Several Great NY Shows Explore Artist's Collections

One pretty dominant trend in museums right now is toward subtle and often smart explorations of their own holdings. The Real/Surreal show at the Whitney was purely from it's collection, and The Brooklyn Museum's Youth and Beauty show leaned heavily towards things they owned.

The Metropolitan has two utterly amazing shows looking at some of the works left to the museum by pioneering photographer and art dealer, Alfred Stieglitz.

Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe October 13, 2011–January 2, 2012

The exhibition features some two hundred major works with hefty helpings of Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Vasily Kandinsky Constantin Brancusi and other more unknown artists.

Smaller but at least as interesting is a related show of Stieglitz's photography collection.

Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz October 11, 2011–February 26, 2012

I actually didn't know about much of this work from a group of photographers dedicated to pushing the creative and spiritual range of photography as a real art form.

Anne Brigman, Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Joseph Keiley, Heinrich Kühn, Edward Steichen, Clarence White are all in this show.

The Museum of Modern Art, also has a good ehibit, looking at some of the personal drawing collections that helped form the museum. Many of the people were not artists, but a few are. Hanging selections next to a profile of each collector helps one see the personal vision and taste of each.

Gifted: Collectors and Drawings at MoMA, 1929–1983 October 19, 2011–February 13, 2012

One important part was the collection of Kay Sage.

Another major show was at Gagosian Gallery, uptown.

The Private Collection of Robert Rauschenberg November 3 - December 23, 2011

Writers Tweet Warhol's Eight Hour Film :Empire

One thing I like about twitter is that random and continnuing converstions about almost anything can develop.

Warhol's eight hour film consisting of one continuous shot of a nighttime Empire State Building became a forum for a continuous stream of consciousness from a group invited (so lucky!) to sit and tweet the experience from MOMA.

Post about it here.

Bernd And Hilla Becher @ MOMA

Bernd and Hilla Becher have a rather amazing little show up at MOMA. Here they talk about their long career documenting the functional, industrial objects and buildings of the world, from water towers, to blast furnaces and coal tipples. A good number of the subjects are from Western PA and West Virginia.

Polly Apfelbaum on You Tube

Here's a You Tube Video that I think MOMA posted that shows her installing her work in the Comic Abstraction show at MOMA. I actually haven't found many online stuff that gives an idea of the intensity and sensitivity of most of her works.She will be here for at least a few days to jury the upcoming AAP show at the Warhol.

NY Trip: Long Island City.

Our agenda for today was mostly determined by the wide range of competing alternatives within the NYC art scene. Because every organization in this city needs to scream for attention, certain neighborhoods are forced to open their destinations during the off days of the major players. Therefore while a lot of the museums in Manhattan are closed, those in Long Island City welcome visitors on Mondays. So our choice was an easy one. We decided to check out P.S.1 and the Fisher-Landau Museum.


We arrived in LIC before noon, so we had time to get coffee drinks and walk around 5 Pointz before we headed to P.S.1. This is a large warehouse (on Crane St. ) converted into artist studios and covered with "wildstyle" graffiti. Because the owner of the building encourages this commonly maligned art-form, it is constantly morphing with the work of both famous and novice graffiti artists. So people who care about such things are likely to return several times to check out the new stuff. Despite JM's contention that "they" are a bit uptight about photographs being taken, I figured public art is fair game. We walked around the perimeter of the building and had a thorough look. It was worth a few minutes of our time.

P.S.1, on the other hand, is a trip worth a significant investment of time and thought. This MOMA-affilated museum is housed in a former public school. It's dedicated to the presentation of work created primarily by "emerging" and contemporary artists. As such it is an impressive facility. It has several floors and a large outdoor sculpture area. We were fairly unimpressed by the John Cage sound installations in the Organizing Chaos exhibition, but enjoyed the highly atmospheric and grainy footage of soap bubbles depicted in a video by Rivane Neuenshwander and Cao Guimarães. While JM liked Tunga's large sculpture of a reclining headless skeleton on a hammock, I enjoyed the same artist's installation wherein the shadows of a horde of contained, live flies were projected by lamplight onto the walls of a small, narrow room. I also liked Jim Shaw's The Donner Party- a panorama of scuptures loosely based on the historical event, as well as his collection of paintings "found" in thrift stores. There was so much good stuff to see at P.S.1. that it would have justified the entire day had I not seen anything else. For $5, you couldn't possibly find a better value.

Next we took a sweaty walk to the Sculpure Center. Unfortunately we didn't find much inspiring in the happiness of objects show on the gound floor. But we ultimately got our money's worth with Christian Tomaszewski's On Chapels, Caves, and Erotic Mystery. This walkthrough series of interior spaces was inspired by David Lynch's Blue Velvet. I have a penchant for dark rides, and the experience of wending through Tomaszewski's creation was satisfyingly eerie and unsettling. It's all in the lovingly-created creepiness of the details. If you have any possibility of engaging this work, I heartily recommend it.

JM was leary about following up with a visit to the Fisher Landau Center for Art. Although he'd never been there, he wasn't excited about having to invest the admission price and time to go to an out-of-the-way contemporary art museum founded by a single collector. He ended up being pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work. There are a lot of ultra successful artists represented in the clean, air conditioned space on 30th Street. JM entertained himself by trying to identify the artists without consulting the gallery guide, while I mostly puzzled over why these selections are considered to be the best of what the last 47 years have had to offer. It reminded me that there was once a time when my bullshit meter was constantly abuzz when viewing modern art. Anyway we both liked the paintings by Zachary Wollard, and we were quite pleased to discover that the Center charges no admission fees.

We rounded out the day with trips to D.U.M.B.O and Brooklyn Heights. JM thought I'd appreciate these areas, but they really weren't at all what I'm looking for in NYC. The Heights is a typical brownstone community of ample means, and D.U.M.B.O is a sadly gentrified place that was obviously once quite interesting from an aesthetic standpoint. Any particular character that once distinguished these riverside communities has succumbed to "urban renewal". While this transition is probably good for NYC from an economic standpoint, it is nonetheless lamentable.

Swoon Talks About Her Work: Part 2

Swoon Talks About Her Work