‘Skewville, Welcome to Greenpoint BK,’ the India Street Mural Project, New York City. Photo via greenpointnews.com
NEW YORK – Greenpoint’s waterfront was once a sleepy collection of warehouses and a spot to see Manhattan’s skyline, but just as the neighborhood has attracted increased attention, so has its waterfront. There’s now a ferry terminal next to those giant warehouses, and how one can visit the neighborhood without first checking the temperamental whims of the G train. Since 2009, the India Street Mural Project has welcomed visitors to the waterfront with a series of murals by six artists.
Contributions vary widely. First, there’s the seemingly straightforward “Welcome to BK” by Skewville on one wall, which on closer inspection reveals a man wearing an eye patch and an enigmatic look on the B, and a group of children wearing bright red hats on the K. Perhaps they are some of the people visitors can expect to meet when they get off the ferry?
Moving away from the water is Ali Asch’s “Untitled,” in shades of pale blue and sea-foam green. There are three people on a boat doing backbends all in a row, like cheerleaders. Each of them hosts another group of kids playing at a table balancing on their stomachs. The sea part of mural is quite relaxing, though the flexible boat owners are a reminder of exactly how inflexible I am, and how I couldn’t balance a small group of children on my stomach.
Closer to the street than the water is a neon pink rocket (or spaceship) rising out of gray clouds, with orange flames. Since I’d hate to think that anything that pink was being used for violence, I choose to believe it’s a spaceship, going to a new planet, hopefully near Greenpoint full of equally fluorescent structures.
The India Street Mural Project was sponsored by the North Brooklyn Art Coalition and the office of council member David Yassky. It aims to bring some artistic life to the industrial space.
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
‘Skewville, Welcome to Greenpoint BK,’ the India Street Mural Project, New York City. Photo via greenpointnews.comJoseph Meloy at the India Street Mural Project, New York City. Photo by Ilana Novic.Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel, ‘India Street Rocket’ at the India Street Mural Project, New York City. Photo via AnimalNY.comAli Aschman, ‘Untitled,’ the India Street Mural Project, New York City. Photo via greenpointnews.com
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art image.
NEW YORK – The Metropolitan Museum of Art will launch the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium in April 2014, a two-week pilot program created and hosted by the museum.
Designed to stimulate and broaden international dialogue on museum management and collections care among directors from collecting institutions, it will bring together 12-15 directors, in particular from museums in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The colloquium will take place April 7-18.
“The Met was founded as an international museum 143 years ago, and this global approach is now reflected in our collections, programs, and audience. Given the breadth and depth of our holdings, it is our responsibility to encourage a dialogue that can benefit museums worldwide, one that reinforces their relevance and encourages their appropriate stewardship,” said Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the museum. “The Global Museum Leaders Colloquium has been designed specifically to address a broad range of museum management issues, and we look forward to welcoming our colleagues to the Met next spring.”
The program will include directors of institutions with collections ranging from archaeological and historic artifacts to modern and contemporary art. Participants will be meeting with the Met’s curators, conservators and administrative staff and also participating in intensive dialogues about museum management.
The series of sessions held during the 12 working days of the colloquium will offer an overview of various aspects of museum operations—from curatorial research, collections management, and conservation to fundraising, education, governance and digital communications—providing a 360-degree view of current museum practices.
A significant portion of the schedule will also be set aside for open dialogue among the visiting directors, who will discuss strategic challenges facing their institutions and engage in workshops to explore timely issues confronting museums worldwide, such as how to formulate cooperative policies and how to advocate effectively for institutions at a time of scarce resources.
At a time when globalization is rapidly reshaping museum audiences as well as programming mandates, the colloquium has been created to promote strong, well-informed, culturally sensitive museum leadership. A key aim of the program will be enhanced international collaboration for all of the participating institutions and their leaders.
Participation in the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium is by invitation. Most participants will be museum directors, although in some cases the program will accept deputy directors or chief curators who have oversight responsibility for their institutions, as well as public officials with jurisdiction over museums.
The 2014 participants of the program will be announced by November of this year.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art image.
Museum of Contemporary Art at 250 S. Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, Wikipedia image attributed to Oxxo, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license.
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Jeffrey Deitch, the sometimes controversial director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, announced Wednesday he is resigning.
Deitch made the announcement at a meeting of his board of directors, adding he plans to stay on until an ambitious campaign to raise MOCA’s endowment from $20 million to $100 million is completed. That’s expected to happen this fall.
In the meantime, the board formed a committee to look for a successor.
“As colleagues, friends and great admirers of Jeffrey’s talent, we respect his decision and thank him for his tremendous dedication to the museum and all those who value MOCA,” David G. Johnson, co-chairman of the board, said in a statement released by MOCA.
The announcement was not surprising. Although Johnson hailed Deitch for helping “solidify MOCA’s financial stability while changing the way Angelenos, and those around the world, engage with contemporary art,” the director had come under sometimes withering criticism since his arrival in 2010.
His signature achievement, the museum’s “Art in The Streets” show, featuring the works of Banksy, Shepard Fairey and other graffiti artists, drew record crowds in 2011. But other exhibitions, including one featuring the works of actor Dennis Hopper and another curated by actor James Franco, were dismissed as lowbrow.
He also alienated some in the art community with last year’s dismissal of longtime MOCA curator Paul Schimmel. The action prompted Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and other prominent artists to resign from MOCA’s board.
Deitch was a surprise choice to some when he was hired in 2010. As the operator of Deitch Projects, he was a prominent New York gallery owner and consultant to collectors, but hadn’t worked in museums.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-07-25-13 0056GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Museum of Contemporary Art at 250 S. Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, Wikipedia image attributed to Oxxo, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license.
