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Museumgeeks: December 2008

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Okay, this is what I love:

What I love is the fact that I start researching the Argentinian artist mentioned in the post I put up earlier today (and she is pictured below), Liliana Porter, only to find that she is the creator of one of my favorite whimsical pieces of NYC subway mosaic art, "Alice: The Way Out," made in 1994. I have passed this mural for years at 50th Street; it always makes me smile. Who knew?

Here is a bit of information about the mural, courtesy of the New York Times:
Q. On the walls of the 50th Street subway station of the 1/9 line, are tile pictures of Alice in Wonderland. How do these pictures relate to the neighborhood?

A. The mosaic art you're referring to is ''Alice: the Way Out,'' a 1994 work by Liliana Porter, an Argentine-born artist who lives and works in New York. There is no explicit connection between 50th Street and Lewis Carroll, who lived most of his life in Oxford, England. Rather, said Sandra Bloodworth, director of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Arts for Transit program, there is a genial conceptual link, a playful reference to the theater district above.

''Liliana is evoking the idea of the theatrical, and she's doing it with a sort of connection with the idea of being underground,'' Ms. Bloodworth said. ''You see Alice pulling the curtain back in one of the images, and you have the theaters above ground. It's her concept to connect it to the theater by way of 'Alice in Wonderland.' '

Alice in Wonderland images are in a number of her works--a description of one work (without a photo, agh) reads: "When Alice's White Rabbit and a bust of Che Guevara hold a private chat, Porter is questioning not only the nature of space-time but that of memory as a vast archive where anything and everyone can hold a conversation."

A Long Hiatus


This blog is basically on hiatus due to lack of time and perfectionist tendencies that make me spend hours on each post. But a note on Buenos Aires museums: MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinamericano de Buenos Aires) introduced me to some artists I'd never heard of and want to explore more, such as Liliana Porter (born 1941, is a prof at Queens College/CUNY; okay, I'm way behind the times--she's in MOMA, MET, reviewed in the New York Times, etc. but I'd never been aware of her before). She just launched a web project with NY-DIA Foundation. By the way, MALBA has a killer outdoor cafe, next to which a large white inflatable marshmallow-like structure went up while I was having lunch. Still haven't figured out what it is. (Museum shop rating: Eh. Seen a lot of it at MOMA.)

The museum's collection comes from the Constantini family. Peggy Dulany (Rockefeller), who is a connector extraordinaire in the world of wealth (my BusinessWeek colleague Aili McConnon wrote about Dulany in this philanthropy story), is on its international advisory board, as is one of the world's richest men, Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim.

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes had an outstanding exhibit called "Latitudes: Maestros Latinoamericanos en La Collection FEMSA." Artists I saw there and will now follow include Roberto Aizenberg and Emilio Pettoruti; I also saw works by Sarah Grilo (always looking out for female artists), Eduardo MacEntyre and Julio le Parc. It's not so easy to find information about Grilo, or good pictures of her work, but here is a link to the Blanton Museum's list of works by Argentinian artists, and they have one of her paintings, and a bunch by Antonio Segui.

Another museum discovery while checking out Puerto Madero (very nice development going on, but did there have to be a riverside Hooters??!?) was the extremely good-looking Coleccion de Arte Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat (at Olga Cossettini 141). There were more security guards there than visitors. If the collection had merged with MALBA rather than setting itself up separately it would have been killer for MALBA. Anyway there were Aizenbergs and Pettorutis, as well as works by Antonio Segui and Juan Batlle Planas that were intriguing. The primer piso was where I thought the best works were. The second mezzanine had works by Brueghels Pieter and Jan, Klimt, Rodin, Turner, but most of them didn't strike my largely uneducated eye as their better works.