The Art of Frames

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend a unique workshop on frames, sponsored by the Appraisers Association. The morning session was held at the studio of Eli Wilner & Co., a company that specializes in restoration work on historical frames and reproduction historical frames. In this first picture I took, one of the studio workers showed us a frame made by American architect and designer Stanford White (1853-1906), and he explained the difference between the sections that were carved in wood and the other parts that were made from compo (or composition), a plaster-like substance that uses molds to make decorative components. You can see the sample molds as blue strips in the lower right. The second picture below is a detail of a frame being hand-carved by one of the skilled wood carvers. These days they use computers to generate the patterns on paper, which are then applied to the wood, enabling the carver to understand what sections are carved out and what is left behind. We also learned more about the process of gilding frames, and I participated in the opportunity to apply gold leaf to a wooden frame. You use a special application brush that lifts the gold leaf almost magnetically and then you gently apply it to the water-brushed surface of the frame. After it dries it is buffed to make it shine. I'm actually abbreviating the process. Technically, there is wood, then gesso, then liquid clay or bole, on top of which the gold leaf is applied. Needless to say, I was amazed at how much more complex the making of a frame actually is. During the afternoon session we had a fascinating "frame history lesson" with Suzanne Smeaton, a specialist in the history and valuation of American frames.

Because of this workshop, I have to say I think I can now look for some general signs of carving or compo, what the color of bole coming through the gilding may mean, and what the difference between a miter joint and a miter joint with a spline is. Before I went to this workshop, I knew zilch about frames, except what I liked, and it has so inspired me to learn more that I'm actually reading Timothy Newbery's Frames and Framings in the Ashmolean Museum (2002). Although the whole day was geared toward appraisers, as the market for historical frames has increased, it was very interesting to go as a curator because I feel it is important for me to consider at times the frames along with the historical paintings in the collection at Columbia University. Without proper documentation and provenance, it is very difficult to know if a particular frame is the genuine one for a painting, but at least I think I can now do a basic survey to determine if a frame is at least historically close to the time period of the work of art itself. Putting this new skill into practice is going to take a lot of time, of course, so I am not making any claims to be an expert, but I do hope I can at least now do some quick, general assessments over time.

Taking this further into aesthetics, I am now also finding myself interested in actually looking closer at frames in museums. For instance, if you look at the glorious frame above, which is from the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can see that it is gilded and carved wood. The tombstone information for this frame also states that it is made of oak, from France, and dates from ca. 1690. During the reign of Louis XIV, French frames reached an apogee in design and style, as did all fine and decorative arts under the influence of the "Sun King." The gilding on this frame would have enhanced the presentation of the art work, particularly in candlelight, giving the work a beautiful glow. This is an ogee frame, meaning that, seen from a cross-section, it has an S-curve that rises from the outer portion and slopes inward toward the picture. The effect of this would have been to draw one's attention into the picture plane, enhancing the intended three-dimensional effect of whatever painting would have been in there at the time. The detail you see here of the lower left corner shows well the remarkable skill in the wood carving, although obviously there is some noteworthy wear and tear considering its age.

Aside from the materiality and history of frames, it did occur to me, over the course of the day, how frames are both painterly and sculptural objects. Because they are so closely attached (literally) to paintings (or photographs, drawings, etc.), we perceive them as part of the two-dimensional art world. But, in fact, the way they are carved or molded follows very closely the methods that are followed in a sculptor's studio. Frames thus are related to fine art, but they are also decorative objects. Their intent is to harmonize a painting with an interior space. These days we are accustomed to seeing framed painting on museum walls, but the long history of easel paintings reminds us that these works were intended for the home, and thus the frame was needed to enhance or decorate the interior space. Frames also change over time based on the taste of an owner. Hence, more modern-looking frames occasionally have been added to historical pictures to make them more appropriate to styles like mid-century modernism. The trend these days, of course, is to return paintings to period frames whenever possible, and places like Eli Wilner keep in stock thousands of actual historical frames from the past for exactly that purpose. But frames are complex creations. They have an in-between status, being two-dimensional and three-dimensional, painterly and sculptural, fine and decorative, all at the same time. Indeed, thinking about them from this perspective makes us realize they are fascinating artistic objects worthy of their own further study and examination. Consider that the next time you walk into a museum and look at your favorite painting by Rembrandt or Van Gogh. You be surprised to discover how its frame impacts the work you see before you.

