suffolk county vanderbilt museum

We took a trip to the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum, the summer home of William K. Vanderbilt II, over the weekend. The image above shows old Willy K. himself, in 1898, on one of his many boats. Because, you see, William K. Vanderbilt II was not just a Vanderbilt, meaning that he basically had all the money and never had to work, he was also a Commodore - able to command any vessel on the sea - and a naturalist, spending as many if not more months traveling by boat in order to collect specimens from every corner of the world as he did on dry land. The property's mansion itself, named Eagle's Nest, is a spectacular Italian villa on Long Island's North Shore that is filled with spectacular antiques and surrounded by lovely grounds. It's an amazing spot to visit, but the house itself is only one of the draws of this highly unusual museum. There's also a planetarium, which we decided to skip on this visit. Instead, we focused on Vanderbilt's marine, natural history and ethnographic collections, which were acquired during his many travels. As far as I could tell, Vanderbilt basically just brought home pretty much everything he came across, including innumerable collections of fish and aquatic specimens preserved in formaldehyde, taxidermied animals both large and small, a mummy, and every type of fish, coral, shell, and other items dredged up from the sea imaginable, including a whale shark. If you ever want to spend a few hours looking at animals in glass jars and taking a charming living history house tour that's set in the 1930s, this is definitely the museum for you. More images on Flickr.

google art project

Screen shot inside the Palace of Versailles. Courtesy of Google's Art Project.

If you haven't yet spent some time playing with Art Project, Google's latest, endeavor, I would highly recommend heading over there right now to see for yourself just what all the fuss is about. A unique collaboration with some of the world's best museums, Art Project contains thousands of high-resolution images of works, allowing people to view them in absolutely stunning detail. You can browse through museums using Google's Street View technology, or simply pick a work from a drop-down list of options given for each institution. For example, let's say you'd like to take a closer look at Officer and Laughing Girl by Johannes Vermeer, on display at The Frick Collection.

Even if you live on the other side of the world, Art Project allows you to not only view the painting, but to zoom in to see details as well, such as this close-up of the map in the painting's background. Or, say you'd like to study Vincent Van Gogh's painting technique in Starry Night, on display at The Museum of Modern Art.

The above images show (from top to bottom) the entire work, a 50% zoom in to the top right corner of the painting, and finally, an extremely high resolution up-close look at one small section of the work. Pretty unbelievable, right? Google's Art Project not only allows you to get up close to these works, but it does so to a degree that would be impossible even if you were to visit the museum in person. I can't wait to see more works from more museums as they're added to this site.

Designer of the Month: Frank Lloyd Wright

Week 5: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

 Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Like Fallingwater, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is one of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture masterpieces. Built from 1956-59, the building itself was actually commissioned in 1943, but it took 13 years just to find a suitable site.[1] In 1943, Wright received a letter from Hilla Rebay, the art advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, asking Wright to design a new building to house Guggenheim's Museum of Non-Objective Painting.[2] As Matthew Drutt, on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's website, explains:

The project evolved into a complex struggle pitting the architect against his clients, city officials, the art world, and public opinion. Both Guggenheim and Wright would die before the building's 1959 completion. The resultant achievement, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, testifies not only to Wright's architectural genius, but to the adventurous spirit that characterized its founders.

Wright made no secret of his disenchantment with Guggenheim's choice of New York for his museum: "I can think of several more desirable places in the world to build his great museum," Wright wrote in 1949 to Arthur Holden, "but we will have to try New York." To Wright, the city was overbuilt, overpopulated, and lacked architectural merit.[3]

Looking down through the atrium at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, January 1, 1971. Photograph by Imagno/Getty Images. Courtesy of LIFE Magazine.

During the 13 years it took before the two lots facing 5th Avenue were purchased as the site for the museum, Wright was busy designing his upside-down spiral "ziggaurat."[4] Wright chose a spiral for his design because he claimed that it was the most exciting architectural form because it existed in three dimensions, with the expanding spiral appearing to defy gravity.[5] Additionally, the museum was designed to stand in contrast to the linear form of the horizontal street grid and vertical skyscrapers of Manhattan.[6] Rather than relying on conventional museum design, where visitors are led through a series of interconnected rooms, retracing their steps on the way out, Wright instead chose to lead them to the top of the building by elevator, and back down on the continuous slope of a ramp.[7] The interior galleries were divided into self-contained sections, with the open rotunda affording viewers the possibility of seeing views of several galleries of work on different levels.[8]

The dome of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum after the 2007-08 renovation, May 14, 2009. Photograph by STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images. Courtesy of LIFE Magazine.

