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Walking Off the Big Apple
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New York walking journal, neighborhood guides, maps, lists of affordable hotels, and art reviews with entertaining commentary on the cultural life of the city.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'art'
A Cultural Guide to West 57th Street: A Walk and a Map
It began in 1891 with the opening of Carnegie Hall, the symbol of music world success that Andrew Carnegie paid people to construct on 7th Avenue between West 57th and West 56th Streets. A year later, the Art Students League moved into the new Americ...
A Walk Through the Studio Museum in Harlem - Hurvin Anderson: Peter’s Series 2007-2009
During the next three weeks or so, I recommend a visit to The Studio Museum in Harlem to see several exhibitions from the museum's summer season that have been carried over into the fall. Hurvin Anderson: Peter’s Series 2007-2009, the first solo U....
Art "That Doesn't Even Exist": Dave Hickey Explains Ennui; and Upcoming Lectures on Art and Art Criticism
"Do y'all mind if I listen to my Ipod?" asked art critic Dave Hickey in a twang, just before striking the first notes of his freewheeling lecture at the packed SVA Theatre on. W. 23rd St. last Thursday evening. "I just put T. Rex The Slider on it." ...
An Art Walk in Chelsea for a Weekday Afternoon, and Places to Stay for the Night
Walking along W. 22nd Street yesterday, on my way to the galleries on the west side of Chelsea, I realized I had often walked this way before. Looking at the familiar houses and recognizing several stoops, I recalled the series I wrote last December ...
Art Trips Up the Hudson: Day Excursions From New York City to Museums and Historic Sites, with a List of Special Exhibitions for the Quadricentennial
With cool weather returning, September and October are popular months to explore day trips north of the city, especially through sites along the Hudson River Valley. Fall foliage, mountain scenery and a rich artistic and literary heritage contribute ...
Art and Spectacle in Nineteenth Century New York
In the spring of 1857, artist Frederic Church (1826-1900) traveled throughout Ecuador, making sketches of the country's mountainous landscapes. Two years later, working in his studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, he painted a large...
The Tenth Street Studio Building and a Walk to the Hudson River
The Tenth Street Studio Building at 51 W. 10th Street was demolished in 1956 to make way for an apartment building. Though not as high profile as the destruction of McKim, Mead, and White's Penn Station, the Greenwich Village building nevertheless he...
An Unconventional Summer in New York: When Geography, Nature and the Weather Dominated the Conversation
The summer is not technically over until September 22, 2009 at 5:18 p.m. (for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere), the date of the autumnal equinox, but with the nearness of Labor Day (Monday, September 7) and the subsequent start of the school...
The Educated Artist: A Guide to Continuing Education Classes and Workshops in the Fine Arts in New York City, Fall 2009
Living in a city with so much art, it's not surprising that so many people who are not professional artists occasionally like to draw, paint, sculpt, and take pictures. So it shouldn't be surprising that many area arts schools, colleges, and other in...
New York Museum Exhibitions, Fall 2009: A Selected List, with Openings in September, October, and November
Celebrations of abstraction, several fine drawing exhibitions, a major Kandinsky retrospective, a visiting Vermeer, an imaginative filmmaker, and the continuing celebrations of the New York in its 400th year of discovery highlight the fall cultural s...
Finding Balance in MoMA's Sculpture Garden
The goat you see in the picture is Pablo Picasso's She-Goat (1950), a bronze sculpture the artist crafted out of discarded objects, and its grazing area is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at The Museum of Modern Art. On most days when t...
The Time and Place for James Ensor, Unmasked
Artists who express a fondness for masks aren't necessarily kooky. Carnival masks often show up in the art made in joyous seaside cultures whether it's Venice, New Orleans, Rio, or yes, Ostend. A major seaside city that rose to prominence due to the ...
A Visit to Audubon Terrace and Environs
Though far from the state of dilapidated ruin that would excite the fantasy of the modern romantic, the worn facades of the monumental museums that make up Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights look sufficiently weathered to induce a civic form of me...
French Lessons: Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art's New American Wing, and Paris Photographs from the Second Empire
The New American Wing, the second phase of the renovation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American collection, has opened to the public, including the Charles Engelhard Court and the period rooms of decorative arts. In spite of the name, the wing...
Aernout Mik at MoMA: Something is Happening Here, But I Don't Know What It Is
Last weekend, when I stood for two hours with a crowd behind barricades watching the Secret Service and police accompany the First Couple's motorcade to the restaurant on Washington Place for date night, I thought about the video installations I had ...