UPDATE 10/4/15: No sooner had I published this blog post, when Hyperallergic published this article/review by Allison Meier about French frames from the 17th and 18th centuries. Warning readers/viewers to "prepare to be blinded by the gilding that encircles each work like an overwrought halo," Meier reviews the free exhibition currently being held on this topic at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. It looks like an interesting exhibition, but alas I won't be able to get to it before it closes in January.

Art Exhibitions of 2014

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a few hours so I could finally see a number of exhibitions they have on at present. I confess I felt rather nostalgic walking through the galleries, remembering fondly my 7 years of having worked there, reinforced by lunch with my curatorial friend JD and coffee with my former library colleagues and friends CD & SP. The current exhibitions are all excellent. The Renaissance tapestry show of the work of Flemish artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst will blow your mind when you turn the corner and see all the gorgeous tapestries installed down a long corridor. Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire is luxurious and fascinating for what could be a morbid topic. The room-installation of Thomas Hart Benton's 1930-31 mural America Today is amazing--you can almost hear jazz playing as the characters sway from one American scene to another. But the greatest part of my day was the exhibition on the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo's Adam, seen here, fully restored. In 2002 the pedestal for the sculpture collapsed and, horrifyingly, the ca.1490-95 sculpture shattered. After 12 painstaking years of intensive study, and utilizing new technologies, the object conservators were able to restore this life-sized statue to near-perfect condition. The sculpture is an exquisite piece, clearly an influence on Michelangelo's David, and important as an early idealized male nude sculpture in Renaissance art. The videos on the website and in the gallery amaze you to see how they successfully conserved and restored the sculpture.

This year the best exhibitions for me were all on sculpture. In addition to the Adam just mentioned, the Met put on two excellent sculpture exhibitions. One was on the works of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875), who reinvigorated French sculpture during the Second Empire with a Baroque-style energy that excited and scandalized people of the day. Running earlier in the year at the Met was another sculpture exhibition, The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925, an excellent show that aesthetically changed one's mind about works you once might have considered to be little more than living room kitsch. At Columbia's Wallach Art Gallery, a great sculpture show was put on about Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973), about which I blogged here. Finally, at the Yale Center for British Art, the long-awaited Victorian sculpture exhibition there brought together about 130 works that changed one's mindset about what defines sculpture and how it can be made. The show also demonstrated the power of the curatorial eye with a fine selection of finely-crafted statues, reliefs, and decorative objects in an array of media. The first work one encountered in the exhibition, as seen in my photo here, exemplifies the surprises of the show. This is a Minton ceramic elephant measuring 84 inches in height, part of a pair, that was first exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. I have a review of this exhibition being published in the spring, so I will share more when it comes out, but for now, here is what I wrote about this gorgeous majolica elephant: "The elephant reveals a high degree of craftsmanship that demonstrates the successful union of man and industry, but it also has a deeper meaning. Displayed as part of a cultural parade, its empty howdah decorated in Mughal textile designs and awaiting a royal occupant, the tamed elephant represents the jewel in Queen Victoria’s crown: India and all its riches. This work in the foyer thus foreshadowed others in the galleries of Sculpture Victorious: masterpieces of human and industrial design, and socio-political symbols of the British Empire."

