Viewing NYC Articles by Hillel Broder

Closing at the Cooper Hewitt on August 21st: A Philosophy of "Beauty" in Art and Design

2016-07-31T07:00:05-04:00

Devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design, the immersive and focused Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum on Museum Mile currently features a carefully curated exhibition on “Beauty,” a sweeping philosophical inquiry into the expressions of beauty within the following seven categories: extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, emergent, elemental, and transformative. The exhibit is the fifth installment in the museum's triennial series and is coming to a close on August 21.

As featured previously on Viewing.NYC, the Cooper Hewitt is a museum for people who hate museums: visitors can put their cameras and phones aside by scanning exhibit codes with a recording “pen” and code for home downloads; visitors are prompted to engage and even interact with art exhibits and design paradigms, such as the “immersion room.” The sculpture garden, free from 8 am and on, is an artistic oasis perfect for picnics and children.

Still, beyond the museum’s inviting and accessible media, visitors will be overwhelmed by the eclectic curation of “Beauty.” Pat McGrath’s photography and architectural design highlight and then blur the boundaries between extravagant and decadent, and then later between intricate and transcendent. Sou Foujimoto’s “Architecture is Everywhere” is comparably enchanting and disorienting in its discovery of building structures in everyday objects—but on a miniature scale.

On the third floor, the Haas Brothers’ recent “Afreaks Series” highlights 25 intricately beaded animal-like objects, each built out of layered beadwork completed by women from the Khayelitsha settlement outside of Cape Town. Here, too, the viewer is pushed to her limits regarding normative definitions of beauty in thinking about the place of the freak or excluded body, both politically and artistically.

And don’t miss the fascinating emergent art objects and forms, including Max Lamb’s pewter and copper tables and chairs cast in sand and Daniel Brown’s 3-D flower animations based on mathematical formula and computer code.

Cooper Hewitt is more than a museum—it’s a museum experience that educates about art’s principles and design even as it entertains. You’ll be captivated by nearly every art and design object, and you’ll feel comforted, too, to know that the entire museum can be viewed in about two hours.

Be sure not to miss “Beauty” before its closing next month on August 21st.

And be sure not to miss the hypnotic movement of the digital clock made out of 288 analog clocks, “A Million Times,” in the museum’s lobby.

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Escape the Crowds and Enjoy Kayak Rentals and Tours on the Hudson River!

2016-07-29T09:16:23-04:00

Located off the West Side Highway at 44th Street—and just a stone’s throw from Times Square, you can enjoy a decidedly non-New York experience on the Hudson River itself in the calming vigor and isolation of a kayak.

Sandwiched between the glaring tourist attractions of the Intrepid Museum and the Circle Line, the humble, pristine, and inviting Manhattan Kayak Company (MKC) offers a wide variety of boating escapes from the crush of City crowds—from a half hour on a kayak in the MKC embayment, to an hour skyline tour, to a three hour nighttime tour, to an overnight trip to Governor’s Island!

Prices are fair, too—for just $7, you can enjoy a half hour escape on a kayak; for $60, you can kayak down to the center of the Hudson, taking in the skyline, bridges, and Statue of Liberty! For those serious kayakers in the City, all-access membership and storage are available, as well.

So escape the crowds and take a tour of the City from an entirely new vantage point.

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American AIDS Art: Traveling Exhibition Opens at the Bronx Museum of the Arts

2016-07-22T10:02:03-04:00

The first exhibition of its kind, Art AIDS America opened on July 13 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts showcasing a stunning, sobering, and sweeping retrospective of AIDS related art since 1981. The exhibit is loosely divided into categories such as “body,” “soul,” and “activism,” but each work captures a complex combination of the hope, devastation, trauma, and stigma of the early AIDS epidemic and its persistent presence. As a traveling exhibit, it was previously shown in Washington and will move to Chicago in September—its purpose, in so doing, is to reignite conversations around AIDS/HIV by highlighting the stunted and stigmatized suffering and presence of AIDS that persists today.

Nearly every work in the exhibition is haunting in its chronicling of a culture of loss, and many works are visually uncompromising in their presentation of the AIDS-inflicted body suffering and dying. In images and photographs throughout the exhibit, bodies suffering from wasting syndrome were sometimes presented within classic and contemporary art forms, such as Patrick Webb’s The Lamentation and By Pucinello’s Bed (1992), depicted and framed in the form of an 18th Century tragedy, and Joey Terrill’s Still Life With Forget-Me-Nots and One Week’s Dose of Truvada (2012), a contemporary collage of domestic still-life and AIDS medication.

