and who are their closest relatives?

In the last 20 years, DNA experts and paleontologists have been hacking away at these questions, and the show provides some startling visuals and answers: Whales (a group that includes dolphins and porpoises) came from four-legged animals that hovered close to shore lines, snapping up fish. Oh, and their closest relatives on the Mammal Tree of Life are…get ready…hippos. See the show before January 5.

Clue to solving the mystery – the skull of Andrewsarchus, three feet long, found in 1923 by Kan Chuen Pao on AMNH’s second Gobi expedition. Courtesy: AMNH/R. Mickens

The first thing you’ll see is a massive skull of Andrewsarchus, a 45-million-year-old whale cousin, who would have stood over six feet tall at the shoulder. He was found in Mongolia on the famous AMNH Central Asiatic Expedition in the 1920s (remember the dinosaur eggs?) and to this day is the only one found.

The paleo team compared the features on his skull to other mammals, ran their analysis through cladistics software, generated a family tree, and learned that Andrewsarchus falls somewhere near the evolutionary point where whales and hippos had a common ancestor, a key clue.

Artist Carl Buell’s depiction of Pakicetus, the oldest known ancestor to whales

A huge discovery in Northern Pakistan in 1983 began to unlock the rest of the mystery. Found in 50-million-year-old Eocene rocks, remains of the enigmatic, four-legged, fish-eating Pakicetus were discovered at the edge of what was once an ancient sea. It was deemed by scientists to be the earliest known modern-whale ancestor. Many specimens were unearthed, with ear bones looking like modern-day dolphins, but ankle bones more like a pig’s, giving scientists a reason to place his ancestry in the “artiodactyl” category, which includes hippos, pigs, antelopes, camels, and other even-toed hoofed animals. Subsequent finds and DNA analysis of modern whales further solidified the hippo-relation hypothesis.

Cladogram showing family relationships of whales and artiodactyls from the AMNH guide for students in grades 6-8

The show includes a full replica of his skeleton, along with other fossils from the subcontinent showing the transition of four-legged wolf-sized animals to the streamlined bodies that we now associate with ocean- and river-going cetaceans. You’ll see a terrific video that animates the transition from longer-snouted, web-footed fish-eaters that paddled through estuaries (Ambulocetus), to more streamlined sea-going mammals whose front legs became flippers and back legs disappeared nearly completely. Kutchicetus (43-46 million years ago) shows evidence that it probably did some deep dives, and Durudon (37 mya) had nostrils at the top of his head, flipper-hands, and apparatus at the end of his tail that suggests a support for flukes.

A clue from India. Artist Carl Buell’s depiction of Kutchicetus, dweller in ancient tropical seas

A clue from India. Artist Carl Buell’s depiction of Kutchicetus, who lived in ancient tropical seas

The show was originally organized by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and features a mix of AMNH and Te Papa artifacts and insights.

There are many other wonderful biological, historical, and cultural details to the whale story, as the YouTube below shows (84K hits and counting), but shout-outs must be given to the two stars — large Sperm whale skeletons (think Moby Dick) on display, lovingly named and transported here by the Maoris, who found the stranded duo, prepared, and blessed them for special appearance in New York.

Science Superwomen at Grolier

Posted on November 23, 2013 by MsSusanB

Portrait of Louise Bourgeois Boursier in one of her early 17th-c books on obstetrics, medical must-reads for over 100 years

Just because the confab is ending, it’s no reason not to acknowledge the loving assembly of super-fantastic women pulled together by the curators at the Grolier Club for the astonishing exhibition, Extraordinary Women in Science & Medicine: Four Centuries of Achievement, which closes today.

Inside the Club’s small gallery, ten cases and other repositories enclose the names, histories, portraits, papers, and publications of 32 remarkable women that deserve high praise and high fives. Yesterday the gallery was packed with academics, admirers, school groups, and bibliophiles who couldn’t contain themselves at their astonishment at the relative obscurity of some of these grand dames in our pop-culture-saturated psyches.

Get to know some of our favorites:

Louise Bourgeois Boursier (1563-1636) was the first woman to write a book on obstetrics – a pioneer in evidence-based medicine. Having observed 2,000 deliveries as a midwife, she personally delivered all of the children of Henry IV and Queen Marie de Medici of France, including Louis XIII.