If I had to choose my favorite exhibition of the year, however, it would be, without a doubt, Kara Walker's sugar-sculpture installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: A Subtlety: or, the Marvelous Sugar Baby. Walker is one of my favorite contemporary artists, and in this work she went beyond anything she had done before. Commissioned by Creative Time as a temporary installation, before the building was scheduled to be demolished, Walker designed a massive, sugar-coated, sphinx-like creature with the body and facial features of an "Aunt Jemima" type, to remind visitors of the intricate ties between the West's love of sugar and its intertwined history of slavery. The work was powerful and had lines of people waiting to get in. A group of friends of mine all went together to see it in June, and we were mesmerized. There are numerous images online that people took, so I'm only sharing here one I took to show the scale of the sculpture in the warehouse and the diminutive nature of the people around it. As time passed, the sugar gradually changed color, and the surrounding molasses "little black Sambo" boys melted and fell apart. After you were in the warehouse a while, the smell of the sugar and molasses became so sickeningly sweet you had to leave and get fresh air. This was all part of the artist's intent, to create a temporal, multi-sensory sculptural environment. When the show closed, most of the sculpture was destroyed (what had not disintegrated on its own already), although there is at present at Sikkema Jenkins an after-show that exhibits her sketches and designs, and an arm Walker kept as her own personal souvenir. This sculptural installation was truly a tour de force of artistic achievement, for the artist and the audience.

Aside from sculpture exhibitions, one major art exhibition highlight for me was Golden Visions of Densatil: A Tibetan Buddhist Monastery at the Asia Society. This historical monastery and its Buddhist treasures was constructed in the 12th century but destroyed during China's Cultural Revolution. The installation included discovered and recovered treasures alongside historical photos, but the most amazing part of this exhibition was having the opportunity to witness the monks make a sand mandala. This was an ongoing event for 5 days with 5 monks. You would expect it to be solemn, quiet, and peaceful. On the contrary, the monks were very engaging with visitors, including taking photos with them. They often laughed too, but then quickly would return to their back-breaking, eye-straining work of constructing this mandala. The most amazing moments were when they would help one another, knowing that one had more expertise than another, and they could share in the responsibility of building this sand mandala together. Their humanity made this a very spiritual experience. You can watch a great time-lapse video of them making the sand mandala here.

Other exhibitions from this year worth noting included:
** Pre-Raphaelite Legacy at the Met Museum, a small but groundbreaking show for them to finally acknowledge the accomplishments of these Victorian artists;
** Beauty's Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America at The New-York Historical Society, about which I blogged here;
** At the Guggenheim Museum, the fantastic multi-media exhibition on Futurism, Italy's modernist art movement, and the riveting photographs of African-American feminist artist Carrie Mae Weems;
** Florine Stettheimer at the Lenbachhaus in Munich (although I guess technically I have only seen it "in process" and will have to wait until early January to see the final, full exhibition!);
** And my dear friend and colleague Meera Thompson at Atlantic Gallery.

I would be remiss if I forget to mention my own two small, curated exhibitions--15 Minutes: Andy Warhol's Photographic Legacy and Off the Grid: Beyond the Noise--both of which I thought were rather well done...if I may say so myself.

UPDATE (12/14/14): One of the blockbuster exhibitions of the year, that previously had opened in London and is now on here in NYC is Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs. Everyone I know who has seen it loves the show, and it has been on my "must see" list, but I dread going to MOMA because of the crowds so I wasn't sure what to expect. Fortunately, AA and I decided to make the trek there today and it actually wasn't as bad of a crowd as I anticipated. The exhibition is very good, demonstrating well how Matisse used paper cut-outs and collage as a form of painting unto itself. It is a smart show about materiality, color, composition, and artistic technique. We also had a chance to pop into the Robert Gober exhibition. He is one of those contemporary artists I typically don't appreciate much, but this retrospective helped change my mind a bit with his theme-and-variation sculptural objects and large-scale installation spaces. It was all rather tongue-in-cheek and clever, I must say, so I do have a better appreciation for Gober now.

