A Night at the Museums

Okay, the special sleepover program at the American Museum of Natural History is sold out. So that option is closed at least until mid-August for those who think it would be fun to sleep on a floor, surrounded by vast amounts of taxidermied animals. But there are plenty of other NYC museums with late access and evening events, even if they can't boast a T-Rex.

To be fair, the American Museum of Natural History does have some good evening programs that don't involve sleepovers. The Rose Center is open until 8:45pm the First Friday of every month. There's a Spanish Tapas bar where you can enjoy sangria, wines and soft drinks while listening to jazz. Starts at 5:30. Here's the menu. There are also great lecture and movie programs. One coming soon: "The Upside of Down," Thursday at 7, at the Kaufmann Theater. It's $15, $12 for members. Here's the writeup; buy tickets here: "Author and conservationist Thomas Homer-Dixon suggests that the pressures we are putting on our planet are likely leading to an imminent breakdown in the economic, political, and ecological systems that sustain us. By examining the intertwined causes of these systemic crises—from growing energy shortages to yawning economic inequalities—his latest book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, shows what we can learn from them and how we can mitigate them."

The American Folk Art Museum (45 W. 53rd Street): Open Fridays until 7:30. Normally, entrance is $9, but there are Free Music Fridays, says the site: "Each Friday, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, the museum trustees and staff invite the public to explore our galleries free of charge, have a drink in the cafe, and enjoy live music in the stunning atrium."

Asia Society and Museum (725 Park Ave., at 70th St.; 212 288-6400): Open from 6:00-9:00 on Fridays (except July 4-Labor Day). Lots of cultural programs and talks like the one this week, on Jan. 24 (during the day, though, from 12-2), a "CEO Forum featuring Scott Bayman, President and CEO, GE India." (It's pricey, at $75.) Bayman "will speak on "Thirteen Years on the Inside: A Perspective on India"."
UPDATE: Turns out there are "Second Fridays" and "Third Fridays." Second Fridays are about corporate diversity networking at the Asia Society's Leo Bar. It's from 6-9 this Feb. 9 and invites people to "join fellow Asian and Asian American professionals for some art and ambiance...Exhibition tours at 7:15 and 7:45; $5 martinis from 6-7. Cash bar." On Third Fridays, its LGBT Night. Says the site: "February's event [for the lesbian, gay, and transgender community] is cohosted by the leading global networking and professional services organization specifically for gay and lesbian financial services professionals," the Financial Services Industry Exchange.
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (2 East 91st Street; 212 849-8400) Open Fridays until 9:00; $12.
Dahesh Museum (580 Madison Ave. (between 56th and 57th Sts.; 212 759-0606)
Open until 9:00 on the first Thursday of every month; free from 6-9 on First Thursdays. Here’s an upcoming event (March 1, 6:30 pm) that sounds fun:
"Daily Life & Feasting in Ancient Egypt: Talk & Tasting
Join Francine Segan, food historian and cookbook author, for a foray into the delicious foods and dining customs of ancient Egypt, which includes a slide presentation and tasting of modern-day Egyptian delicacies. Discover fascinating tidbits about Cleopatra’s dinner parties; why Egyptians kneaded dough with their feet; and the must-serve foods for pyramid builders. Learn the recipes from the fertile Nile Valley...and also the centuries old health secrets and remedies of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, including their long list of aphrodisiacs and the food stuffs that accompanied them in their tombs."
The Guggenheim Museum (Fifth Ave. at 89th St.): On First Fridays, "enjoy a drink with friends, explore the galleries, and listen to some of the best DJs in town, all in the spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. From 9 PM to 1 AM, admission is $25. Free for members. " Next up on Feb. 2: "Composor [sic??], producer, and inventor of the mutanttrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument, Ben Neill presents a short solo set of new and unreleased tracks. He is accompanied by an eclectic sonic stew of space rock, house, and downtempo spun by past Guggenheim partner DJ Ben Butler."
International Center for Photography (1133 Ave. of the Americas at 43rd St.; 212 857-0000) Open Fridays until 8:00; admission from 5:00-8:00 on Fridays is a voluntary contribution. Otherwise, it's $12.
Jewish Museum (Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.;212 423-3200): Just saw--in the ads on my blog!--that the museum is free on Saturdays (and closes at 5:45 on Sats.) Normally the entrance fee is $12. It's open until 8:00 on Thursdays.
Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth Aves.; 212 708-9400): Open Fridays until 8:00; right now the sculpture garden is open until 9:00 for the video installation by Doug Aitken (plays from 5:00-10:00), and entrance is free on 54th Street. For the museum's film schedule, look here.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.; 212 535-7710): Open Friday and Saturday nights until 9:00; enjoy drinks and appetizers on the Great Hall Balcony (sample menu here) while listening to live classical music. The MET also has subscription lectures and events, some of which are at night. You can learn more here.
Museum of Art and Design (40 West 53rd Street; 212 956-3535) Open Thursdays until 8:00; pay what you wish from 6-8. Pop in and then head over the MOMA's 54th Street entrance to the sculpture garden at 8:00 and check out the Aitken installation--or just admire it from in front the the Museum of Art and Design, since it's right across from MOMA and the Aitken video is projected on both the front and back of the MOMA building.
Rubin Museum of Tibetan Art (150 W. 17th Street; 212 620-5000): Open Fridays until 10:00; gallery admission free from 7:00-10:00. Visit here to find out more about a Friday night jazz program; there's also one on Jan. 24--"Harlem in the Himalayas Special: Wycliffe Gordon performs a new score to accompany D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. Introduced by New Yorker humorist Patricia Marx; 7:00 - 11:00." For a calendar of events, which include films, go to this link. UPDATE: A friend notes that the snack bar has great healthy stuff, like edamame--and that you can access their very clean bathrooms without having to pay the entrance fee.

