Occasionally, we are forced to venture beyond Brooklyn to see art. The most impressive exhibitions we saw in New York City’s other boroughs this year included the inaugural extravaganza at the new Whitney Museum, a tripartite retrospective of an activist group’s visual output, marionettes, vintage Mexican pulp novel covers, and much more.
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#museum of modern art #New Museum #Pablo Picasso #Metropolitan Museum of Art #Drawing Center #Bronx Museum #matthew marks gallery #luhring augustine #martin wong #jacob lawrence #studio museum in harlem #el museo del barrio #MoMA ps1 #artists space #Jeffrey Gibson
(via Expanded Schedule Increases Attendance at MoMA but Not Met)
A seven-day schedule implemented last year at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art brought a 7% increase in attendance at the former but no change at the latter, Crain’s New York reported.
It’s hard to get excited for another Pablo Picasso exhibition. He is, after all, the Steven Spielberg of European modernism — flashy, prolific, proficient at a vast range of genres, and overrepresented in the mainstream cultural canon. But Picasso Sculpture, the Museum of Modern Art‘s (MoMA) first exhibition since the late 1960s devoted to the master painter and collageist’s three-dimensional works, is an opportunity to discover a relatively obscure part of his practice. Save a handful of exceptions, Picasso kept his sculptures to himself until the penultimate decade of his life, and even now only certain types of works are widely circulated: the Cubist still lifes, the plaster busts of women, the bronze and wood assemblages derived from his encounters with African art. These works figure prominently in Picasso Sculpture, but so do his incredibly fine and playful ceramic vases of the late 1940s and early ’50s, the somber bronzes he made living through World War II in Paris, and the funny, whimsical plaster and wood sculptures of the mid ’30s. While so much of Picasso’s two-dimensional work has been rendered static by its status as seminal art history, many of the sculptures in this show are refreshingly surprising and inventive.
Museumgoers in New York must now accustom themselves, when visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to walk past a fountain of incongruous design. Placed on them in golden, raised letters of a nondescript font are the words David A. Koch Plaza. A sensation will invariably arise not unlike discovering that someone has just spit on your meal.
(via Gods and Monsters: Cubism at the Met)
“To a new world of gods and monsters” is the promethean pledge from one mad scientist to another in James Whale’s classic Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but it’s easy to imagine the same toast echoing from a Montmartre studio in 1909 as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque raise a glass to the fractured new reality they’d uncovered.
Uneven but Steeply Discounted Books and Posters at Luhring Augustine Bushwick
A selection of books and posters are on sale at Luhring Augustine Bushwick (all photographs by the…
In disappointing news for those excited for a futuristic new Museum of Modern Art(MoMA) with retractable glass walls and moving floors, the museum has just unveiled scaled-back plans for its upcoming renovation.
For 10 years, artist Abbie Zabar had a ritual: go the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sketch the new floral arrangements adorning the entrance hall. Selections from her Flowers in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art series are on view at Wave Hill in the Bronx, capturing in still life the most ephemeral art of the Manhattan museum.
“Josh Smith: Sculpture” is how the sign reads. Yet behind it is a conservatively installed exhibition of drawings, conventionally framed and tastefully spaced on Luhring Augustine’s neutral white walls. So what’s the gag? According to a member of the gallery staff, the “sculpture” idea was the artist’s way of addressing the project’s material history. Apparently, wood panels prepared with a traditional gesso recipe were botched, resulting in cracked, peeling surfaces. Having rejected the option of redoing them correctly (a predictable choice for those familiar with Smith’s work), he decided instead to make drawings on them. Thus, a technical screwup led to an unremarkable decision to make the best of an accident, which inspired this art world veteran to inject a dose of graduate student overreach into the show’s concept.
Go with the Slow: Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors”
Ragnar Kjartansson, “The Visitors” (2012)
Behind a curtain in the darkened gallery space at Luhring Augustine nine screens, each equipped with its own speaker have been arranged into two somewhat discreet areas.