Art Properties in the News

My department of Art Properties has been profiled in an excellent write-up in the Columbia University news by Eve Glasberg. You can read the article and see a slideshow of a few highlights from the collection by clicking here. The image above is a Buddhist sculpture from the collection: Head of a Disciple, 550-577, from China, Northern Qi dynasty, limestone with traces of pigment (S1135). The article gives a good overview of the University's art collections, and how my team and I have been changing the mission to one based more on curricular integration, educational programs, and international exhibition loans. They also filmed us reinstalling art works from the Sackler Collections in the Faculty Room of Low Library, in which I narrate a little bit about these works and the recent graduate seminar in Chinese art in which students researched and studied works from this collection.

Review: The Hare with Amber Eyes

I just finished reading a superb book some of you may know: The Hare with Amber Eyes by the ceramics artist Edmund de Waal. It was highly recommended by a former student of mine who was of retired age, and I'm so glad she recommended it. The book is the story of the author's family's ownership of 264 netsuke, including the work you see here, a beautiful ivory hare with eyes inlaid with amber buffalo horn. For those who don't know what netsuke are, they are finely carved and polished Japanese figurines and sculptural objects no bigger than the size of your hand. Often carved in ivory or boxwood, they were originally made as toggles to hold the string that attached a purse/satchel to the Japanese kimono and obi. (You can download for free the Met Museum's excellent collection catalogue of netsuke here.) By the late 1800s, they had become collector's items not only in the West through the influence of japonisme but also in Japan as a form of its cultural past. De Waal's story recounts how his ancestors first acquired the netsuke from a dealer in Paris in the 1870s, and then continues the story of the netsuke as they passed on to relatives in Vienna during the World Wars, then post-War Tokyo, and modern-day London. But the story is not just about these netsuke. It's a cultural biography of his Jewish ancestors, the Ephrussi family from Russia, how they made their fortune and settled throughout Europe, and how they engaged with the art and literature of their day. It's not all high life society, however. The author also tells with pathos the trials his family endured in a world of anti-Semitism and Nazism, and how his family lost everything because of Hitler and the persecution of Jews at the time.

This book is one of those rare stories that beautifully links art and culture with personal experience. De Waal asks questions such as how people from the past felt about life and art, and how they felt to hold these beautifully carved netsuke generation after generation, hand-to-hand, a symbol of a family saga that reaches backward to the unknown makers of these figures, and forward to the author's own children. His personal experience as a craftsman and artist make his telling of the story even more poignant. To quote de Waal: "How things are made, how they are handled and what happens to them has been central to my life for over thirty years. ... How objects embody memory--or more particularly, whether objects can hold memories--is a real question for me. This book is my journey to the places in which this collection lived. It is my secret history of touch." To learn more about Edmund de Waal, his writing, and his exquisite minimalist ceramics and installation pieces, go to his website at http://www.edmunddewaal.com/.

Chinese Bronzes & Korean Ceramics

Whenever people ask me about my job and I tell them I'm the Curator of Art Properties at Columbia University, they inevitably ask me the most obvious question: "What do you do?", or the derivative, "What does that mean?" However, I enjoy most this question-phrased-as-a-statement that requires more thought: "Tell me what a typical day is like for you." The trouble with responding to that is there is no such thing as a "typical day" for me. Sometimes I'm dealing with loans (external exhibitions or on-campus displays). Other days I teach a class about a selection of artwork chosen by a professor. I sometimes meet with potential donors and then process their donations through a variety of channels. I'm frequently in meetings (a LOT of meetings) and dealing with email (a LOT of email) on more things than I can bother relaying. I try to do as much research on art objects in the collection for a variety of projects as I can. Preservation of art objects is also a regular concern. With a universal art collection such as ours, in 1 week I have been known to deal with a public monumental sculpture from 1967, a Dutch portrait from 1626, Polaroids by Andy Warhol, and ancient Chinese bronzes. One of the greatest parts of this job, however, is working directly with the objects themselves, and when I have time to be creative, arranging an installation of these objects can just turn out to make my day a laborious, but fun-filled one.

