Culture Corner

Culture Corner – June 2014

2014 06-15 Finding Viviane MaierAlthough I skipped last month, this month’s culture explorations definitely make up for it. From my NYC trip which I wrote about last week and you’ll see a lot of pictures of below to my deCordova trip earlier this week and more I have planned over the next few days/weeks.

I’m not going to write much about the photo sets other than where they’re from and first impressions of the museums/experiences. I probably should’ve written this last week when it was all still fresh, but oh well. This first picture is of the postcard and ticket stub from the documentary Finding Vivian Maier. I’ve wanted to see this film for AGES and was very glad that the IFC was still showing it. It was worth every penny and made me even more excited about her as an artist. If you don’t know her story or her photographs I definitely recommend reading more about her above or at the Wikipedia page.

One of the things I love about NYC are the things you randomly stumble across and that’s what this first section is:

Some of these I went looking for, like The Strand Book Store, others I just came across randomly like the Charles Scribner’s Sons building (now a Sephora) and the numerous pieces of art around the city including the two sculptures in Madison Square Park. They looked like drawings brought to life!

Other things in NYC you go looking for like the NYC Public Library, which was so big it was overwhelming. And I don’t even mean the stacks I just mean the building itself.

Or you want to visit the world-class museums like MoMA, with masterpieces like Van Gogh’s Starry Night why wouldn’t you visit them? I “discovered” the artist on the right, Umberto Boccioni, there and was ecstatic to see many more of his works at the next museum. On the right is his piece Dynamism of a Soccer Player.

And we even went to the stuffy Guggenheim:

I call it stuffy as they were super retentive about photographs. Tara was telling me their super secretive and I’ve only read a bit about the museum. It was by far one of the coolest museums I’ve ever been in, but the guards yelling no photographs every two-to-three minutes really put a dent in it for me. I snapped the picture of the Boccioni sculpture before I realized it was a no photograph museum and I risked getting yelled at again when I snapped the bottom left photo (but it was worth it). The museum is a giant ramp and the way you move through it was incredible at showing the evolution of one type of art, in this case it was Italian Futurism.

And last but not least I swung by two neat places:

Mood from Project Runway and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. I didn’t go into Mood, as I was by myself, but it was still pretty cool to see the exterior window in the photograph! The Leslie-Lohman was interesting and was more of a gallery than a museum. I went to see the exhibit After Our Bodies Meet: From Resistance to Potentiality and it was definitely a different type of exhibit and I appreciated the unique perspective. I did snap a picture of this piece, Shebacca at the top, but forgot to put it on Instagram and later decided it was probably for the best. In addition it was awesome to see an actual Lavendar Menace t-shirt and buttons from the early 70s and the feminist separatist movements that were happening. I’ll probably post one or more of those pictures when I read the book of the same title, but different meaning.

Leave a Reply