Saturday, June 2, 2012

Walking on Sand and Boardwalk: Exercises for Coney Island

Coney Island, New York's famous beach and boardwalk destination in southern Brooklyn, brings many things to mind - the old days of Luna Park at night, the photographs of wall-to-wall people crowding the beaches, long summer days riding the Cyclone, and the overindulgence of sand, sun, and Nathan's hot dogs. While Coney Island's rich history may be lost in many physical reminders, the Coney Island of the mind, to reference the title of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 1958 collection of poems, remains strong and personal for many New Yorkers.

 Coney Island

During a visit this past week, a sunny day when the beach and the boardwalk were relatively not crowded, some of those historic and personal images of Coney Island veered in and out of my consciousness. Yet, the strong sun had the effect of washing out the remembered mind pictures of Coney Island only to leave its geographical elementals - a peninsula on the Atlantic Ocean with a long deep beach that stretches out for nearly three miles under a relentless sun. The Lenape Indians called this place Narrioch -"land without shadows," because the horizontal east-west geographic configuration keeps Coney Island in the sun all day. On this particular day, the beach looked extra clean, and the ocean looked extra blue.

Coney Island

Coney Island

Coney Island

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Museum Exhibitions in New York, Summer 2012: A List, with Openings in June, July, and August

Residents and visitors can look forward to many new exhibitions at New York museums this summer. Below are a few highlights, noted in the order of their openings. Following these selections, please find the list of continuing exhibitions as well as the titles and dates of most all of the upcoming openings at area museums. This list will be regularly updated throughout the summer.

Summer Highlights at New York Museums:

Guggenheim Museum. Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949-1960 
June 8-September 12, 2012
A survey of nearly 100 works in the Guggenheim permanent collection provides an overview of the global post-war phenomenon of abstraction in visual art. Artists include Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Burri, Asger Jorn, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Pierre Soulages, Antoni Tàpies, and Zao Wou-Ki, among others.

Caribbean: Crossroads of the World Arnaldo Roche Rabell, We Have to Dream in Blue, 1986 84 x 60 inches Oil on canvas Collection of John Belk & Margarita Serapion Photo courtesy of Walter Otero Gallery


El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum of Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Caribbean: Crossroads of the World 
June 12, 2012-January 6, 2013
The most ambitious exhibition of the summer explores the far-reaching cultural history of the Caribbean basin and its diaspora. Organized by El Museo del Barrio in conjunction with the Queens Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, the three museums each take a separate theme in presenting 500 works of art from four centuries.

Rineke Dijkstra, Amy, The Krazyhouse, Liverpool, England, December 22, 2008. 
Archival inkjet print, 125 x 103 cm. © Rineke Dijkstra, courtesy the artist

Guggenheim Museum. Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
June 29-October 3, 2012
The Guggenheim presents a major mid-career survey of the Dutch photographer and videographer Rineke Dijkstra. The artist's accomplished technique and sensibility in portraiture, especially her signature large-scale works featuring young people, have drawn comparisons to the golden age of Dutch painting of the 17th century.

MoMA. Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan
July 1–October 1, 2012
A retrospective, organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, offers the largest survey of works by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) to date outside of Italy. Boetti was one of the guiding lights of Arte Povera, the radical art movement that challenged the modes and materials of the established art culture.

Alighiero Boetti. Io che prendo il sole a Torino il 19 gennaio 1969 (Me sunbathing in Turin 19 January 1969). 1969. 101 concrete stones, 69 11/16 x 35 7/16″ (177 x 90 cm). Private collection, Turin. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome

New Museum. Ghosts in the Machine
July 18, 2012 - October 7, 2012
A global-minded exhibition on the museum's three floors provides a survey of artists exploring the "nature" of technology - from the meanings of machines to virtual reality. With work from the past fifty years and including contemporary artists, New Museum promises an "encyclopedic cabinet of wonders."

Brooklyn Museum. Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way 
August 17–December 2, 2012
A late summer opening at the Brooklyn Museum, organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, offers a mid-career retrospective of Jean-Michel Othoniel (French, born 1964), an artist known for his large-scale glass sculptures. Difficult to categorize, Othoniel is part surrealist and part conceptualist, exploring a visual language of myth and fantasy, yet the works often evoke cultural and political realities.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Greenwich Village in the Shade: Washington Square Park and the West Village at the Start of Summer

Those left behind in Greenwich Village during the past weekend's long Memorial Day holiday did well to retreat to the shade. Muggy and warm days sent people to the leafy canopies of Washington Square Park and to the shady streets of the West Village. In addition to sitting, reflecting, and reading on benches, park visitors could pick among several entertainments. Children splashed in the fountain, those funny acrobat guys did multiple performances of their gymnastic routines, the piano guy played many tunes, and so did the jazz cats. A flurry of excitement hit the park late Monday, just around the time the sun was setting, when Boo and Scout, the park's adolescent red-tailed hawks, took off from their ledge on NYU's Bobst Library for their first flight.

Cherry Lane Theatre, Commerce Street, West Village
American flag, Cherry Lane Theatre, Commerce Street

ivy-covered house, Bedford Street, West Village
Ivy-covered house on Bedford St. at Grove Street.

Commerce and Barrow Streets, West Village, NYC
Barrow and Commerce Street