Other works chronicled loss directly—through graphic photography, for example, and many others referenced loss through tracing the absence of bodies, such as Daniel Goldstein’s Icarian I Incline, a stretched cover from a workout bench imprinted by countless bodies in San Francisco’s Castro District, and Shimon Attie's Untitled Memory (1998), a photographic imprint of a deceased friend on a present space.

The exhibition is a challenging but critical intervention for its open and direct address of an epidemic that has been marginalized and oppressed by institutions, cultures, and politics. The first and last “image” one sees is the chalkboard hanging above the café register, Willie Cole’s How Do You Spell America? #2 (1993)—an acronymic work that reads “AMERICA” as containing condescending or oppressing headline-like narratives. But it might be works like Sue Coe's painting, Kaposi's Sarcoma (1993) that capture the mission at the heart of the exhibit's political mission by challenging its viewers to witness the suffering with compassion.

As I departed from what was a display of contemporary and often hidden suffering, I felt that this is precisely the sort of art exhibition that disturbs in the most necessary ways.

On exhibit now, as well, is a small-scale exhibition entitled “CAZA” that explores the place and role of art in the domestic sphere—caza, here, translates as searching and puns on casa—home. And you won’t want to miss Frank Gimpaya’s series of black-and-white photographs of masked faces on display in a side hallway, an exploration of the interplay between personas and beauty.

All three exhibitions are open through September 25th. The Bronx Museum of the Arts is a free museum and is located off of the Grand Concourse (a short walk from Yankee Stadium). If you’ve never been, it is worth spending a few hours and exploring this quiet and unfrequented art space.

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Upcoming: New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island

2016-07-14T10:23:21-04:00

Save the date! Now in its sixth year, the annual and free New York City Poetry Festival will take place on July 30th-31st, 2016, on Governors Island.

Special site specific features of the festival include The Poetry Brothel, The Typewriter Project, and the NYC Children's Poetry Festival.

From last year's announcement at the New York Times:

…Now in its fifth year, the free weekend-long New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island continues to grow — organizers are expecting 4,000 people this year — and gathers a book fair, food trucks, around 50 vendors and a children’s festival on Colonels’ Row.

Drawing on the variety of poetry groups from all five boroughs, readings at the event can be academic or high-minded, musical or theatrical…

I'll be reading some of my work as part of the Art Kibbutz residency on Governors Island. See you there!

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Intimate Portraiture at the Met Breuer: Diane Arbus Exhibit Opening

2016-07-13T11:44:06-04:00

Go off the beaten path from Museum Mile and enjoy a focused and iconic art viewing experience within one of New York’s most unique art buildings. In the striking Bauhaus shell of the former Whitney Art Museum, the (brand new) Met Breuer opened its doors in March of 2016. On July 12 (just yesterday!), The Met Breuer opened its landmark exhibit of Diane Arbus’s early photography (from 1956-1962). The exhibit is entitled diane arbus: in the beginning and will remain open until November 27, 2016.

For those unfamiliar, Arbus is the original Humans of New York photographer who took an interest in capturing intimate portraiture on the streets of New York that is full of narrative, scandal, and personality. The exhibit contains over 100 photographs of single subjects, each on its own standalone column. Without a clear beginning, end, or sequence to the viewing experience, visitors are invited to wander to each photograph and view it intimately, much as Arbus the photographer might have viewed each subject.

Some highlights included the horrifying Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park (1962), as well as the many carnivalesque and burlesque performers whom she captured in dressing rooms, and sometimes still in costume. The general sense, upon viewing an early Arbus photo, is the raw, momentary exchange between the photographer and her subject. Viewing these photographs demands putting all notions of bias aside--and just seeing people as they are.

After wandering through the 100 or so photographs, the viewer is invited to skip forward in time to some of Arbus's most renowned photographs--nine of the ten photos from the "Box of Ten Photographs" exhibit. A favorite was Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967

The ongoing and inaugural exhibit at the Breuer, Unfinished: Thoughts LeftVisible, on the 3rd and 4th floors of the museum, is worth checking out, too. Drawing on a robust historical array of works from the Renaissance through the present, this exhibit showcases the strength of the Met’s collection while also asking its viewers to wonder about the nature of unfinished art (both intentionally and unintentionally).

The Met Breuer is located on the corner of Madison Ave. and 75th Street, just steps from Museum Mile and the central Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just like its flagship institution, the Met Breuer only asks for a “recommended” admission fee (I paid $5).

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