Madame Du Chatelet’s name is absent from the top book, which she co-wrote in 1735 with Voltaire about Newton’s philosophy

Physicist, mathematician, and author Madame du Châtelet (1706-1749) was the first to translate Newton’s work Principia Mathematica into French. To this day, it’s the standard translation for students there, although in its day, only Voltaire’s name was on it, since it was considered inappropriate to print a lady’s name on a frontspiece. Her dad, who worked for Louis XIV, encouraged her scientific accomplishments, but her mom bucked her all the way. She worked on scientific philosophy, the properties of fire, and made breakthroughs in the understanding of kinetic energy – a foundation of the 150-years-later E = mc².

Laura Bassi (1711-1778) was the first female physics professor in Europe and the second woman in Europe to actually have a university degree. Remarkably she still had 12 children, had a cheerleader in Pope Benedict XIV, and had the reputation and chops to do most of her work from home.

Victorian-era portrait of Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, with her 1843 “computer” program – the published sequence by which Babbage’s analytical engine could perform calculations

Lord Byron’s daughter, Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) created, according to some, the first computer program. She translated an Italian engineer’s description of the analytical engine designed by mathematician Charles Babbage, but she added a lot of her own notes to explain its difference from earlier incarnations and explained the steps by which it could perform complex calculations. She felt it was important to use calculating machines to do more than mathematics, and she speculated that a computing engine “might compose music” and other “poetic” things.

Everybody knows that Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) innovated modern nursing, but the exhibit showcased the fact that she got her ideas across because she was an expert statistician. She used stats to kick-start evidence-based healthcare. Think about it: life before Excel.

Madame Curie (1867-1934), along with Florence, is the most famous of the Grolier group – the first person (and only woman) ever to have received two Nobel Prizes in two scientific disciplines (physics and chem). After discovering radioactivity, polonium, and radium with her husband, the Polish super-achiever applied radiology to help surgeons deal with battlefield injuries in WWI, accompanied by her 17-year-old daughter, Irène (1897-1958). Irène also later won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating radioactive elements.

Nightingale’s 1858 document for Queen Victoria’s commission, proving that Crimean War casualties were mostly from preventable diseases

New Yorker and Nobel-winner Gertrude Elion (1918-1999) never got a doctorate, but climbed her way to innovation from a job as a lab assistant. Say thank-you to her for inventing the first anti-cancer drugs, anti-viral drugs, and drugs to enable human organ transplants. Her pharma inventions treated leukemia, malaria, meningitis, and led to the development of AZT.

According to the curators, the show – which includes Curie’s apparatus, Ada’s portrait from London, a box showing how pre-mainframe pioneers tracked and sorted results of their experiments, and other items – will have a second life as a traveling exhibit and website. Until then, find out more by picking up the catalog, crammed with interesting essays, to this unforgettable tribute.

Down-to-Earth Women and Space

Posted on October 15, 2013 by MsSusanB

Installation view of Pruitt’s 2012 drawing, Diasporic Leaps and Bounds, courtesy of the Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City, CA

At the Studio Museum in Harlem’s current show, Robert Pruitt: Women, you’ll get to meet some regal-looking smarties who have a handle on art, space, and day-to-day life. Sandra Bullock’s astro-surfer is the talk of the town, but it’s these dozen-plus beauties, with their feet on the ground, who are soaring into the stratosphere with their intellectual firepower, accessories, and hairdos.

We’re talking about the stunning portraits on display through October 27. Click on the link to see more views of the installation, courtesy of photographer Adam Reich, but you need to get up to 125th Street to meet them in person.

First, it’s astonishing that these grand portraits are done with those first-year art school staples – conté crayon and brown butcher-block paper. Pruitt’s a master of the medium, and the women in his series can definitely hold their own against any Dutch Renaissance doyenne. They’re calm, cool, and collected. Yes, he’s added a touch of color or glint of gold to some detail or another, but it’s the fine hand and the technical mastery that gives each ethereal woman such large-format presence.

Pruitt’s 2011 Dreaming Celestial, featuring a Shuttle pendant suspended against a constellation bodice.

But there’s another dimension going on, too. Pruitt goes one step further by creating headpieces, outfits and accessories that tantalize art-lovers and science buffs with references to sometimes unknowable realms — art and astrophysics.