The design and construction of such a unique structure necessitated more than 700 drawings and numerous sets of construction documents, with Wright battling the city over building codes.[9] As Matthew Drutt further explains:

Some people, especially artists, criticized Wright for creating a museum environment that might overpower the art inside. "On the contrary," he wrote, "it was to make the building and the painting an uninterrupted, beautiful symphony such as never existed in the World of Art before." In conquering the static regularity of geometric design and combining it with the plasticity of nature, Wright produced a vibrant building whose architecture is as refreshing now as it was 40 years ago. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is arguably Wright's most eloquent presentation and certainly the most important building of his late career.[10] 

For more information about the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, including exhibition schedule, visit the museum's website, here.


[1] Marie Clayton, "Commercial and Civic Commissions," Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide: His 100 Greatest Works (London: Salamander Books Ltd., 2002), 387.

[2] Matthew Drutt, "The Frank Lloyd Wright Building," Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum online, http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/about/frank-lloyd-wright-building, (accessed December 22, 2010).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Marie Clayton, "Commercial and Civic Commissions," Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide: His 100 Greatest Works (London: Salamander Books Ltd., 2002), 387.

[5] Ibid., 388. 

[6] Alan Hess, "Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum," Frank Lloyd Wright: The Buildings (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 232.

[7] Matthew Drutt, "The Frank Lloyd Wright Building," Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum online, http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/about/frank-lloyd-wright-building, (accessed December 22, 2010).

[8] Ibid. 

[9] Marie Clayton, "Commercial and Civic Commissions," Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide: His 100 Greatest Works (London: Salamander Books Ltd., 2002), 388.

[10] Matthew Drutt, "The Frank Lloyd Wright Building," Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum online, http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/about/frank-lloyd-wright-building, (accessed December 22, 2010).

Seductive Subversion

Marjorie Strider, Triptych II (Beach Girl), 1964. Acrylic on board, 72 x 52 in. (182.9 x 132.1 cm) each. Courtesy of Michael Chutko and WikiPop.

I recently had the chance to visit "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968" at the Brooklyn Museum, and to write a review for the Gallery Crawl website, and have to say that I was very impressed with what I saw in this show. Who knew that there were so many female Pop artists? I pretty much always enjoying my visits to the Brooklyn Museum, and this show is definitely a reason to head over there:


Name one female Pop artist.  Go on, just one.  While men such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol easily come to mind as the epitome of the movement, possibly with Tom Wesselmann or James Rosenquist thrown in for good measure,  women like Evelyne Axell, Vija Celmins and Idelle Weber are probably not very high on your mental list of notables, if any of their names register at all.  “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968,” now on display at the Brooklyn Museum, hopes to not only rectify this omission, but to expand the previously narrow definition of Pop art as well.  This means allowing for a wide array of work – some of which, while clearly influenced by Pop art, is not entirely of it – produced by a surprisingly international group of artists, many of whom are only now receiving the recognition they so clearly deserve.

You can continue reading here.

Ai Weiwei - sunflower seeds

Courtesy of the Tate Modern, London. © Ai Weiwei. 

Images from Sunflower Seeds, by Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei, the newest exhibition on display in the Tate Modern's Unilever Series.

Courtesy of the Tate Modern, London. © Ai Weiwei. 

Courtesy of the Guardian. Photograph by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

Courtesy of the Guardian. Photograph by David Levene for the Guardian.

Courtesy of the Guardian. Photograph by David Levene for the Guardian.

According to the Tate Modern's exhibition website:

Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain. Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands.

Over 100 million porcelain seeds were individually formed and painted for an exhibition where visitors are encouraged to walk over, interact with and listen to the sound created by the manipulation of these delicate objects.

***Update***: Sadly, due to health concerns, Sunflower Seeds is no longer open for visitor interaction. It seems that the dust from the seeds posed a health hazard, so people are going to have to be content to be spectators only for the duration of this installation. For those of you who are interested, you can read more about it here.

