Tag: art

Categories
Culture Real Estate

Word on the street: Andy Warhol Museum Downtown

warhol new york

What we could be seeing downtown later this decade!

It has been 50 years since Andy Warhol made his first ever artistic imprint of the city with his iconic and whimsical style in the Upper East Side, where the Bodley Gallery once stood firmly. This year, Warhol worshipers will be pleased to hear that the archetypal artwork of their favorite artist will be venturing back to the Big Apple once again.

Announced at The Andy Warhol Museum‘s 20th Anniversary on May 17, confirmation of the museum opening a branch in New York City was made by Eric Shinner, Director of the museum, during a black-tie dinner.

 The new museum will be part of the Essex Crossing project that includes 15,000-square-foot of open space and a new and expanded Essex Street Market. The prospective museum will allow New Yorkers who lack the desire to road-trip all the way to Pennsylvania to see a selection of Warhol’s famous works in our very own Lower East Side. Delancey Street Associates, an alliance of three developers, have won the approval of build this development in September. The city has bulldozed a set of run-down apartment buildings in the Seward Park neighborhood. Ever since, the area has been used as parking lots with chain link fences.

Unfortunately, the museum won’t be gracing our doorstep until 2017. “There is still much work to be done to finalize the project and plans and designs,” said Shinner during an interview with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, a week prior to the museum’s anniversary.

So until then, maybe you could find the motivation to hop over the border and check out the fabulous Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. You could even make a day out of it and stop by to check the Big Mac museum whilst you’re at it. Yes, that is a thing, and no, we’ve never been.

– Rachael Sprague

Categories
Entertainment Events

New at the Met: The Roof Garden Commission: Dan Graham with Günther Vogt

Dan Graham
One of Graham’s pavilions in Berlin, Germany.

American artist Dan Graham was selected by The Metropolitan Museum of Art as the featured artist for its rooftop exhibit, coming this April. Dan Graham will work in collaboration with Swiss landscape architect Gunther Vogt for the exhibit, which will feature a unique steel and glass pavilion installed atop of the museum’s Iris B. and Gerald Canto Roof Garden. The Roof Garden Commission: Dan Graham with Günther Vogt will be on view from April 29 through November 2, 2014.

The focus of the exhibit is one of Graham’s masterfully designed pavilions, which are a unique blend of glass and steel, constructed of hedge rows and curves of two-way mirrored glass. The pavilion will be both transparent and reflective, offerring a changing and visually complex environment for visitors.

“We are thrilled to present this extraordinary new commission,” stated Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Met. “For decades, Dan Graham has created work that challenges viewers to think in new and thought-provoking ways about the streets and cities they traverse every day. In his reimagining of the Met’s roof, visitors will discover a picturesque landscape that is at once unexpected and familiar.”

Graham rose as a prominent figure as head of John Daniel’s Gallery in New York back in the 1960’s, and curating Solomon “Sol” LeWitt’s first one man show back in 1965. His work designing pavilions has garnered him high praise since the 1980’s.

In 1966, Graham released his groundbreaking landmark photo-essay Homes for America, which dealt with issues of urbanity, public space, and the viewer’s own experience of it, through a multidisciplinary practice that includes writing, photography, video, performance, and the creation of sculptural environments of mirrored glass and metal.

Graham’s site-specific pavilions of the years that followed built on the artist’s interest in engaging the public with the space and structures that surround them. With its spectacular views of the city skyline and Central Park, the Museum’s Roof Garden presents a unique environment for Graham to further engage with notions of the city, its landscape and architecture, and the role of the public within its spaces.

Sandwiches, snacks, desserts, and beverage service—including espresso, cappuccino, iced tea, soft drinks, wine, and beer—will be available at the Roof Garden Café daily from 10:00 a.m. until closing, as weather permits. A martini bar will also be open on the Roof Garden on Friday and Saturday evenings (5:30–8:00 p.m.).

For further information, visit http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/dan-graham

-Alejandro Ramos

Categories
Entertainment Events

The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Jean Baptiste

The newest exhibit coming to the Metropolitan Museum of Art within the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall is The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.

It explores the life and work of an artist who helped define the period of France’s luminour Second Empire from 1852 to 1870. The exhibition begins on March 1 and will be on display until May 26.

