Posts Tagged ‘The Jewish Museum’

Outdoor and Indoor Museum Exhibits to See This Winter

While most entertainment is shut down in New York City, museums provide a welcome diversion that’s both socially distanced and enlightening. Two museums invite you to view their current feature installation from outdoors, free of charge. Four invite you in from the cold to view exhibits that will not last as long.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts

http://www.bronxmuseum.org

#SeeMeBronx

Through May 24

Bronx Museum of the Arts - Installation Image by Becca Guzzo

Celebrating the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ 50th anniversary, #SeeMeBronx is an interactive project about visibility, intersectionality and identity. Visitor participation is encouraged and all you need to do is write a question about any of the three topics on a sign and take a selfie of yourself with it. You then post your selfie and tag @bronxmuseum with the hashtag #seemebronx. The Museum creates a changing selection of submissions, which are then included on the installation on the outside of the museum.

The Jewish Museum

https://thejewishmuseum.org

“All the Stars in the Sky Have the Same Face”

Through February 2021

Lawerence Weiner, All the Stars Have the Same Face. The Jewish Museum, NY. Photo: Liz Ligon.

On the museum’s Fifth Avenue façade, you’ll see the building-wide banner “All the Stars in the Sky Have the Same Face” by New York City artist Lawrence Weiner. The two-story red, white and blue banner imparts a plea for shared humanity. The banner was born out of Weiner’s many years of reading messages on walls all over New York and he views these walls, like the walls of the museum, as a canvas for communicating important messages. The sentence itself derives from a Yiddish saying that Weiner has reconceived in response to anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism, writing the words in English, Hebrew and Arabic to emphasize inclusiveness.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

www.metmuseum.org

“About Time: Fashion and Duration”

Through February 7

The Metropolitan Museum of Art - About Time: Fashion and Duration

In a sleek serpentine display of black silhouettes, mirrors and a pendulum that ticks off the years and moments of a timeline, two rooms of paired designs show the influence of past creations on later ones. Each creation is displayed in black to emphasize comparability. Contrasts in shape, material and decoration are discussed with many earlier designs looking as fresh as their more recent counterparts. Designers include Cristóbal Balenciaga, Gabrielle Chanel, Christian Dior, Tom Ford, Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior, Gabrielle Chanel, Alexander McQueen and other fashion-world cognoscenti. Timed tickets are required, and tickets are limited.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

https://www.guggenheim.org

“Countryside, The Future”

Through February 15

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - Countryside, The Future

Heavy on text and environmental and cultural references, “Countryside, The Future” lines the entire spiral of the museum, focusing on differences and evolutions in city and country living over the years. Even more relevant today than when the exhibit first opened in February 2020 (and then closed due to the pandemic), the contrasts of country concerns with the problems of the urban life spark a growing contemplation of our current situation. Whereas the movement to the country might have seemed to be gradual and remote, isolationist, or perhaps more of an environmental or political reactiveness last year, the outflow now holds extended relevance and invites closer reading of the dense texts that discuss the forces, ecosystems and other motivators to the present. The exhibit was organized by Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas with a team of researchers and was five years in the making.

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

www.moma.org

“Handles”

Through February 2021

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art - Handles - Photo By: Dennis Doorly

“Handles,” a site-specific commission by Korean artist Haegue Yang for MoMA’s Marron Atrium, features six sculptures with a variety of geometries that combine with light and sound. As conceived by Yang, Handles are points of attachment and material catalysts for movement and change. Some clearly represent door handles, some move with tones of bells or rattles. A subtle background of bird sounds recorded in the DMZ between North and South Korea during the 2018 summit adds a haunting soundtrack. The effect is a sensory experience with mixed-in historical references.

Whitney Museum of American Arts

http://whitney.org/collections

“Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945”

Through January. 31

Whitney Museum of American Arts - Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945

A striking exhibit of three Mexican muralists alongside their American contemporaries, “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945” presents approximately 200 works by 60 artists. Pieces by Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros acknowledge the influence of these painters on art in the United States during the twenty-year period. Of particular note is the reproduction of Diego Rivera’s controversial mural “Man at the Crossroads” removed from Rockefeller Center due to the inclusion of Vladimir Lenin. Also mounted are never-before-shown sketches of this giant mural.

Much like the city that never sleeps, online never sleeps either, so you can tour these museums virtually as well.

