NYC Day 17: The Rubin Museum of Art

The start of the spiral staircase that rises through the Rubin Museum

SENIORS FREE FIRST MONDAY'S @ THE RUBIN MUSEUM, 150, West 17th Street.
I caught a 1-train the 19th street station which was less than a couple hundred yards from the Rubin museum. The museum provides free entry to seniors (normally USD$10.00) on the first Monday of each month, and I was more than happy to take advantage of the offer. I have been to the Rubin Museum on previous visits to New York and enjoyed my visit enough to make a return trip today. The two new major exhibitions this summer are The World Is Sound, which is part exhibition, part sound installation. The second exhibition, Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame, features sixty-nine photographs taken by this much acclaimed photographer during several trips to India from the late 1940s through until the early 1960s.

The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room

Acoustic insulation in the Deep Listening room

The World Is Sound
This exhibition/installation juxtaposes sound art and Tibetan Buddhist ritual music cyclically, that is, from creation to death to rebirth. The work explores different dimensions of sound and listening and its many functions in Tibetan Buddhism. Some of the key concepts and terms explored through the exhibition encourage visitors to focus on ambient sounds, microtones, electronic music, drones (the musical type, not the modern flying craft), rhythm and polyrhythm, tone and timbre, and more besides.

I was particularly interested to learn about the late Pauline Oliveros's concept which she called, Deep Listening. The brochure for this part of the exhibition contains four exercises that visitors can employ to help them focus deeply on tuning in to the sounds around them. One of these exercises she called, Ear Piece, and asks thirteen questions that encourage Deep Listening. Here are the first five and final two:

1. Are you listening now?
2. Are you listening to what you are now hearing?
3. Are you hearing while you listen?
4. Are you listening while you are hearing?
5. Do you remember the last sound you heard before this question?

And so on, until the final two questions: Are you listening to sounds now or just hearing them? And... What sound is most meaningful to you?

Even working through the first five questions is harder than I thought it would be. After all, we live in a world where it is virtually impossible not to be surrounded by sounds that are loud, intrusive and constant. Especially here in New York City!

Henri Cartier-Bresson: India In Full Frame
In 1947 Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), co-founded the renowned Magnum photographic agency. Later that year he went to India for the first time and was in Delhi in January 1948 to meet with and photograph Mahatma Gandhi, who despite his diminutive physical size was one of the towering political figures of the 20th century. While Cartier-Bresson was not present when Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist on January 30, 1948, he was certainly present to document the subsequent funeral and the massive crowds of mourners who gathered to witness Gandhi's traditional cremation ceremony.

Above and below; images from the Cartier-Bresson exhibition

Above: Mahatma Gandhi's funeral pyre 

These images, and many others cemented Cartier-Bresson's reputation as one of the great photographers of the last century, and a selection of images from that period form an important part of the current exhibition at the Rubin Museum.

Many of the other photographs from the late 1940s capture a country that was right on the cusp of major political change, as India struggled to get out from under British colonial rule, a campaign that Gandhi was heavily involved in. For students of history, and of British colonial history and how that impacted on the Indian subcontinent, these images will surely be of interest. However, I suspect that other visitors will mostly regard them as historical curiosities - though hopefully interesting ones.

But Wait - There's More!
Apart from these two major exhibitions, the Rubin Museum also has a permanent collection of fascinating drawings, paintings, statuary and more from Tibet and other nearby regions that make this museum worthy of a visit. Like similar institutions, the Rubin programs a full calendar of ancillary events ranging from free (and fee paying) musical performances across a range of genres, film screenings, classes, lectures, events for children and families, and an annual Block Party that also includes free entry to the museum. This year the Block Party (which takes place on West 17th street between 6th and 7th avenues), will be on Sunday, July 16, from 1:00pm to 4:00pm.

If You Go
Rubin Museum of Art...
150, West 17th Street, New York, New York.

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Monday, July 3 | Expenses $15.00

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New York City Arts Round-Up #1

MoMA: Unfinished Conversations

This is the first of a regular series of posts highlighting the current art scene in New York City. I have long had an interest in the arts, and now visit to New York is complete without spending time in at least one or two the city's great art institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and so many others. If You are a New Yorker, you know you are spoiled for choice when it comes to immersing yourself in the arts there.