This will be the first full scale exhibition in 38 years of the celebrated artist’s work and will feature 160 pieces that include paintings, sculptures and drawings. The works are being loaned to the museum from other respected museums such as the Musee d’ Orsay, Musee des Beaux-Arts, the Louvre, Valenciennes (birthplace of Carpeaux) and other prestigious institutions. For some of these loans it will be their first time returning to the United States in decades and for some their very first.

MET
Great Hall of Metropolitan Museum of Art

Carpeaux is best known today for his masterpiece, “Ugolino and His Sons” which is part of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum.  But he was a multifaceted and prolific artist. A sculptor of emotion, both grand and intimate, he was drawn to extremes from Michelangelo to Watteau while retaining respectful admiration for his peers in French sculpture.

The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux will certainly evoke a spectrum of emotions from the public. Dramatic, highly independent paintings, barely known during his lifetime, will also be on display. The exhibition will probe overlooked works that reveal the darkness and despair of Carpeaux’s life. (The artist was plagued by serious physical maladies and violent mood swings and was only 48 when he died.)

Despite all this, he was extraordinarily productive, producing a vast body of work of the highest quality.

For information you can visit the MET website  http://www.metmuseum.org/en/exhibitions/listings/2014/carpeaux

—Alejandro Ramos

Categories
Culture Entertainment

Gloria Vanderbilt Exhibit: The Left Hand Is The Dreamer

Gloria Vanderbilt has been many things in her lifetime: a mother (to Anderson Cooper), a wife, a lover (rumored affairs with Roald Dahl, Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, and Marlon Brando), a designer, an actress, a writer, a muse, an heiress, and more. Most recently, just after celebrating her 90th birthday, the icon has taken upon the role of an artist.

Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, Anderson Cooper, at the opening of her exhibit
Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, Anderson Cooper, at the opening of her exhibit

A collection of her drawings, paintings, and collages are now on display in the 1stdibs Gallery at New York Design Center. More than 50 pieces, which she created in a span of eight months, are on view to the public and simultaneously on sale through 1stdibs. The exhibit is called “The Left Hand Is The Dreamer.” In an interview with W, she commented on this choice:

“In mythology and palmistry, the left hand is called the dreamer because the ring finger on the left hand leads directly to the heart. I find it a very poetic idea. And that’s why I only wear nail polish on my left ring finger.”

Ms. Vanderbilt studied art at the Art Students’ League in New York and with Robert Beverly Hale, a former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator. Her first solo exhibit took place in 1952, when she showed a collection of paintings. She has lent her paper works to the Hammer Gallery in New York and the Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester. The pieces on display right now are mostly playful, imaginative drawings done in plenty of color. The title work, “The Left Hand Is The Dreamer,” is reminiscent of a child-like Chagall.

“The Left Hand Is The Dreamer” 2013, pastel and collage on board

The exhibit is a fascinating look inside the mind of the matriarch of one of America’s oldest and richest families.

“The Left Hand Is The Dreamer” is at the 1stdibs Gallery on the 10th floor of the New York Design Center, from February 27th until March 28th. The works are available for purchase at 1stdibs.com.

–Charlotte Bryant

Categories
Culture Entertainment

Gauguin: Metamorphoses at the MoMA

Paul Gauguin in 1891

The Museum of Modern Art will host the exhibit, Gauguin: Metamorphoses. This is the first exhibit to showcase French artist Paul Gauguin’s (1848-1903) entire repertoire, rather than the modernist paintings the pioneering artist is more commonly known for. One hundred and sixty works (130 paper pieces and 30 related paintings and sculptures) will be on display in the MoMA International Council’s Special Exhibition Gallery. Emphasis is placed on his prints and transfer drawings from the end of his career. These pieces date from 1889 until his death in 1903 when he lived in the South Pacific, an experience he interprets in many of these works.

Gauguin: Metamorphoses features the lesser-known side of the artist who is best known for his colorful paintings that inspired and influenced Picasso and Matisse. These pieces are darker in content and color, and many have a mysterious, even evil feel to them.

Tahitian Woman with Evil Spirit, c. 1900. Oil transfer drawing. Courtesy of the MoMA
Tahitian Woman with Evil Spirit, c. 1900. Oil transfer drawing. Courtesy of the MoMA

The exhibit will run for three months, starting March 8 and closing June 8, 2014. 

For more information, visit moma.org

—Charlotte Bryant