Tiffany's Home at the MET

Incredible. That is the only way to describe the lush, luxurious, intricately detailed home that artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany created in Laurelton Hall, his 84-room, 60-acre-gardened Oyster Bay, Long Island, home. That home is now the basis of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's not just those incredible stained glass windows and panels and the beautiful, flowing glass vases. We've all seen those countless times, in countless museums. It's the massive, deeply and intricately carved teak Indian doors on display from his home on 72nd Street in New York City, the Islamic-style alcoves in a picture of the fountain room, the long iron chains with elephants that he hung in his atmospheric studio, the Indonesian wood block panels he assembled as their own sort of canvases on the wall. It's the gleaming, fantastical peacock headdress a young girl once wore for a party he had, when she walked in as Juno leading a real peacock, with friends behind her dressed in grecian robes and bearing stuffed peacocks on platters. The MET website on the exhibit describes his country home perfectly in saying that Tiffany created "a total aesthetic environment."

Unfortunately, the home in Oyster Bay burned down a long time ago. Many bits and pieces of it were sold before the fire, and some stained glass windows in the show were found mud-covered and just propped against a tree on the property after the fire. The exhibit includes items from, and pictures of, the Tiffany home on Madison Ave. and 72nd street. (Alas, also gone now.) Items that had been sold at auctions, such as a beautifully beaded Native American buckskin dress that Tiffany used to display above intricately woven Indian baskets, as well as amazing Japanese, Chinese, and Islamic artifacts, have been assembled into an beautiful, awe-inspiring (the money to collect this stuff!) exhibit. New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith has a great opening line in her review of the show: "“Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate” is the rare exhibition that comes with its own porch." (Yes, a gorgeous restored "daffodil" porch from the house has been transported to the museum.)

The exhibit displays a lot of works lent by The Morse Museum in Winter Park, Fla., which has an incredible collection of Tiffany items. The founder of The Morse was Jeannette Genius (great name, eh?), who came from a wealthy family in Florida that collected Tiffany glass. Around 1960, Jeannette, with her husband Hugh McKean, paid $10,000 for what they could salvage of the burnt-down Laurelton estate. Tiffany was considered passe at the time--his glass panels and lamps were pretty, but not intense, not abstract, not modern. McKean, a painter--as was his eventual wife--actually studied at Laurelton around 1930 in Tiffany's artist-in-residence program. You can read about the Morse's Laurelton Hall collection here and see some of the incredible things they have, such as the recreation of the 800-square-foot chapel Tiffany built for the 1893 World Columbian Expedition in Chicago.

There's quite a tale behind that chapel, and you can find the full story here. In a nutshell, Carol Whipple Wallace bought it and donated it to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine here in NYC. But it was relegated to a cramped space in the basement and it deteriorated. So Tiffany offered to take it back at his own expense and installed and refurbished it at Laurelton. But after he died, it fell into disrepair, parts of it were sold off by the Tiffany Foundation, and then Laurelton burned down in 1957. The McKeans assembled many bits and pieces of it that had been sold at auction and now it's on display again in sunny Fla. Here's another Tiffany room at the Morse Museum.















"Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist's Country Estate" (at the MET 'til May 20) is the perfect exhibit to see before grabbing a glass of wine and a bite on the MET balcony on a Friday or Saturday night. I wish, though, that the MET balcony operation took names for a waiting list, because you feel creepy lurking around the tables, trying to unobtrusively check out how close people are to leaving and then staking your claim by waiting in the four feet or so between the tables and the gallery walls. But when I was there this past Saturday the service was great, the appetizers and wine were fine, and the music was wonderful. It's a nice way to start a night.

My one complaint with the Tiffany exhibit, since I'm addicted to museum stores (so shoot me, I sometimes like commerce with my culture): The merchandise sold at the end of the exhibit is not that great. There is a pretty purple velvet scarf, but the supposed "fine jewelry" looks cheesy and I feel like the MET lost a real opportunity there. The only thing I saw that I'd want in my home (okay, there were some purple and deep, almost-teal blue leather embossed jewelry boxes that were very pretty, but the smaller round one was $55 and I couldn't stomach the price) was a $175 decorated gold cross, and since I'm not particularly religious, it would be a little odd for me to have that hanging on my wall. Ah well. The aesthetic experience petered out at the gift shop, but the exhibit itself is gorgeous.

Morphing MOMA

The MOMA is getting ever more creative with its use of space. In an exhibit that starts this Jan. 16 and ends on Feb. 12 the MOMA paired up with New York public arts group Creative Time and commisioned artist Doug Aitken (here's his deal, courtesy of artfacts.net) "to create the artist's first large-scale public artwork in the United States," according to an article on MOMA's web site. "The project is also the first to bring art to MOMA's exterior walls.

Continuous sequences of film scenes will be projected onto eight facades, including those on West Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth streets and those overlooking The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden (photo). Inspired by the densely built environment of New York's midtown, the artist will create a cinematic art experience that directly integrates with the architectural fabric of the city while simultaneously enhancing and challenging viewers' perceptions of public space. The project, filmed in New York City, will be shown daily from 5:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m., and is intended to be visible from many public vantage points adjacent to the Museum."

Aitken has exhibited in the past with video artist Pipilotti Rist, who is mentioned in the previous post (and, by the way, I'm not positive the photo in that earlier post is actually her, but it's just so perfect that I'm choosing to believe it is right now). Here's a picture of Aitken with another artist mentioned in the previous post, Jeff Koons (Aitken's on the right). Aitken's Sleepwalker features Tilda Swinton, Donald Sutherland, Chan Marshall (Cat Power), Seu Jorge, and Ryan Donowho. Read MOMA's full description of the upcoming exhibit on their site here), where you can also see the online Sleepwalkers exhbition.

Very cool. (And such a shame, she wrote selfishly, that my friend Glenn sold his apartment overlooking the MOMA.) And on top of using its existing vertical acreage in innovative ways, the MOMA is lining up some net new space. Having New York mega real estate power broker Jerry I. Speyer as a museum trustee ready to help you negotiate real estate deals must be a beautiful thing. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley are listed among the supporters of the project, so presumably that means providing money as well as influence.

Here's an AP item on MOMA that ran in the Washington Post arts pages this past Thursday:

NEW YORK, Jan. 3 -- Little more than two years after a major expansion, the Museum of Modern Art is set to grow again.

MoMA has negotiated a land deal that will yield 50,000 square feet of additional space to display paintings and sculptures, said the museum's director, Glenn Lowry.

The museum will sell a piece of vacant land for $125 million to Houston-based development company Hines, adding an estimated $65 million to its $650 million endowment after construction costs, Lowry said.

"This is a Christmas present," Lowry said. "It's a tremendous boon to enhancing what is already an extraordinary collection."

Hines spokesman George Lancaster confirmed the deal Wednesday and said Hines was "thrilled to be working with MoMA" but declined to comment on the sale price.

The property is one of several the midtown Manhattan museum acquired in recent years as it planned its expansion. In 2004, an addition made of glass and steel was completed.

In the latest plan, Hines will construct a mixed-use building with exhibition space connected to MoMA's main building on several floors, Lowry said. The building, part of a larger project, will include approximately 10,000 square feet of museum storage space.

The lot has about 200,000 square feet of building space, the director said.

Hines has developed other buildings in New York, including the 34-story office tower known as the Lipstick Building.

There is no architect or timetable yet, but the project is expected to take at least five years.

The museum closed during the last expansion and showcased its art in a temporary space in Queens, but it will stay open this time, Lowry said.

A museum trustee and real estate developer who helped negotiate the sale, Jerry Speyer, said the board agreed readily to the deal.

"Everyone felt great about the decision," he said. "There were no issues in anyone's mind."

Quick Culture Hit...