(Via designboom)

Dead or Alive

Simen Johan, Untitled #150, 2009, feathers, cocoons, sparrows, insects, foliage, taxidermy, cement, rock, wood, 36 x 36 x 36 in. Image courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.

"Dead or Alive," now on display at the Museum of Arts and Design, is a pretty incredible exhibition. Just take a look at the above image of Simen Johan's Untitled #150 and you can pretty much tell that this show is a bit unusual. Anyway, my Gallery Crawl review is up, and if you're in NYC between now and October 24th, I would highly recommend checking out "Dead or Alive" at the Museum of Arts and Design:


Growing up in a house on a man-made lake in suburban South Florida provided me with more opportunities to explore nature than one might imagine. There were tadpoles to be collected, snapping turtles and water snakes to be fished out of the pool, ducks and geese to be fed, and urban legends to be told of alligators finding their way through the neighborhood canals and into someone’s backyard. There are two specific memories, moreover, that are particularly clear to me, both involving insects. The first incident occurred during a short period of time when I was fascinated with feathers. I badly wanted to be able to collect the duck feathers that could be found around the backyard, but was warned against it because of the very real possibility that they carried lice, and was instead consoled with unnaturally-colored craft store feathers that I nonetheless thought were beautiful. The second memory is an even more pronounced one, involving my mom’s bug collection, which she began for an entomology class, and included a massive horned beetle that terrified me. She would often keep specimens in the freezer, so there was a good chance that at any moment, there would be a dead bug in a jar just waiting to be discovered. These two memories immediately came to mind upon viewing “Dead or Alive,” now on display at the Museum of Arts and Design, an exhibit that attempts to encompass the variety of the natural world, evoking a wide array of reactions along the way.

You can continue reading here.

art in the age of mechanical reproduction

We took a little day trip down to Philly this past weekend because NCECA had taken over the city, and even though we didn't have tickets for the actual conference, we couldn't pass up an opportunity to run around a city that had been completely taken over by ceramic art and artists. We ran through the Philadelphia Musesum of Art as well as some galleries, including the always great The Clay Studio, an especially wonderful pairing of George Nakashima furniture with ceramics from masters of the American Craft Movement at the Moderne Gallery, and the above store/gallery space of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Previously, I had only been familiar with Art in the Age in an online capacity, and it was great to finally be able to check this place out in person. It has a ton of wonderful clothing, accessories and home goods, as well as a small gallery space where we got to see Drawing Dinner, an exhibit featuring artists who have transformed found ceramic wares with their own original paintings, prints and drawings.

Another great plus for this store was ROOT, an alcoholic Root Tea that Art in the Age makes and that there had been a tasting of the night before, making the store smell absolutely incredible. Unfortunately, due to Pennsylvania's liquor laws, you can't purchase ROOT at Art in the Age and we didn't have a chance to stop by a liquor store (although we really wish we had), but if it tastes even nearly as good as it smells, I'm definitely going to have to try and get my hands on a bottle.

Yuken Teruya

I always appreciate beautiful cut-paper artwork, and I'm particularly loving what I've seen from Yuken Teruya. Working with everyday, discarded objects - toilet paper rolls, newspapers, cardboard, disposable paper bags - he creates intricate landscapes that are stunning in their detail. I first saw some of Yuken's work from his Forest Series (first image below) at the Museum of Arts and Design's Second Lives exhibition in 2008, and I have to say that not only were his pieces some of my favorite from this show, but they are even more stunning up close.

(Via Ok Great)

Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection

I have a new review up on the Gallery Crawl website right now for "Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection," which is on display at the New Museum from now until June 6th:


The Dakis Joannou Collection, one of the largest contemporary art collections in the world, began with the purchase of Jeff Koons’ One Ball Equilibrium Tank in 1985, so it’s fitting that Koons was asked to curate “Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection,” now on display at the New Museum. Of course, Koons’s choice to include One Ball Equilibrium Tank in “Skin Fruit” would have made sense if the exhibition were merely meant to be an overview of contemporary artwork from the past two decades, but it isn’t. Yes, for the person who knows very little about contemporary art and wants to see all of the biggest names in one place – there are Cindy Sherman photographs, one of Takashi Murakami’s creepy-sleek sculptures and some Chris Ofili elephant dung paintings – this exhibition is a great place to start. However, Koons’s repulsively-named exhibition seeks to explore the age-old preoccupation with the human body as a vessel and vehicle for experience, but with over 100 works by 50 artists spread out over four floors, “Skin Fruit” can be, at times, a bit overwhelming. Since all of these pieces are from one of the most famous collections of contemporary art in the world, and have won awards and gained exposure prior to this exhibit, it’s sometimes hard to see past their provenance.