Today was just one of those days. This semester my department is working with Prof. Robert Harrist and 9 PhD students for a seminar entitled "Chinese Art at Columbia." I was the impetus behind this in that I first presented to him last semester the idea of having students study objects in the collection, especially the works from China on display in our gallery in Low Library. The installation in this room quite literally had not been touched in over 40 years, which means no one had ever done research on them since they were donated by Arthur M. Sackler (yes, that Sackler!) from the 1960s and 1970s. This graduate seminar has begun, and the students are doing their first assignment already, researching and writing about some of our bronze vessels from the Shang and Zhou dynasties (ca.1650-ca.250 BCE). Today, my staff and I moved about 100 objects out of the main gallery space, put most of them in storage, and then reinstalled the Shang and Zhou bronzes in display cases near the seminar room so the students have easier access to them. The photograph you see at the bottom is the new display we set up for the Shang dynasty ritual bronzes. We then did a temporary installation in the original gallery space, putting in 9 cases a selection of Korean ceramics that are also from the Sackler donation. The photograph above is what 3 of those display cases now look like. When the seminar is over, the research by the students will help us reenvision a new installation in the gallery for the Chinese art, with proper signage to educate people about the works, and make them all look better and more up-to-date with modern backdrops.

I confess that I'm extremely proud with how it all worked out today. The installation of the bronzes and ceramics in the cases all came out even better than I had hoped. It was a full day of work to get it all accomplished, and LGS and LV (my staff) did a wonderful job packing and moving everything back and forth between buildings, but it was definitely worth it. We're Art Properties. And we rock!

Review: Grayson Perry, Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman

Last month after I posted about upcoming Fall Exhibitions 2011, I discovered another show I had to see when I was in London, Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum. Readers may recall Perry first making an appearance on bklynbiblio earlier this year when I wrote about his recent election to the Royal Academy as a printmaker. Perry works in different media, but is best known as an artist who makes ceramic pots and vases. He won the highly-acclaimed Turner Prize in 2003 as well. However, he's probably most notoriously known as a transvestite named Claire, and frequently shows up for events like the annual RA dinner dressed in frocks he himself designed. To me, there is something innately British about Perry, a theatricality to his persona in and out of drag that fits into the longer trajectory of British drama, reaching as far back as Shakespeare and beyond. This may seem far-fetched to some--after all, he is a 51-year-old man wearing baby-doll frocks and bonnets--but Perry sees his art as part of history, and thus Claire is more than just a put-on character but an important part of his creative personality. Because of this, I believe Perry is a more difficult sell in the U.S., where no major museum as yet has given him an exhibition (although based on its recent history of solo contemporary artists from the U.K., the Brooklyn Museum would be a perfect venue).  The fact is, Americans are uncomfortable with “trans”-anything, and in the ongoing fight for social equality in marriage and the military, even many gays and lesbians are uncomfortable with "trans" culture, preferring their own “trans”-gressive behavior not to challenge too much the easy-to-identify gay/straight sexual binary.

Perry is a queer artist. He blurs the boundaries of gender and sexuality, but then also pushes the definitions of topics like art, craft, religion, history, and the museum, and ultimately points out the foibles of personal identity as well. And yet (as my friend CC pointed out as we walked through the exhibition) unlike the White Cube commercial sensationalism that his contemporary Damien Hirst exudes, what is so striking about Perry is that you can actually understand him. He may be conceptual at times, but he works with real art objects that the masses can appreciate: ceramic pots (such as the one here, The Rosetta Vase, 2011), cast iron sculptures, prints and drawings, tapestries, and costumes. Hirst favors esoterically titled vitrines with dead sharks or large jewel-encrusted skulls. The very nature of Perry's art, with an intended focus on craft, demonstrates how real of an artist he is, even when he shows up for openings dressed as Claire.

