NYC5: New York Goes Over the Top (Arts and Holidays)

New York is big. Shocking information, I know. This means there’s a lot of pretty much everything. One of the things that there’s clearly a lot of is museums, particularly art museums. We passed up visiting several dozen that we either wanted to go to or simply walked by on the street. On one of our architecture walking tours, I counted at least five that we went by. Seriously, there are just tons of them all over the place. But, we did get to a few of the big ones amongst all our other wanderings.

Since I already talked about the MOMA in my first post about NYC, let’s start this one with the MOMA PS1 over in Queens. This is a newer branch of the MOMA that is located in an old public school building. While most of the gallery spaces have been redone and feel mostly like other museums, the building itself is a kinda rickety old place with creaky floors and tons of ex-student graffiti. Besides a display by an artist who collects counterfeit shirts and other items being sold around New York (which was kinda hilarious), a few of my favorite finds at the MOMA were:

• Yuji Agematsu’s collection of trash. He walked the streets of New York every single day in 2020, and each day picked up some of the objects he found. It’s kinda gross, but also kinda fascinating. There were 366 of these little daily sculptures that give a tiny bit of a sense of what might have been happening in his neighborhood. (On a side note, I think the sidewalks of New York were far cleaner than I recall them being as a child.)

• Curtis Cuffie’s “impromptu performative sculptures” from the 1990s. Evidently, he mostly lived on the streets and would put up these sculptures in random spots. Some were cared for by people and seen as works of art, others torn down as trash.

• Paulina Peavy…not so much for the painting or the painter, though her work is visually interesting, but mostly for the description. The MOMA staff decided to present something a little “out there” as a total matter of fact note on their “about the artist” card. It began, “Paulina Peavy had a life-changing encounter with a spirit who identified as a genderless UFO voyager named Lacamo while attending a seance in Santa Ana, California in 1932. From that moment forward, Peavy’s artistic expression began to focus on promoting Lacamo’s teachings,” and added later, “It was in New York, guided by Lacamo, where Peavy began to add incremental layers to her paintings, which she saw as progressively preparing the viewer to receive extraterrestrial wisdom.” Finally, it mentioned that “in her studio, Peavy would wear elaborate mixed-media masks of her own design to channel Lacamo’s spirit.” So…why is Lacamo’s existence presented as fact here? I guess that’s just a sign of them being accepting of her beliefs? Anyhow…

• Genesis Jerez’s work. This was part of a series of rooms featuring artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, but since that space is under construction, their works are being displayed at the MOMA PS1. I liked her mixture of the realistic and the imaginary that made you look and try to understand a situation in a new way.

• A whole room dedicated to the campaign for the “Excluded Workers Fund.” There were signs, photos, a video, and more about the work done to get undocumented but essential workers relief during the pandemic.

Further north in Queens we also visited the Socrates Sculpture Park. This is just a bite-size little park with a dozen or so installations. Currently, they had a number of works organized loosely around the concept of “sanctuary.” While several of the sculptures were “interesting,” most of them weren’t that visually exciting. One exception was Moko Fukuyama’s giant wooden fishing lures. I found those quite colorful and amusing. And, on that amusing note, I also liked the “Eternal Flame” which was actually a simple set of barbecue pits that families could reserve for picnics in the park–a radically grounded twist on the idea of a sanctuary.

Another major museum I mentioned visiting in NYC1 was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thanks to having a friend on staff there (Hi Alison!), Jess and I got to sneak back in again for another afternoon. The place is just incredibly overwhelming with floor after floor after floor of gigantic galleries.

We picked and chose a few random things to look at the day we were there, while wandering past much, much more. A few of the highlights:

• An exhibit of specially curated items for the Met’s 150th Anniversary, included this one from 2021, “Art for the People for the Met,” by Xu Bing. It has a series of embedded QR codes. I opened a few and they include quotes about art, museums, the Met, etc. translated into Chinese characters. I particularly liked “People lower their voices when they get close to art” and “Art is cosmopolitan. It belongs to no age. It belongs to no country.” I was less keen on “The museum’s original intention was to provide moral uplift for the masses by instructing them in the finer things.” But, overall, I liked the mix of traditional (caligraphy, historic quotes) and contemporary (QR codes). [Click links for images.]

• An exhibit of British prints from the early 20th Century. I appreciated their clear hard lines and loved the use of simple black and white, but also the more colorful ones as well. Several had clear political commentary too.

• Speaking of political commentary. Did the Guerilla Girls ever expect this to end up in the Met? (Poster produced in 1989.)

