I visited the Sidney Mishkin Gallery with a couple of my friends. I forced them to come with me because they thought that the gallery was going to be boring. I also thought it was going to be boring. I was never really into museums and galleries. In high school, trips to museums and galleries were always the most boring trips to everyone. No one ever wanted to go and nothing really ever seems to catch anyone’s interest. As I walked into the gallery, I was expecting another boring trip to a room with old pictures hanging around the walls just like the time I had to go to the same gallery with my English class. I walked in with my friends and immediately they started to catch interest in some of the pictures. I didn’t thoroughly look at any of the pictures. My friends, who are all musically talented, pointed me out to some pictures. They began to ask if I knew the people in the pictures. I didn’t know anyone except Louis Armstrong. Then when I realized that the gallery was actually filled with musicians from the past. I started to look around and also realized that the pictures were mostly candid.
I never liked galleries and museums because the pictures are usually posed or made from a certain person’s perspective made into a picture or painting. The Sidney Mishkin Gallery had pictures taken by Milt Hilton who candidly took pictures of jazz performances. I looked around and stuck around in the gallery to see that the jazz performances by dozens of jazz musicians such as Cab Calloway, Billy Taylor, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Benny Goodman, Thelonious Monk, Gene Krupa, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and Barbara Streisand. My friends knew most of the artists. The candid pictures show that not all art is just one person’s idea but could be seen from a different perspective or point of view from anyone that sees the pictures.
I can’t say that it was best place I’ve ever been to; but the gallery made me see that there are a lot of things. Especially that New York City is not the only place where performances, hobbies, or any kind of action for that matter are happening. Milt Hinton took pictures throughout the whole world. In the photos of the famous jazz artists that were named before, the artists in the pictures are performing on stage. Milt Hinton takes his time as a hobby, besides being a jazz artist himself, to explore of his musician friends, colleagues, and other known artists from New York City to Tokyo. In the end, I think my friends ended up liking the gallery more than I did. I came out of the gallery with a new sense that not all museums and galleries are all the same. My friends were talking about if each of them knew a song from this artist and that artist that they saw a picture of in the gallery. I did like the gallery.
Michael Shin