MoMA: Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection brings together works by more than a dozen artists, made in the past decade and recently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art. The artists that make up this intergenerational selection address current anxiety and unrest around the world and offer critical reflections on our present moment. The exhibition considers the intertwining themes of social protest, the effect of history on the formation of identity, and how art juxtaposes fact and fiction. From Cairo to St. Petersburg, from The Hague to Recife, the artists in the exhibition observe and interpret acts of state violence and the resistance and activism they provoke. They reexamine historical moments, evoking images of the past and claiming their places within it. They take on contemporary struggles for power, intervening into debates about government surveillance and labor exploitation. Together, these artists look back to traditions both within and beyond the visual arts to imagine possibilities for an uncertain future.

Now through July 30, 2017. More at MoMA…

Rubin Museum: Gateway to Himalayan Art

Rubin Museum of Art

150, West 17th Street, rubinmuseum.org

The Rubin presents art that traverses Asia’s diverse cultures, regions, and narratives. The Museum’s special exhibitions celebrate art forms that range from ancient to contemporary, including photography and multimedia, while its permanent collection galleries are focused primarily on art from the Himalayan region. Of particular interest are two exhibitions: Sacred Spaces: Himalayan Wind… (through until June 5, 2017; and Gateway to Himalayan Art (through until June 27, 2017). Sacred Spaces invites visitors to reflect on devotional activities in awe-inspiring places, while Gateway to Himalayan Art introduces visitors to the main forms, concepts, and meanings of Himalayan art represented in the Rubin Museum’s collection.

Grandma's Closet At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art

Sara Berman's belongings became an unlikely meditation on immigration, re-invention and feminine independence. By Priscilla Frank, Arts Writer, The Huffington Post

Sara Berman kept her closet in perfect order ― shoes lined up in an unerring row, crisply ironed white shirts stacked one atop the other, her signature bottle of Chanel 19 perched within easy grasp. Her children and grandchildren would gaze into the modest, meticulously organized niche reverently, as if staring at a work of art. Still, they never actually imagined their mom or grandma’s closet would one day, quite literally, find its way into The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“If someone told my mother her closet would be in the Met one day, she would have thought they were crazy,” artist, author and illustrator Maira Kalman said during a talk held at the museum last week, alongside her son, Alex Kalman, and Amelia Peck, a curator of American decorative arts at the Met. And yet, among the period rooms in the museum’s American Wing, most of which display opulent domestic craftsmanship from the 17th to 19th centuries, is Berman’s neat and tidy closet of the 1980s. 

If You Go:

Sara Berman’s Closet… 

Now through September 5, 2017

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park & Fifth Avenue

- o0o -

Carol Rama: Antibodies at the New Museum

From April 26—September 10, 2017

235 Bowery, New Museum…

Appassionata (1940), by Carol Rama; Photo: Studio Gonella

This exhibition is the first New York examination of the work of the late Italian artist Carol Rama. The exhibition lays claim to being the largest presentation of her work in the US.

While Rama has been largely overlooked in contemporary art discourses, her work has proven prescient and influential for many artists working today, attaining cult status and attracting renewed interest in recent years. Rama’s exhibition at the New Museum will bring together over one hundred of her paintings, objects, and works on paper, highlighting her consistent fascination with the representation of the body.

Seen together, these works present a rare opportunity to examine the ways in which Rama’s fantastical anatomies opposed the political ideology of her time and continue to speak to ideas of desire, sacrifice, repression, and liberation. “Carol Rama: Antibodies” celebrates the independence and eccentricity of this legendary artist whose work spanned half a century of contemporary art history and anticipated debates on sexuality, gender, and representation. Encompassing her entire career, the exhibition traces the development from her early erotic, harrowing depictions of “bodies without organs” through later works that invoke innards, fluids, and limbs—a miniature theater of cruelty in which metaphors of contagion and madness counteract every accepted norm.

More at New Museum…

More Arts Information

Museum of Modern Art…
Rubin Museum of Art…
The Metropolitan Museum of Art…

Village Voice Guide to NYC’s Spring Art Exhibits…