The entrance to the 1931 Brill Building, located at 1619 Broadway at 49th Street in Manhattan. Image by Americasroof at en.wikipedia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
NEW YORK (AP) – A new owner is seeking tenants for a landmark New York City building where generations of songwriters peddled their wares to music publishers.
The New York Times reports that the Brill Building is now half empty since the closing of the sheet music store Colony Records and a post-production studio.
Real estate investor Eric Hader paid $185 million for the 11-story mid-Manhattan building in February. He tells The Times he believes he can breathe new life into the building by evoking its show business past.
For starters, the Times says Hader is in discussions with the Songwriters Hall of Fame about establishing a small museum in the building.
Famous names associated with the Brill Building include Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington and Carole King.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-07-25-13 1320GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
The entrance to the 1931 Brill Building, located at 1619 Broadway at 49th Street in Manhattan. Image by Americasroof at en.wikipedia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
A replica of the ship Dove, which first brought English settlers to Maryland in 1634, is shown docked at historic St. Mary’s City. Image by Pubdog, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
ST. MARY’S CITY, Md. (AP) – Archaeologists working with Maryland’s Historic St. Mary’s City museum believe they have discovered the remains of an English ship 10 feet below the St. Mary’s River.
The museum announced Thursday that archaeologist Scott Tucker and a crew of volunteer divers found the remains this summer. They discovered a heavy load of rounded cobblestones in an oval-shaped area more than 50 feet long.
Tucker says the stones are unique and not typical of Maryland. They would have been used as ballast to provide weight and stability to the ship. Tucker says the stones may have come from the North Devon coast of England.
Archaeologists also found a shaped wooden fragment that may have been part of the ship’s bilge pump. But no timbers from the ship’s structure have been uncovered.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-07-25-13 1400GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
A replica of the ship Dove, which first brought English settlers to Maryland in 1634, is shown docked at historic St. Mary’s City. Image by Pubdog, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
U.S. astronaut Alan B. Shepard, the second man to go into outer space, models a Mercury spacesuit in 1963. NASA image, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
WASHINGTON (AP) – The familiar exteriors of astronauts’ spacesuits often hide all of the ingenuity and mechanics that are built inside the suits, which were first imagined as “wearable spacecraft.”
Now a new art exhibit, “Suited for Space,” opening Friday at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, highlights the creativity behind the suits that allowed humans to explore the moon and aspire to fly farther from Earth.
X-ray images and photographs show the suits in intricate detail, said space history curator Cathleen Lewis. The museum’s X-rays are the first such images ever created to study, conserve and research the nation’s spacesuits.
“You don’t realize what a complex machine these are,” Lewis said. But the X-rays of Alan Shepard’s Apollo spacesuit and a 1960s prototype “allow visitors to see beyond what is visible to the naked eye, through the protective layers of the suit to see the substructures that are embedded inside.”
The exhibition traces the evolution of the spacesuit from the early high-altitude test flight suits of the 1930s to the dawn of the space age with Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle missions.
While technology drove much of the suit design to maintain an airtight barrier to the vacuum of space and to protect from solar radiation, fashion aesthetics of the time also played a role, Lewis said. The original Mercury seven astronaut suits were unique from all others with a silvery coating to introduce America’s space explorers to the world.
“NASA had a demand to create the astronauts into a whole new corps, a non-military corps. So here was an opportunity to dress them in a new uniform … that evokes sensibilities of that Buck Rogers imagination,” she said. “All of these guys, the engineers, they grew up on science fiction. They fed it with their ideas, and they were consumers of it at the same time.”
Curators are working to find ways to preserve spacesuits because some materials are decomposing, discoloring or becoming rigid some 50 years after they were created.
The spacesuit show is traveling to 10 cities, moving next to Tampa, Fla., Philadelphia and Seattle through 2015.
Two companion exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum also highlight 50 artworks of about 550 new items added to the Smithsonian’s growing space art collection over the past decade. They include portraits of astronomer Carl Sagan and astrophysicist Neal deGrasse Tyson, and a photograph of first female shuttle commander Eileen Collins by photographer Annie Leibovitz.
The museum’s art collection includes 7,000 paintings, drawings, prints, posters and sculptures. Curators have been working to add more contemporary and conceptual art over the past 10 years.
Chief Curator Peter Jakab said art helps people reflect on aerospace achievements and the humanity imbued in each machine.
Albert Watson, a photographer known for his portraits of celebrities, such as Steve Jobs, and of fashion, took a break in 1990 to photograph spacesuits and other artifacts. More recently, he donated two large-scale prints of an Apollo glove and boot to the museum.
Watson said he was captivated by the thought of suits that traveled in space and came back covered with moon dust.
“When you deal with celebrities every day or super models every day and fashion people every day, there is always a nice escape to go into still life,” he said. “As a child, I loved science fiction. I always remember arguing with my father about rocket ships. He said man will never go into space, he said, because what goes up must come down.”
The museum also has acquired a sculpture by Angela Palmer that evokes 46 different earth-like worlds that have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler Observatory. The piece, titled Searching for Goldilocks, involves 18 sheets of glass marked with circles for each star with an orbiting planet.
It refers to “Goldilocks” planets that might support life. They range from 132 light-years to about 4,300 light-years away.
“If you have a look, you can stand there looking from Earth, as if you are the eye of the telescope,” she said. “Or you can go to the back of the sculpture, and you can be thrown back towards Earth—4,300 light years straight back down.”