• We spent a good amount of time in the new exhibit of Japanese art. I liked the meta of the “Screen with screens,” enjoyed the image of “Li Bo’s visit to Emei Shan” because that’s both a poet I know a bit and a place I’ve visited, and wondered at some of the gorgeous modern ceramic works. Last, but not least was a taxidermied deer covered with odd glass bulbs. It was fun watching other people’s reaction to it, but I think Alison had more fun with that as she described to us one time when they had to wheel it through the museum with a specially designed tool basically stuck in the deer’s butt.

• Of course, it’s always a bit amazing to see the Temple of Dendur — an entire Egyptian temple rebuilt inside the museum — but, I also liked that they had a projection showing what the wall probably looked like when it was painted a couple of millenia ago.

• A bit down the hall, there was a completely different structure–an imagined one created as “An Afrofuturist Period Room.” It celebrates the Seneca Village, a predominately black neighborhood that was taken by eminent domain to make way for Central Park (which the Met borders) in the 1850s. The room featured a number of historic, fantastical, and creative objects from the past, present, and potential future all brought together in one space.

• On the other end, we saw some completely ridiculous decorative art objects: faberge eggs–what’s the point of these?–and a malachite vase large enough to stuff a good-sized person in, among others.

We also went to the Met’s other major branch, the Cloisters, up in Fort Tryon park, a beautiful spot along the Hudson River just north of Washington Heights. The Cloisters is an odd museum. It focuses exclusively on medieval European art, but much of the museum itself is built around various cloisters, courtyards, columns, doorways, etc. imported from various parts of Europe, so as you walk from room to room, the rooms themselves are often as much part of the exhibition as the art objects on the walls are.

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There were about a zillion cool objects there. And, to be clear, we really enjoyed the museum, but I think we were less blown away by it since we’d just been to a dozen places with similar things all over Europe over the past few months. That said, the collection at the Cloisters is top notch–really only the most beautiful or the best examples of various things–it’s just that we’d seen a lot of similar stuff recently.

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There were some great tapestries though. I particularly liked this unicorn kicking the guy hunting it, and the level of detail you can see on these when you get up close makes them even ore impressive.

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Probably the most fun for me were the medieval game pieces. They had some chess pieces, but also a set of medieval playing cards (same 52 card deck we use), of which they display just a few at a time on a rotating basis.

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Just up the street from the Met (main branch) we went to the Guggenheim Museum. Probably the best part of this modern art museum is the crazy central space of the museum itself, though I found standing on slightly sloping floors all the time to be a bit of an odd feeling.

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There we found one exhibit that we thought was a total dud (Etel Adnan), along with a huge exhibition of works by Vasily Kandinsky. Of course it was Kandinsky. If you look back at previous posts, you’ll note that we’ve already come across his stuff in at least half a dozen museums over the past few months. I mean, he’s cool and all, but please! There are other artists, aren’t there?

But, lucky for us, we didn’t check what was being shown there, so in addition to more Kandinsky (which was great, just getting a little old), we were treated to a whole series of rooms dedicated to the work of Gillian Wearing called “Wearing Masks.” She does some very fascinating performance stuff, sculpts, and generally invites a lot of interesting participation from her subjects. She had a series of photos of people holding up the signs they wanted to, not the ones she provided. In another part, it talked about her making sculptures of “real families” from various places. One was a queer couple with their kids. In another, there was a nationwide contest to determine which Danish family she should immortalize. But, perhaps most interesting was her work that both hid her subjects and herself by mixing the two. She had videos of various people speaking her words with her face projected over theirs, and famous portraits with her interpolated in in place of Warhol, Maplethorpe, O’Keefe, or whoever. On the other hand, she had a series of masks she made to disguise herself as others. It doesn’t capture well on film, but it was definitely fun and fascinating to see.

A few blocks further up 5th Avenue, we also made a quick run-through of the Cooper Hewitt Museum, a branch of the Smithsonian (free!) focused on design in particular. One part that we particularly enjoyed was a nifty little exhibit about Susie Zuzek, who designed most of the prints for Lilly Pulitzer’s brand in the 1960s and 70s.

There was also a thorough retrospective on the work of Edward Kauffer, a British printmaker of the early 20th century who did a ton of work promoting the London Underground system and the various destinations it could reach among other things. It got me excited to get to London in January…

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And there was a really fun interactive exhibit where you could design your own wallpaper print.

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Even smaller than the Cooper Hewitt was the American Folk Art Museum (also free!), basically a one room spot nestled in near Lincoln Center. They had one tiny exhibit about…weathervanes? Seriously. It was a series of historical, odd, and imaginative weathervanes. My favorite was this one with a great witch on it, but there were also dragons, squirrels, and all sorts of other things.