Following the current trend in museums to host artists-as-curators, Perry was given the opportunity to rummage through the seven-million-plus holdings of the British Museum. Director Neil MacGregor has described the show as “eccentrically personal yet infinitely universal in its sense of humanity and commonality.” Rather than use his art to respond to these objects as other artists have done in the past, Perry unites them, demonstrating their commonality in the longer history of civilization. In an interview for the August 2011 issue of the British Museum Journal, he says that he sees himself as a one-man civilization, although he astutely notes that “no civilisation is an island and there’s always an interplay with other civilisations.” In this spirit, he has brought together 200 objects from the BM's collection, all representing Africa, Native America, the Pacific Islands, China, Anglo-Saxon England, and other cultures, along with 35 of his own original works, some premiering for the first time. Like all civilizations, his also has a religion and he announces to the visitor upon entering that his chief god is Alan Measles. Who is Alan Measles? Why, he's a teddy bear that Perry has had since he was a child who has come to represent Claire's alter-ego.

Now, if you're rolling your eyes and thinking this guy is a crack pot, I beg to differ. Sure, it seems a bit inane, but the fact of the matter is, you have to laugh aloud at all of this, and then you realize that Perry is laughing along with you, but in that "Britty" (i.e. British witty) sarcastic way that Americans will never be able to master. Claire/Alan Measles...this is Perry queering our understandings about civilization and religion as we (think we) know it. CC and I laughed aloud through the exhibition. We were joined by a few others in the know, people who realized not to take any of it too seriously. But it wasn't all fun and games. At the same time, we could not stop talking about his work and his ideas, how he manages to make the artifacts of past civilizations relevant to us here and now, not just as sanitized detritus of the past.

Returning to Alan Measles, however, this was really an opportunity for him to shine, for Claire is largely missing from this exhibition (probably the only disappointment with the show). Or rather it was Alan Measles himself who apparently has decided this. After all, he has his own blog where he writes that 2011 is his year to reveal himself, following the examples of Christ, Buddha, and Mohamed before him. But Alan Measles is no ordinary god: “One of my core messages is that I want people to think about what fantasies they are holding on to and to hold their beliefs lightly. If I am a God of anything, I am God of a doubt. Pretty useless for a religion I know, but I feel the world has enough zealots and people attached to being right already.” In a world where religious followers teleologically rely on texts written thousands of years ago to justify living in 2011, it is refreshing to consider that maybe doubting can be even stronger than asserting. (All hail the great Alan Measles!)

The exhibition opens with Perry telling the visitor not to think too hard. He’s not an art historian, just a craftsman, and so he introduces us to his imaginary world and invites the visitor to participate in its artifacts along with those from other world cultures. Arranged thematically, there are sections dedicated shrines, pilgrimages and badges, maps, and the spiritual dimension to sexuality. On the theme of Magick, Perry writes: “Part of my role as an artist is similar to that of a shaman or witch doctor. I dress up, I tell stories, give things meaning and make them a bit more significant. Like religion, this is not a rational process, I use my intuition. Sometimes our very human desire for meaning can get in the way of having a good experience of the world. Some people call this irrational unconscious experience spirituality. I don’t.”  In wall texts such as these, we encounter over and over succinct yet intelligent explanations for how the artist-craftsman throughout time has not only participated in the making of the visual identifiers of civilizations, but in fact has superimposed his/her supremacy on them because their handiwork is all that survives. He invites us to ponder who  these artist-craftsmen were. We will never know, and this is Perry’s point. The unknown craftsman of the show’s title elevates the importance of these unnamed masters and shows how anonymity has the power to create the most important features of a civilization.

From here the visitor begins to see that Perry actually is taking him/her on an actual pilgrimage. The very museum in which they have been viewing these cultural artifacts all this time now becomes a temple to the past and present. These objects that we see inside vitrines and raised on pedestals aren’t just representations of long-dead peoples but mirrors that show us who we are as well. The fact that so many have come from tombs now plays into the title of his show as well, for the BM (and all museums) are not only temples but also tombs in which we excavate an understanding of the past and how it relates to us.