Drawing Sessions: The Walk-In Ateliers of New York
An accomplished figurative artist friend came to visit this week, and it was quickly decided that we should spend a night drawing from life. While she has taught life drawing for many years and shown her work in solo exhibits, I'm am occasional sketc...
New York Museum Exhibitions, Summer 2009: A List, with Openings in June, July and August
Some people plan trips to New York based on the appeal of blockbuster museum exhibitions, especially the ones that gather work under the same roof for a brief amount of time and that will not likely occur again in one's lifetime. That's a good reason...
Revisiting Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party in the Age of The Da Vinci Code
The Dinner Party, a multimedia work created by Judy Chicago and many volunteers between 1974-1979 and now permanently housed, or perhaps the word is enshrined, inside The Brooklyn Museum, is essential viewing for fans of art. The monumental installat...
WOTBA New York Events Calendar: Kick Off Your Shoes Edition Monday, May 11 - Monday, May 18, 2009
While some people are sadly out of work and many more subsist on freelance wages, with the latter now said to make up 26% of the U.S. workforce, New York is still a workaholic city full of people with incredible drive. One subset of the city, however...
When the Cherry Blossoms Fall: A Walk through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
A walk through a spring garden in New York during cherry blossom season at just the right time can be an exquisite experience, but sometimes personal schedules and the weather can throw off a well-timed visit. If you're slightly late, you're still lu...
Gustave Caillebotte: Impressions of Water
People often lose umbrellas, but I've held onto a special one for many years - a large parapluie (literally, for the rain, in French) with a wooden base and curved handle that upon opening reveals the painting Paris Street, Rainy Day by painter Gusta...
WOTBA New York Events Calendar: Rainy Day Slacker Edition Monday, May 4 - Monday, May 11, 2009
This week appears to be one of those weeks that highlight change and transition, a tentative time between before and after. Nothing seems settled. Students at local universities and colleges are studying for finals, with commencement and graduation c...
WOTBA New York Events Calendar: Monday, April 20 - Monday, April 27, 2009
Though the week begins with rain and patchy fog, our ever-precarious New York weather forecasts call for mostly sunny skies by the end of the week. Some flowering trees of the pinkish-rose variety look ready to unfurl their dainty petals, and with th...
WOTBA New York Events Calendar: Monday, April 13 - Sunday, April 19, 2009
I'm a little preoccupied with tax preparations today. For some reason, I thought April 15 was next weekend, not Wednesday.• I NEED TO STAY HOME AND DO TAXES BUT OTHERS CAN GO TO THIS. Monday, April 13. An Evening with Jeff Koons, Strand Bookstore, ...
WOTBA New York Events Calendar: Monday, April 6 - Sunday, April 12, 2009
Passover and Easter will be celebrated this week, and in New York, it's one of the richest times of the year, spiritually and culturally. The city starts springing to new steps. The culmination of the week is Easter Sunday, a delightful day of celebr...
WOTBA New York Events Calendar: Monday, March 30 - Sunday, April 5, 2009
Before the listings, a bit of news. File this item under "something to keep in mind later." News reports indicate that the planned streetscaping of Broadway from Herald Square to Times Square may force the Macy's Thanksgiving Day route to take a diff...
WOTBA New York Cultural Events Calendar: Monday, March 23 - Sunday, March 29, 2009
A chilly start to this week, but looks like it will gradually warm up by the end. I'm ready for Springtime. What follows is a handful of literary, musical, and artistic events for this lovely Spring week in New York.• LITERARY TRIVIA. Monday, March...
Recent Books on New York City Life and Art: A List for Spring Reading
All I want is a week to browse through bookstores, and although I don't see that week in my near future, I have found time this weekend to scout out some relatively new and interesting New York-oriented books. A few of them deal with the city's every...
WOTBA New York Cultural Events Calendar: Monday, March 9 - Sunday, March 15, 2009
Want to stay focused, happy, and productive? My advice is to not twitter too much, concentrate on lengthier tasks, ignore at least some of the articles on the terrible economy, think like a philosopher, take long walks and eat your vegetables. I lear...
WOTBA New York Cultural Events Calendar: Monday, March 2 - Sunday, March 8, 2009
This Monday is a snow day here in New York, with a major snow storm in progress, yet some people will find in today's wintry conditions an opportune time to visit area parks and museums.On Sunday or Monday of each week, I usually compile a list of te...