Google Arts & Culture

This non-profit initiative by Google Arts & Culture is a compendium of NYC museums and cultural institutions around the world available 24/7 with virtual tours. https://artsandculture.google.com

Posted by Meryl Pearlstein
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The first-ever survey of Isaac Mizrahi’s boundary-breaking designs brightens the Jewish Museum

Through August 7, fashionistas and non-fashionistas alike can bask in the colorblock glow of Isaac Mizrahi at the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side.  Designed to admire and explain the inspirations behind the Brooklynite’s provocative and colorful collections, the “Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History” exhibition pieces together sketches, storyboards and fabric swatches from the designer’s 30-year career with footage of models wearing the actual items displayed.  “It’s a rare opportunity to have these two groupings come together in one exhibit. Watching the supermodels strut their stuff in Isaac’s dresses is wondrous enough. But to see the dresses and all on mannequins within inches of you, is truly a rare experience,” explained guest curator Chee Pearlman.

Mizrahi may be most recently known for his performances in the documentary Unzipped and on Project Runway All Stars, or for his QVC and Target collections – especially among younger fans — but it’s the couture items that really turn heads.  Take, for example, two of his earliest “High and Low” dares: mixing a t-shirt fabric top with a taffeta ball skirt bottom, or creating a gown from elevator padding materials.  Or his “The Real Thing” dress made of paillettes from Coca-Cola cans, laboriously beaded together on a 60s silhouette sheath.  There’s also a room with video showing Mizrahi-designed clothes worn by Sarah Jessica Parker on “Sex in the City” and Sarah Bernhard while doing stand-up comedy, as well as unusual costumes created for the Guggenheim Museum’s annual presentation of Peter and the Wolf and the frog attendants in the 18th-century French opera Platée.

The exhibit has been built to be movable, with a limited run at the Jewish Museum.  So why the fuss about a designer who is still alive?  Isaac Mizrahi is the real deal when it comes to New York City. He’s a 21st-century Renaissance man who loves life, embraces everything for what it displays, and re-gifts it in ways that break boundaries and challenge the imagination.  From his humble beginnings as a Yeshiva boy in Brooklyn, to his late 1980s entry into the design world, followed by forays into television, film, dance, and theater, Mizrahi displays a talent for imagination and vibrancy.  You may love some of the designs. You may be puzzled by others. But you will be hard-pressed not to leave with a vivid impression of this multi-talented polymath.

Museum admission is $15 for adults, $12 for seniors and $7.50 for students from Sunday-Friday (closed Wednesday).  Admission is free on Saturday, and Thursday from 5-8 are Pay What You Wish nights.  The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street.  http://thejewishmuseum.org

Posted by Meryl Pearlstein
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Chagall Exhibit Closing February 2 — Don’t Miss

Closing February 2, the Chagall: Love, War, and Exile, exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan should not be missed. This exhibit of paintings, prints and artifacts makes its debut in the United States, showing an important period in Marc Chagall’s artistic career: the effect of the fascism and World War II on his creativity.  It also show the impact of the death of his wife Bella in 1944 and the inclusion of his new wife Virginia Haggard McNeil into his paintings, which are filled with many familiar icons of earlier works.

Always hearkening back to Vitebsk, the village in Belarus/Russia of Chagall’s birth, the paintings include fondly remembered symbols of the shtetl or village, such as the cow, a brightly colored horse, houses, violinists, religious villagers and mothers with children. Later, darker paintings incorporate Chagall’s memories of the Bolshevik Revolution, a dark period of exile from his beloved Russia to France.  The exhibition includes 31 paintings and 22 works on paper, as well as telegrams, letters, poems, photos, books and more, all works of Marc Chagall or ephemera from his life.

Chagall: Love, War and Exile focuses on the artist’s works from the 1930s through 1948, following his move to Paris in 1922 (where he changed his name from Moishe Shagal/Segal to the more French Marc Chagall and incorporated much French style into his paintings), and during his second exile to New York at the invitation of Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art. One of the most revered modernist painters, Marc Chagall (1887–1985) displays here the influences on his style from folk art, religious painting, Cubism and even Surrealism (one painting shows a “walking” street lamp). Especially interesting is his attempt at outreach to both Christians and Jews, showing frequent depictions of the Crucifixion of Jesus as well as of Jesus in the form of Jewish figures wearing Jewish religious vestments, both functioning as an everyman symbol of anyone who has been the victim of persecution.

Moving from the folk style of Russian art, to French-influenced flower-filled paintings, darker persecution-themed paintings, and mourning images following his wife’s death, Chagall finally shows splashes of color again in the final paintings of the exhibit. World War II has ended, Chagall has re-married and has a second child.  Themes of his past — “the village” that he so adored — remain but are now more vibrant, showing the Chagall that one has come to know more familiarly from his earlier paintings like “I and the Village” (1911) at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, 1109 5th Ave, Manhattan, (212) 423-3200 http://www.thejewishmuseum.org

Posted by Meryl Pearlstein
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