Each day of the week, I am exploring museums and exhibits, what is written bellow is a personal reflection on the experience and my personal understanding of the art seen that day. After ever museum, I find a public place to journal about what I saw to be later transcribed and edited for the web.
Interested in taking a closer look? My project exists on a separate blog here
(https://gnboulukos.wixsite.com/my-site)
MoMa PS1
MoMa PS1 is a branch of the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown manhattan and has a heavy focus on contemporary art and education. The historic building was once a school house and little has changed from that era, most of the galleries are the size of a classroom, and the exterior remains largely untouched.
Niki de Saint Phalle
During my visit, Niki was the only artist and exhibit showcased giving curators the space to fully unpack her carrier as an artist. Niki’s style and her influence on modern art is striking. Her typography and sculpture are reminiscent of doodles in a child’s notebook, blending moments of great detail with uses of negative space, shape, and form. Her work emotes joy and whimsey but also highlights a woman finding strength and confidence in her struggle. As a child she was subjected to a home life that she later called, ‘hell’ her mother was incredibly violent especially to her younger siblings and Niki later came to terms with her father sexually abusing her. Prior to going to see her show I did not know about her incredibly troubled childhood but it didn’t matter, her pieces effortlessly speak for themselves conveying the story of woman everywhere finding joy in everyday color and shape despite a tense life of trauma and pain. Her early work, not shown in this exhibit, consisted of three dimensional paintings using found objects and toys. The canvases were filled with pockets of pain to be shot at with a gun leaving a bullet hole dripping out color. These works directly related to the culture of violence that Niki grew up in, while her later work discusses the dissociation and escapism of childhood. Her work addresses how the young mind constructs safety nets in times of struggle, in Niki’s case she found safety in loose and whimsical forms of representing the modern woman. When asked about the size and proportions of women in her sculptures she joked that it was great to see a woman towering over men. Her portraits of women exude strength and confidence, with impossible curves that allow for women to take up space, literally. These pieces emerge from the women’s liberation movement of the sixties and showcase how revolutionary art can be, Niki simply uses shape and form to allow women to take up enough space to be seen as strong and feminine.
The Sculpture Center
The Sculpture center is the only museum on my list of 30 entirely dedicated to sculpture. The space is architectural, with a large rusted metal exterior and warehouse ceilings in the main exhibit. As you experience the museum and its architecture, the viewer is encouraged to look at the art as an intersection of sculpture, architecture, and design. The space brings in new shows and highlights new artists a few times a year allowing for a multitude of voices to come out of the space.
My Experience
There were two separate shows on display during my visit, Rindon Johnson’s Law of Large Numbers and a show of a number of different artists examining grief and mortality called, In Practice You May go, But This Will Bring You Back. Johnson’s work on the first floor was a great showcase of an interdisciplinary artist with large scale sculpture and video installation that captured how interconnected we are with some of the large numbers of life. The most prominent piece in the exhibit was a sculpture that resembles the trans american pyramid in San Francisco which fills the entire space. I understand that part of the experience is seeing the piece on its own but it also felt like a waste of a huge gallery to only house one piece.
On the bottom floor of the museum the show encompassed many different types of work nearly on top of each other, giving stark contrast from the nearly empty gallery upstairs. Another one of my frustrations with the space is that none of the pieces were labelled, it makes it hard to research the artist while in the exhibit and it prevents the viewer from understanding necessary context to go with the art. Despite being unaware of the artist or the context in which the pieces were made, the basement gallery was used as a space to interact with the art. In the middle of the gallery there is a hallway with a circular ceiling that had projected video that rotated and shined on all the walls. The impact of the video installation was enhanced by its surroundings giving the viewer a connected to the space and the video. Seeing video in museums during the internet age can feel pointless but the basement gallery at the Sculpture Center reminded me of how video can be showcased in ways that interact with and add to gallery and museum spaces.