...or, as I described it to a colleague as I was leaving my office at lunch, "I've decided that I have to start going out and taking a half hour at lunchtime to get some nuggets of culture." Which is a strange way to phrase a desire to pack a little more culture into my everyday life. Hard as I try to think of nuggets of culture as burnished gold pebbles, my mind's eye inevitably settles on....Chicken McNuggets. Chicken McNuggets that somehow have the Mona Lisa's image imprinted on them, or Munch's "The Scream," or Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Or, ugh, Monet's "Water Lilies." It's kind of revolting. And an art project, I guess.

But I did get my...dollop...of culture today. (Much better. Makes me think of whipped cream.) Since my employer is a corporate member of the MOMA I get in free, so I took a half hour to go into the Contemporary Galleries. Note to people whose companies are corporate members--the MOMA is curbing corporate member benefits. Instead of being allowed to bring in four people, now you can bring in two (I usually don't go to musums in packs of five, anyway) and there's some other restriction with the passes to films, which I wasn't even aware we got a discount on. If anyone's interested in the changed terms, leave a post and I'll send the info. Or if you go get a ticket as a corporate member, they'll give you a slip of paper that lays it out.

ANYWAY, to get to the Contemporary Galleries you have to go up the stairs and through some Cy Twombly paintings, and past an enormous, bronze pencil-sculpture-thing. I perhaps need to gain a better appreciation for Cy Twombly. His "Leda and the Swan"? (pictured) And "The Italians"? Are they really great art? They kind of look like...bad art. Like, "I'm trying too hard to be cryptic" art, so I'm going to squiggle here, scratch there, slop a glop of ugly-colored paint here, and then I'm going to write random words on a canvas--yeah, in pencil!--and then...I'm a genius! Now decipher me! Okay, I'm showing a philistine side and it may just've been my mood on the first day back at work since Dec. 23. But it's an honest philistine side, if that counts for anything. (P.S. After writing that I read on wikipedia.org that Twombly "served in the army as a cryptologist, which influenced his work." Who knew?)

So, a discovery. The show in the Contemporary Galleries is "Out of Time/A Contemplation," and while I could do without the three basketballs half covered with water in a fishtank, by Jeff Koons, there were two items in the second room that I thought were very cool and/or interesting.

No. 1 interesting thing: Janine Antoni's "Butterfly Kisses 1996-99." Her medium: Cover Girl mascara on paper. Uh huh. The tag tells the tale: "The artist applied many coats of Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara to her eyelashes and then fluttered them against the paper. She averaged 60 winks per day and completed the drawing after approximately 2,124 winks, and over many months."

It's pretty cool-looking. (And any woman knows that applying mascara can be messy--I wish she'd taken pictures of herself after 40 winks.) It reminded me of Florentine swirly paper sold at Il Papiro, but in black and cream as opposed to greens and blues. The only other way I can think of to describe the effect of her eye-fluttering on paper was that it looks like a pelt, like fur--as if a polar bear rolled around in slush or had been covered with a light coating of soot.

You can read some good PBS articles on her. It's worth checking out--she does some very out-there stuff, as in Gnaw (2002), which involved 600 pounds of chocolate gnawed by her, 600 pounds of lard gnawed by her, a display with 130 lipsticks made with pigments and beeswax, and chewed by her...you get the idea. She also directed a 4-minute film inspired by the Shaker tradition of ecstatic dancing. The MOMA also has a learning page on her. And here's "Lick and Lather," self-portraits in soap and chocolate, that, of course, she either licked or lathered with.









The other piece I liked, just for its out-there-ness, was by a Swiss artist born in 1962, Pipiliotti Rist (yes, a nickname--you know, Pippi Longstocking; she was born Elisabeth Charlotte). It's called "Ever is Over All," whatever that means, and was executed in 1997. Her website is here. "Ever is Over All" is a video project and it involves two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. One focuses on lush flowers in a field, and the other focuses on this attractive, ethereal-looking, blissed-out woman, dressed in a flowing baby blue chiffon dress and red shoes, as she strolls down a sidewalk.

All seems normal, except that she is carrying a large metal stalk with a red/yellow/orange flower on top similar to the real flowers you see in the other projection. She's meandering along happily on a sidewalk, and then she cheerfully and gracefully slams the stalk into the window of a parked car, which only seems to increase her bliss. She goes on to do it again and again, never losing her poise. It is bizarre. A red-lipsticked, hatted policewoman walks behind her for a bit, not seeming to think anything is amiss, and smiles at her in passing after she smashes her third or so car window. The tag summed it up well as a "whimsical and anarchistic scene."

So it was two cultural nuggets. And you know what? I really enjoyed them.