Consider the Tatlin-inspired updo coupled with the solar-system tunic in Be of Our Space World, the tiny Space Shuttle pendant and constellation bodice in Dreaming Celestial, the planetary tank top in Sun Fired, the Suprematist-inspired T in El Saturn, the space capsule chapeau and orbit diagram T sported in Diasporic Leaps and Bounds, and those choir-robe-looking outfits embellished with the tiniest of Star Trek logos for the sisters in the corner.

Yes, there are other political and pop references, but the space spin is pretty satisfying, particularly considering that Pruitt’s hometown is Houston.

Installation view of Be of Our Space World, a 2010 work featuring braids fashioned into Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, courtesy of Houston’s Hooks-Epstein Gallery

Pruitt’s women are real-world and smart beyond belief — just the type of people we’d like to meet at the next SciCafe or have Dr. Neil interview at an upcoming panel at the planetarium – women whose look tells us they have some super-big insights to share.

Anxious, Turbulent Skies in Masterful Landscapes

Posted on August 23, 2013 by MsSusanB

Frederic Edwin Church’s depiction of the volcanic eruption in Ecuador -- Cotopaxi, painted in 1862 and exhibited the following year. Source: Detroit Institute of Arts.

Frederic Edwin Church’s depiction of the volcanic eruption in Ecuador — Cotopaxi, painted in 1862 and shown the following year. Source: Detroit Institute of Arts.

Who expects that gigantic, bold 18^th-century people-free landscapes by Bierstadt and Church to bear the heft of telling the anxious backstory of America before, during, and after the Civil War?

It’s true. Big landscapes are the booknds to the dramatic story told by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s exhibition to honor the 150^th anniversary of Gettysburg, American Painting and the Civil War, installed through September 2 on the upper and lower levels of the Met’s Lehman Wing.

Seeing the stunning upper-gallery works within the context of America’s troubled times is a must. You’ll never look again at a Bierstadt or Church again without checking its date to see if it was painted in the 1859-1865 range.

Sanford R. Giffins’s 1863 oil, A Coming Storm, says it all. Retouched by the artist in 1880. Source: Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Hear Smithsonian curator Eleanor Jones Harvey’s three-minute introduction to how these magnificent landscapes became the “emotional barometer” of the country and what approach genre painters took in the midst of changing times. Then, check out the Smithsonian’s nice timeline and click on Church’s Meteor of 1860 and Our Banner in the Sky from 1861 to see what was in the news while these were being created in the studio.

You’ll find Sanford Gilfford’s A Coming Storm (1863) in the timeline in 1865. Ironically, this was owned by Shakespearean superstar Edwin Booth right after it was painted, but before his brother actor John Wilkes changed history and trashed the family name. When Melville saw the painting in a New York gallery a few weeks later in April 1865, he felt the tragic irony so profoundly that he had to write a poem to process it all.

Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, exhibited in 1865, one year after Lincoln signed legislation declaring this a public reserve. Source: Birmingham Museum of Art.

Church, Homer, and Gifford also painted camp life during the War, and those up-close-and-personal works are also featured in the show, alongside very precise oils of Confederate encampments by Conrad Wise Chapman. Thanks to Richmond’s Museum of the Confederacy, which loaned the works by Chapman, you’ll get to see the famous experimental submarine, The Hunley as it was in 1863. The submersible was raised from the depths near Charleston in 2000 with the tar bucket you’ll see in Chapman’s oil painting

But back to the giant landscape that closes the show upstairs. Bierstadt paid someone to take his place in the Union Army, so maybe that’s why his mind was free concentrate on more placid, ethereal works, such as the show’s finale, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California of 1865 – a immersive look into the California Eden that Lincoln’s signature in 1864 preserved as public land and away from scarred landscapes of the battlefield states.

What’s the connection between Arctic exploration and unusual nighttime phenomenon of 1864? Watch this video to see how Church used them to convey the mood of the country through his powerful, gigantic, beautiful Aurora Borealis.

See a slide show of 34 paintings in the show and access the full set of video podcasts on the Smithsonian’s web site.

Unicorn Natural History

Posted on August 19, 2013 by MsSusanB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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