GUEST POST by Brenda Feist
All photos by Brenda Feist
Approach from Soho
I spent two weeks in NY this past July, visiting family and wandering the streets and museums of Manhattan. I’d made a promise to a friend to visit the New Museum on Bowery, but as I was staying up by Central Park, and it was 37 degrees with 80% humidity, I kept putting it off. When I finally made the trip, it turned out to be (second only to my granddaughter) the highlight of my time there.
The Met and The MOMA had been crowded, noisy, and had a cult of celebrity about them. Small mobs were gathered, snapping madly around a Van Gogh, or lined up to see Yoko Ono. People moved quickly through the exhibitions and very few people were reading the didactics.
The new Whitney museum was an astounding piece of architecture, but there was still something missing for me in that collection. The Frick, where I’d gone to see Flaming June, an oil painting by Sir Frederic Leighton, on loan from Porte Rico, was disappointing to say the least. Between the glass (which I imagine to be bulletproof :), the obscene framing and the stanchions, I could get no where near the artist’s hand or thought.
The New Museum on Bowery had me at hello. From a block away, the facade bade my heart beat a little faster. At street level, it was all glass. In the front window, an artist’s ‘drone’ painting. Inside the spacious lobby, an unassuming ticket desk, a gift shop (mostly books), a coffee bar with communal tables, and a small glass gallery at the end of the room, floated like small islands in a sea of concrete and steel mesh.
I started on the 5th floor…Nir Evon, from Israel, Jun Yang and Yao Jim-Chung from Taiwan, Chou Yu-Cheng, winner of the 2012 Tai Pai Art Award Grand Prize, Joel Halmberg. Individuals were suspended in front of screens, paintings, photographs, and didactics. No one was talking. I, myself, read every panel for the fecundity of ideas there. A sign (on the Education door) read “Please do not touch the artwork” but “do” and “not” were painted were painted out. The 3rd and 4th floors were devoted entirely to the works of German artist, Albert Oehlen, and Sara Charlesworth’s work occupied the whole second floor. There are not enough words in my vocabulary for what I found in these vast rooms, awash with light. I took as many pictures of didactics as I did images. Back in the lobby, I explored the glass gallery installation, lost myself in the bookstore for an hour, and finally ordered an iced latte for the walk back to the train. On my way out, I discovered that Chris Burden had done the installation pieces on the building facade.
I pretty much walked backwards through Soho, grinning like a love-struck teenager at the New Museum until it was out of view. I didn’t even notice the heat in the subway tunnels, going home. The New Museum WAS the ‘new’ museum as I dreamed it could be. Open, engaging, showcasing our best and brightest contemporary visual thinkers. It was the kind of place, tat if I lived there, I would visit once a week. It did what I think, as Educators, we all aspire our galleries to do–occupy a place in its community’s heart, and to be an instrument of transformation in every open individual.