Click on over here to continue reading.

Designer of the Month: Philip Johnson

Week 2: Philip Johnson and the Museum of Modern Art

Philip Johnson (1906-2005) was one of those designers whose success and influence was remarkably wide ranging, not only in his career as architect and designer of some of America's greatest landmarks, but also as a tastemaker, artistic patron, curator, and foundering Director of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.[1]

Pictured from left to right: The Museum of Modern Art moves to townhouse at 11 West 53 Street (townhouse parcel is part of present site) in 1932; International Style building designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durrell Stone opens at 11 West 53 Street location in 1939, photo by Eliot Elisofon; New west wing and renovated and improved facilities, designed by Cesar Pelli, open in 1984, photo by Adam Bartoss. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The MoMA was founded in 1929, in response to a perceived cultural need: to to establish an institution devoted exclusively to modern art and dedicated to helping people understand and enjoy "the visual arts of our time."[2] For the first time, there was to be a museum with departments devoted to Architecture, Design, Film and Video, and Photography, in addition to Painting and Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints and Illustrated Books.[3] What's important to keep in mind here is that, as the head of a brand new department in a museum devoted entirely to the modern art of the time, Philip Johnson was able to help influence taste in a way that previously would have been impossible. And of everything that he accomplished in his position of Director of the Department of Architecture and Design, his most influential and well-known exhibition was 1934's Machine Art.[4]

Street sign for the exhibition Machine Art. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. March 5, 1934 through April 29, 1934. Photograph copyright The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Picture walking into one of the architecture galleries at the MoMA. The year is 1934, and the exhibit you've come to see is called Machine Art. You enter the gallery and right there, laid out behind glass cases and on plinths, is an assortment of...familiar, everyday household objects. There are typewriters, pots and pans, propellers, self-aligning ball bearings, springs, and other objects that Johnson chose as "typifying the beautiful in industrial objects."[5] Can you imagine going to see an art exhibit like this in 1934? Today, we're used to entering the Architecture and Design department at the MoMA and seeing examples of industrial design, but back in 1934, these were not the types of things that one expected to see at a museum. Johnson showcased objects that were useful in ordinary life, with no purely ornamental objects included in the display, and with all of the objects chosen for their aesthetic quality.[6]

Self-Aligning Ball Bearing, Sven Wingquist, 1907. Chrome-plated steel, 1 3/4 x 8 1/2" (4.4 x 21.6cm). Manufactured by S.K.F. Industries, Inc., Hartford, CT. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The purpose of Machine Art was to foster what Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the MoMA's Director from it's opening in 1929 to his retirement in 1967, called an "appreciation of their beauty in the platonic sense."[7] In the Machine Art catalog, Johnson and Barr identified abstract and geometric beauty, kinetic rhythms, beauty of material and surface, and visual complexity and function as being central to this aesthetic.[8] The idea behind this exhibition stemmed from the Bauhaus approach of dealing with various media on an equal aesthetic scale, leading to Johnson's conviction that industrial objects of good design merited aesthetic praise and validation.[9] While Johnson resigned from his Director post in 1934 (although he would return to the museum again from 1946-54), it is a result of his conviction and the overwhelming popularity of the Machine Art exhibition that the scope of the department was expanded in 1935 to include not only architecture, but industrial art as well.[10]

Next week, some of Philip Johnson's architectural work!

[1] The Glass House website, "Philip Johnson: Biography," http://philipjohnsonglasshouse.org/history/bios/johnson/ (accessed September 7, 2009).

[2] The Museum of Modern Art website, "Museum History," http://www.moma.org/about/history (accessed September 7, 2009).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Philip Johnson, "Machine Art," in The Industrial Design Reader, ed. Carma Gorman (New York: Allworth Press, 2003), 134.

[7] Ibid., 132.

[8] The Museum of Modern Art website, "Archive Highlights: Philip Johnson discussing the 1934 exhibition Machine Art," http://www.moma.org/learn/resources/archives/archives_highlights_10_1991 (accessed September 7, 2009).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.