Many of Perry’s individual art works are simply beautiful. His vases are undoubtedly my favorite works.  The first one seen upon entering is You Are Here, a vase in which Perry envisions different types of visitors to his exhibition, suggesting in bubbles over their heads the many reasons why they may have shown up, from having a free ticket or needing to write a school report, to the social critic who declares “I need to have my negative prejudices confirmed.” Perry's Shrine to Alan Measles could pass for a Tang Dynasty tomb sculpture, except for its contemporary references, dangling  pictures of Princess Diana and the Twin Towers. His cast-iron sculptures were new for me and simply exquisite with their rust-colored sheen. These included Alan Measles on Horseback, a primitivist Don Quixote-like figurine, and the pathos-driven paired figures Our Father, Our Mother, who carry the weight of all civilizations in baskets and satchels on their broken bodies. The tour de force of the exhibition itself, however, is the final piece in the last gallery, appropriately entitled The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. A new work made for this exhibition, it is rusty cast-iron funerary ship decorated with casts of numerous objects seen throughout the exhibition itself, from African figure heads to Asian shrines. At the heart of it is a piece of 250,000-year-old flint, the very first tool that allowed an unknown craftsman to make the first product of civilization.

Perry’s exhibition is simply brilliant. I can't say it enough. There is an entrance fee, which may make some people balk, but it is absolutely worth it. Despite his warning not to think about it too much, you cannot help but ponder the associations he has made and how his own beautiful work complements and relates to the long history of artifacts that surround you. But at the same time, the absurdity of Claire/Alan Measles makes you realize you truly do need to take it all in stride, and to laugh—yes, laugh in a museum!—whenever you think it is appropriate. Perry isn't so intellectual about his art that he wants you to forgo enjoying it. On the contrary, he'd rather you simply enjoy it first and perhaps never think about it at all. That of course is almost impossible for art historians like CC and me, but fortunately we were able not only to get excited about his messages, but also laugh our way through the exhibition at his intentional queering of everything you might come to expect from art and the museum.

The exhibition is on until February 19, 2012. There is an exhibition catalogue as well. Be sure to visit the exhibition website where you can see a short video about Perry's preparations for the exhibition.

The New American Wing

I don't usually write about The Metropolitan Museum of Art to avoid any potential conflict of interest as an employee there, but at times I will make an exception. After two years of major construction, the Charles Engelhard Court and the period rooms of the American Wing Galleries have reopened this week. The wait has been worth it. The courtyard looks spectacular. The major highlight is that many pieces of American sculpture are now be displayed in a way that one can walk around them, as figures in the round should be displayed. Natural lighting from the wall of windows brilliantly illuminates the sculpture and the space brilliantly. The period rooms are fascinating and arranged so that you walk through time from the 1600s into the early 1900s. There are also now computerized information kiosk screens in many galleries that allow you to press on objects so you can learn more about them. All in all, it's a spectacular repositioning of American material culture in a way that's user friendly and feels very 21st century, yet preserves the historicity of the objects and environment. Here is a link to the museum's webpage about the galleries and period rooms. Here's a link to a review and a slideshow of images from The New York Times. The museum's YouTube page has a few videos on it, and I've embedded two of them here. The first one is of director Thomas P. Campbell and curator Morrison H. Heckscher discussing some of the sculpture and the new space. The second is the ribbon cutting ceremony with First Lady Michelle Obama, which was held this past Monday, May 18, 2009. (Heightened security restricted most staff from attending, but I was at a workshop at Yale that day anyway.) This reopening of the American Wing Galleries is the second phase in a three-part renovation. The first part opened in 2007, and the last part (the main painting and sculpture galleries) will reopen in 2011.