Creative Mischief at the National Academy Museum

Tango steps sometimes lead in unexpected directions. Yesterday I spent a pleasant hour at the National Academy Museum and School on 5th Avenue and 89 Street, attending the Creative Mischief exhibition (see their Twitter feed and catalog in PDF). This is the fourth annual exhibition of the works contributed by over 170 students and faculty of the National Academy School. Since 2012, this exhibition has grown from a one-day, one-room show to an event that for nine days occupies the entire museum. And for a good reason: there is plenty of talent and originality on display and enough variety of media and genres to tease the eye and the mind. Kudos to the National Academy for cultivating a vibrant artistic community, to the selection committee for choosing a very entertaining set of bold and intriguing pieces, and to the authors for their fresh-off-the-easel works. Many thanks to Boris Svechinsky, a fellow tango student and one of the Creative Mischief's contributing authors, and Walter Perez, our tango teacher, for the invitation to this unexpectedly enjoyable and stimulating exhibition.

See photos of selected works under the cut.

NYC Scene: Campo del Cielo Meteorite

Fragment of Campo del Cielo meteorite
Astro Gallery of Gems, 5th Ave. at 38 St.

If you find a chunk of ore

Take it to a New York store.

Here the price is always right -

They will sell your meteorite.

Killer Heels

At the “Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoes” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Arts (until March 1), one item is accompanied by a quote from an 18-century Dutch comparative anatomist Peter Camper (1722-1789):

"The wealthy women walk... by reason of the height of their heels, on the fore-ends of their feet, and consequently, very badly; they walk... like the majority of quadrupeds - on their toes only."

(Dissertation on the Best Form of the Shoe, 1781)

Yeah baby! Finally someone said the truth!

Fukushima Shoes

Another exhibit in my collection of art inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster is a work titled “Healing Fukushima (Nanohana Heels)", currently displayed as a part of “Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (until March 1, see the video intro on the museum page and my report).

These shoes were co-created in 2012 by an artist and designer working under the pseudonym Sputniko! (I thought that this was a plucky Yoko-Ono-like grandma, but it turned out to be a 30-year-old assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, Hiromi Ozaki) and a shoe designer Masaya Kushino, a person with the most Baroque imagination when it comes to creating shoes.

Masaya Kushino. Stairway to Heaven (2013).
Heaven? Nah. If I were Hermes, this would be
my footwear of choice for trips to Hades.

The Fukushima shoes are decorated with the flowers of nanohana, a kind of rapeseed, a plant that absorbs from the soil caesium-137 and strontium-90 and stores them in its stalks, but not its seeds. The idea is that the wearer of the shoes walks on the ground and the seeds, which are stored in a drum on each shoe, are deposited through the heel into the soil at every step. The plants grow and absorb the radioactive elements, and the contamination is cleared. A short movie displayed alongside the shoes demonstrates how the shoe is supposed to work.

Nanohana Heels in action (movie screenshot)

What to do about the fact that both caesium and strontium have 30-year half-life is still unclear, but then who said that art needs to be practical. In terms of audacity, originality, impracticality, and quixotry, this opus has no serious rivals at this exhibition. 

Children's Books at the Grolier Club

The Grolier Club, the oldest active bibliophilic club in the US, was founded in 1884 by a small group of book lovers headed by Robert Hoe III, a manufacturer of printing press machinery and an avid book collector, and was named after Jean Grolier, a statesman, diplomat, and book lover in 16th-century France.

The club regularly mounts exhibitions on literary and bookmaking topics. The current offerings are One Hundred Books Famous in Children’s Literature (until February 7) displayed in the ground floor hall and Quotations of Chairman Mao (until January 10) in the second floor rare book room (free admission).

Grolier Club entrance.

Since 1917 the club occupies a small building on East 60^th Street between Madison and Park Avenues, designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, who was also the author of the iconic California Tower in Balboa Park in San Diego. Currently a large-scale construction is going on next door, where a 51-story building is being constructed, using air rights acquired from the Groiler Club and a neighboring church. The facade of No. 47 is also obscured by scaffolding.

One Hundred Books Famous in Children's Literature.
Groiler Club, ground floor hall

The place is charming and the exhibitions are attractive and well attended. The children’s books exhibit is the sixth in the series of “the Grolier Hundreds”, after previous exhibitions focused on English literature (1903), American literature (1946), science (1958), medicine (1994), and fine printed books (1999). The selection of the “most famous 100” can be debated, but the most significant works are represented by delectable old editions going as far back as 17th century. Many of these books come from the Morgan Library and large university libraries. The oldest book on display appears to be Johann Amos Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), an illustrated encyclopedia published in London in 1659, an influential early book in children’s education. Curiously, a number of older books on display are really tiny, as if made for the children’s small hands rather than for their parents’ and grandparents’ presbyopic eyes.

A first edition of Charles Perrault's Histoires ou Contes du tempts passe (left) published in 1697 was illustrated with engravings by Antoine Clouzier (from the Princeton University collection). The French edition is open on the first page of Puss in Boots and the English translation lists The Little Red Riding Hood as the very first tale in the table of contents. 

Another famous forest-roaming Hood - Robin Hood - is represented by the 1883 collection of stories, retold for children and illustrated by Howard Pyle (UCLA collection).

The Noguchi Museum

Illusion of the Fifth Stone (1970)

The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City was opened in 1985 to display the works of Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) in a former industrial building across from the sculptor's studio. The garden wall is currently under renovation. Below is a series of 26 photos from a visit to the museum in the summer of 2013.

Kykuit: A Patchwork Fairytale

Kykuit, view from south-east.

Kykuit (KY-kit or KY-cut, from the Dutch for “lookout”), the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills near Tarrytown, NY, is like a fairytale: to enjoy it, you must accept its logic and suspend your disbelief. If you ask questions, especially those that start with a “why?” (e.g., “Why did Cinderella’s father marry a shrew and let her mistreat his daughter?”), the tale instantly loses its charm. So is Kykuit – delightful and enchanting on its own terms, when the rules of the outside world are placed on hold and the back story is forgotten.

Half Hour at the Morgan Library

The Morgan Library, south wall

It is a quintessential American story (by George!):

There lived a man who liked buying stuff. He filled two houses with stuff, but when stuff started to overflow his third house, he built a large shed to store his stuff. When the man died, his children held a garage sale and donated the rest of the stuff to charity.

The man in question is John Pierpont Morgan (1837 – 1913) (the JP Morgan, JPM) and his stuff – an eclectic collection of art, books, and manuscripts – at the time of his death was worth over $50M and accounted for up to three quarters of his estate. The big shed is what is now known as the Morgan Library and Museum on Madison Avenue and 36^th Street.

After Pierpont’s death, his son Jack, JPM, Jr., sold part of the estate to pay taxes, gave a large part (6 to 8 thousand pieces!) to the Metropolitan Museum, where his father had been a trustee since 1888 and the president since 1904, and in 1924 unloaded the rest into a trust overseeing a public library and museum.

A visit to the Morgan Library (visit virtually via the Google Art project), which offers free admission every Friday between 7 and 9 pm, was planned as yesterday’s after-dinner entertainment; but various circumstances intervened, and I ended up having only about 40 minutes to spend there. The Library is certainly worth a cursory look and perhaps more.