Friday with Friends

What a great day to have a few hours to spare with friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We met in the morning at the Balcony Café for a cup of coffee and set off from there. Typical of a group visit, we covered a lot of ground, meandering through the various galleries, commenting on pieces that caught our attention.

All Things AIGA

After work today, I had a couple hours to kill before attending a lecture I wanted to see (more on that later). So I ventured up to the AIGA headquarters in the Flatiron District to see 365: A Year in Design, the annual exhibition of the year's design awards live in 3-D technicolor.

First of all, the main gallery was transformed complete with a painting supplies theme by a nonprofit called Publicolor, which teaches at-risk youth the trade of commercial painting (by the way, their site, though still in progress, is really rad). The exhibit itself is actually quite sentimental to me because it serves as a marker for my year anniversary in New York City: I visited last year's 365 show just after I moved here. I truly love the way the various design pieces are displayed here, you get a hands-on look at brochures, catalogs, books, posters, web sites, and commercials (just about every form of design). These are the cream of the crop — they are gratifying as individual artworks, but they also serve their function best.

Next it was a short jaunt down to the Apple store in Soho, where I heard swiss-miss.com founder, Tina Roth Eisenberg speak. Incredibly talented and inspiring, Eisenberg showed us a little background of her work as a designer, even highlighting a data organization/visualization project her firm pitched to The New York Times that reminded me of the Met's Timeline of Art History in the way it structures the information.

She then began to describe her blog, whose original intent was actually to organize her bookmarks! I totally understood, since currently I have 83 bookmarks in 7 folders on my bookmarks bar alone — and I just recently cleared some out. Swiss-miss.com visually organizes and highlights Tina's interests, and she has really good taste. Definitely worth bookmarking and visiting daily!

Continuous Mile

While perusing YouTube, I found this video showing a new installation in the Modern Art gallery. So I sought out to see for myself. (The video is really interesting, but also really long - skip to the end to see the final result).

In noticed this piece right away, since I frequently pass through the Met's Modern Art wing. I was thrown by the size and detail — the rope is made out of about a gazillion tiny white beads.
It is amazingly intricate, elegant, and let's face it: reminiscent of a wishing well... and who doesn't like a wishing well! A really nice addition to the works in the corridor that houses Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. More to come on that, I've been holidng out on you :-)

The Day of the Week Between Sunday and Tuesday

I recently came across the Time Out NY magazine feature on Things you don't know about New York. Among the awesome, colorful infographics is this image:

RECENT MET MUSEUM ADMISSION BADGES

I feel pretty confident I have all of them.

UPDATE: I do have all of them!

Sunnyday

Today's weather was unseasonably wonderful, so I meandered through the park on my way to the Met. Knowing I didn't have much time and that there would be lots of people at the museum, I opted to just pass by on my walk to the subway. I do love to see the crowds at the museum though — to know that its appeal reaches so many others, and that I have the luxury of visiting as often as I do.


"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" filled the air at the bottom of the steps, thanks to this guy — a frequenter of this spot.

An In-Depth Look at American Style

Tonight was my first experience with "The Observant Eye," a twice-monthly program for recent college graduates and young adults interested in art. Well, it just so happens, I am one of those, so I eagerly enrolled. About an hour-and-a-half long, it is really a lecture/discussion with a curator of a specific department (right up my ally, right?).
They lent us little Met stools and herded us over to the American Wing, where we parked ourselves in front of a Rococo revival parlour.


The room was designed by John Henry Belter, a German immigrant whose furniture became popular in the mid-19th century. Remarkably, Belter discovered important new techniques for furniture manufacturing — his were the first pieces to have curved wooden structures, like the Tête-à-tête in this room. In addition to his New York showroom, Belter built a five-story factory had separate floors for each step in the process of furniture making from carpentry to upholstery; interestingly, people of different ethnicities worked in each department. For more photos on the Met's flickr page, click here.


Next, we encircled our little folding stools around a Herter Brothers Library Table built for the opulent Fifth Avenue mansion of William H. Vanderbilt.
The top is rosewood with inlaid mahogany and accurately placed mother-of-pearl constellations from Vanderbilt's birthday, May 8, 1821. I was glad to learn a little more about this stunningly beautiful piece, after all, I had admired it on many occasions.

Drawings by the Masters

The recently opened exhibition, Raphael to Renior: Drawings from the Collection of John Bonna, displays drawings by some of the greatest artists of all time. What I found most interesting was the great variety of work represented in this collection. Some drawings were sketchy, unfinished works, others were studies for paintings, and then there were completed colorful pieces.

The first drawing that caught my eye was A Wild Boar Piglet, by Hans Hoffmann - I know it's silly, but sometimes you gotta appreciate the cuteness factor. Among the dozens of other incredible drawings, the following stood out: Boucher's beautifully composed finished masterpieces; Watteau's three studies of people from different perspectives on each page; a tiny, simple Rembrandt pen and ink drawing; and a New Year's card by Victor Hugo.

Walker Evans: The Picture Postcard

Notable American photographer, Walker Evans, had a postcard collection... and it was a good one. So good, that photography department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art created an exhibition to display all the meticulously categorized postal treasures. Evans made sure to divide his collection by subject; be it windmills or beaches, small towns or exotic locales, there is a place for each and every piece of correspondence he received. It is a delight to look at the variety of subjects, all bearing the same early 20th century style.

Monday's Flowers

If you visit the Met as much as I do, you'll notice that the flower arrangement varies from week to week. That is because, every Monday, a twenty-seven-year-old Dutch man named Remco van Vliet painstakingly creates the five major arrangements in the Great Hall. From now on, I'll be posting a photo of the week's flowers on the corresponding Monday.

Farewell PDM

The exhibition, Philippe de Montebello: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions, ended today. To honor the now former director and highlight his incredible contribution to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curators from every department collaborated to show the grandest of the 84,000 works acquired during his tenure.

Like Shigeyuki Kihara, I had planned on revisiting this exhibition much sooner — but there is just too much to see at the Met! I did take the time today, however, to fully absorb the breadth and importance of this show. Widely acclaimed for its unique blend of pieces from different cultures, time periods, and media, the exhibition is truly an unparalleled experience with some of the greatest highlights of art history.