Of course, art in New York isn’t limited to museums and galleries. We also saw a ton of graffiti, murals, statues, etc. It was interesting, as the variety of street art was quite wide, from very official, stately statues, to simple tags on the side of buildings. In between were a range of murals and such that were at times clearly community artistic expressions and at others simply commercial. Sadly, I didn’t get nearly as many photos of such things as I would like (particularly graffiti), but just to give you a taste, here’s some of the murals I liked the best.

There was also a whole range of political subjects covered by such public art. I’ve already mentioned some in other posts, like near the Stonewall Inn and such. But, a few others that stuck out included:

• a series of images along the side of the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine dealing with issues of immigration and justice,
• The sculpture at the AIDS Memorial Park, reminiscent of the pink triangle symbol,
• And a mural dedicated to the Central Park Five and other victims of the police that included a “know your rights” list in regards to dealing with police (sadly, behind glass as it is now part of a semi-outdoor dining space).

Political activity wasn’t just confined to art either. On the day of my math test, there was chanting of “shut it down” in the streets 20 stories below me. Sadly, I have no idea what they wanted to shut down, as I couldn’t really hear what they were saying through the window. But, I got a better sense of the purpose when we saw…

• A rat protesting unfair practices at a construction site,
• A protest about the murder of the Haitian president and subsequent actions by the US and UN in Haiti, and
• A series of letters deploring low wages for grad students at Columbia. (I also played games with several Columbia grad students who told me a bit more…)

So, we’ve covered big art museums, a plethora of art museums, art being everywhere, and politics too. So, that leaves one other thing I wanted to discuss that New York does super-big: holidays.

We decided to briefly subject ourself to the madness of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. It’s nuts. There were soooooo many people there, that we were a good forty or fifty feet back from the road. We were able to see the big balloons and most of the floats, but people marching by (bands, etc.) were simply a blur of sound to us, with almost nothing to see (though sometimes we could see the feathers on their hats bobbing down the street, with no visible people attached, which was pretty amusing).

It was kinda fun to be in a crowd to see how people intereacted with the parade. We got to see a sea of cell phones, as well as watch how excited kids got when Ada Twist or Sesame Street or something went by. There was also a teenage girl standing next to us on a stool narrating the whole experience for her parents who she was sure were less culturally informed than she was. Even though they kept saying, “We know who that is” and such, I was glad sometimes, because I was clueless a fair amount. We had our fill about halfway through, but I did notice a theme of creepy green monsters who were coming to eat us.

No. Seriously. Grogu and his ball were the biggest hit of the parade. My favorite was one woman who was carrying a Grogu doll who cheered when he showed up and left the parade as soon as he had passed by. That’s far more serious Star Wars fandom than I hold. Also, on the Star Wars note, there were storm troopers marching in the parade at times. Like, literally people in Star Wars storm tropper costumes, with the imperial march music being played. Why? How is that a Thanksgiving celebration?

Anyhow, that was an amusing cultural experience…

But, probably even bigger than a single parade is the Christmas season in general. There’s sooooo much Christmas decoration around, particularly along Fifth Avenue, but really all over midtown. It’s concentrated in commercial zones, but every apartment building and lots of public spaces turn to full-on Christmas celebrartion around mid-November…

Even the statues get dressed up for Christmas…

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Bryant Park and Union Square (as well as a few other places) are completely taken over by “holiday villages” — basically just outdoor malls, but with fun gifty things and some fun food stands.

There are also a number of places to ice skate that pop up. Rockefeller Center and Bryant Park I knew to expect, but I think I had the most fun watching people at the rink in Central Park…

But, beyond the overly-commercial grossness of some of the Christmas-y stuff, there was a truly dark side to the Christmas season in New York: Santacon. On December 11th, thousands of people dressed in Santa-ish costuming (quality varied greatly) flooded into the city to fill the bars and the streets. There were lines around the block for some particularly popular roof bars, but everywhere there were packs of Santas roaming around in various states of drunkenness. It was a bit amusing, and also pretty gross. However, it did provide us with the probably the funniest moment of our time in New York, when one half-drunk Santa-woman said to another, “Which way do we go? It’s so confusing here! There are too many streets! I don’t know how they fit together.” Which sounds like a reasonable complaint, except that she was in the absolute easiest part of pretty much any city in the world to navigate: numbered streets running east-west and numbered avenues running north-south. I mean, seriously? How hard can that be?

But, believe it or not, there was an even more frightening side to Christmas than Santacon. And that was this monstrosity along Fifth Avenue just south of Central Park…

Seriously. WTF is happening here? There’s a showering polar bear and skating ones, and some penguins whose animatronics were broken. A monkey holding a string of lights up like it’s a trophy (or maybe he’s imprisoned by them?). It’s all pretty incomprehensible. And there was no clear explanation around of why this horror show of a display had been erected. It was baffling.

Anyhow, I’ll leave you with that. I’ll be back with one more post on New York soon…