Month: December 2019

This was the first time I visited Riverside Park and the first time I’ve been to Tavern on the Green (though I’ve heard about this place before). Riverside Park is a scenic waterfront public park located in the Upper West Side of New York City. It was first established in 1872 by land condemnation and was developed with Riverside Drive. Riverside Park consists of more than 330 acres of parkland from 59^th to 155^th Street. This park is the home to more than 25 monuments, plaques, and statues reflecting U.S. History.

Riverside Park is the home to numerous monuments and statues. One of the monuments that stood out to me was Grant’s Tomb, which holds the remains of national war hero and former president, Ulysses Grant. Grant’s memorial was chosen to be placed at 122^nd street and Riverside Drive, the site once suggested by George Washington as a possible location for the U.S. Capital. Grant’s Tomb incorporates elements from the tomb of Napoleon, the tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian, and the Tomb of Kind Mausolus at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Grant’s tomb acts as both a city landmark and a national monument.

Another monument that stood out to me at Riverside Park was the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. This memorial remembers the six million Jewish men, women and children killed under Nazi rule and is dedicated specifically to the people of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 who resisted and fought back rather than be sent to the Nazi death camps. There is a plaque placed in the circular plaza of the memorial that reads “This is the site for the American Memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Battle, April-May 1943, and to the 6,000,000 Jews of Europe martyred to the cause of human liberty”. Underneath the cornerstone is a scroll describing the defense of the Warsaw Ghetto stating, “this monument set up in New York is the name of the people of the United States of America stands as a memorial of the unparalleled horror committed by the fiendish inhumanity of the Nazi leaders of the German people during the years 1939 to 1945 in destroying six million Jews, one third of the whole Jewish people”. This monument was significant to me because it reminded me of my visit to the Holocaust Museum a few years ago. To this day, it still baffles a mind that our human race was capable of such cruel inhumanity, and just how vicious our actions can be. The power of our political leaders and propaganda truly influence our society as a whole and this memorial serves as a reminder that we must not repeat something like this in our history.

I actually visited Tavern on the Green on a different day due to the rain, so I decided to bring my mom along with me on my adventure. Tavern on the Green is a popular restaurant located in Central Park. It originated as a sheep fold that was later transformed to a restaurant that proudly served locals, presidents, royalty, artists and actors. This restaurant is most well known for being featured or mentioned in numerous films from Wall Street in 1987 to New York, I Love You in 2008. My mother was most fascinated by the restaurant’s gift shop and even grabbed an overpriced T-shirt on the way out.

Riverside Park and Tavern on the Green definitely serves as a cultural landscape. Riverside Park is the home to much American history, it almost portrays a timeline of the United States. From the Civil War, to the memorial of Ulysses Grant, to the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, it acts as a historical retelling of past events. It reflects on how America has evolved from the past to the present. It represents the struggles and obstacles we had overcome to be where we are today.

This is my first visit to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, and honestly my initial thought was “why is the entrance fee so high?”. It wasn’t until I began to venture around the museum that I realized how culturally valuable every artifact was. The Morgan Library and Museum is located on Madison Avenue, just a short walk from Grand Central and Penn Station. Composed by a complex of buildings, the Morgan Museum actually originated as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan, one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States. Mr. Morgan’s library was built between 1902 and 1906, adjacent to his home in New York. The library consisted of three rooms representing America’s Age of Elegance in an Italian Renaissance styled palazzo. Eleven years after Pierpont’s death, in 1924, his son J.P. Morgan Jr. gifted his father’s dream library into a public institution. In 1928, the Annex building was erected, replacing Pierpont Morgan’s residence. Then later in 1988, J.P. Morgan Jr’s (aka Jack) former residence was also added to the complex. The largest expansion in the Morgan history was completed in 2006 by architect Renzo Piano. Piano added 75,000 square feet to the campus, increasing the exhibition space by more than fifty percent and implemented various visitor amenities, including a new performance hall, a new café and a new restaurant, a shop, a new reading room and collections storage. J.P. Morgan Jr.’s generosity constituted as one of the most momentous cultural gifts in U.S. history.

J.P. Morgan’s Library portrayed his admiration and respect he held for his religion and the arts. The sixteenth-century tapestry over the mantelpiece depicts avarice, one of the seven deadly sins, personified by the mythological King Midas. The ceiling is covered in signs of the zodiac; the arrangement of the signs in his library’s ceiling carry a hidden meaning related to key events in his personal life. There are also portraits from Socrates and Michelangelo, identifying the library as a place for the preservation of art and ideas. In the East room of Morgan’s library, you will find a plethora of medieval illuminated manuscripts, rare printed books, and handwritten manuscripts of composers from the Renaissance to the present day. One item that stood out to me most was Morgan’s copy of a Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455. Gutenberg’s Bible took away the tedious process of copying books by hand and paved the way for an innovated new technology to exchange art and ideas in all spheres of human endeavor.

Renzo Piano’s renovation in 2006 has definitely enhanced my impression of J.P. Morgan and the Morgan Library and Museum. In Morgan’s early years, he strived off international affairs, funneling capital from Europe to America’s emerging economy. As a banker, he stopped a major public panic in 1907 by rallying bankers to supply liquidity to shore up the endangered economy. This led to the establishment of a National Monetary Commission and eventually to the founding of the Federal Reserve. As a collector, he amassed in a full range of artistic and human achievement in Western civilization. Morgan’s exquisite library portrays his appreciation for human achievement in the arts. He is a believer in the value of expressive thinking. From his collection of art, to his ability to think outside the box as a banker, Morgan was a supporter a visionary man. Piano’s renovation to the Morgan Library and Museum just further enhanced the museum, making it more enjoyable to the public perfectly representing J.P. Morgan; an innovational and skillful man.

This is my second visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My first visit was as a freshmen in college for ART 1011 Art History I. I remember visiting specifically for the Egyptian and Greek exhibitions for this class. One of the most standout artwork was the “Venus of Willendorf” clay doll that was on display for a limited time period.

The”Met” is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among seventeen different departments. The main building is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which by area is one of the world’s largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan (Inwood, west of Dyckman) contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened its third location the Met Breuer museum along Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side, which features the museum’s modern and contemporary art programs. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 for the purposes of opening a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. The Fifth Avenue building opened on February 20, 1872, at 681 Fifth Avenue.

After negotiations with the City of New York in 1871, the Met was granted the land between the East Park Drive, Fifth Avenue, and the 79th and 85th Street in Central Park. A red brick and stone “mausoleum” was designed by American architect Calvert Vaux and his partner Jacob Wrey Mould. Vaux’s ambitious building was not well received. The building’s High Victorian Gothic style being considered already “outdated” prior to completion, and the president of the Met considered the project “a mistake”. Within 20 years, a new architectural plan for “fixing” the Vaux building was already being executed. Since that time, many additions have been made, including the distinctive Beaux-Arts(French style) Fifth Avenue facade, Great Hall, and Grand Stairway. These were designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, but completed by his son, Richard Howland Hunt in 1902 after his father’s death. The architectural sculpture on the facade is by Karl Bitter. The wings that completed the Fifth Avenue facade in the 1910s were designed by the McKim, Mead & White firm. The modernistic glass sides and rear of the museum are the work of Roche Dinkeloo. Kevin Roche has been the architect for the master plan and expansion of the museum for the past 42 years. He is responsible for designing all of its new wings and renovations including but not limited to the American Wing, Greek and Roman Court, and recently opened Islamic Wing. The Met measures almost 1⁄4-mile (400 m) long and with more than 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2) of floor space, more than 20 times the size of the original 1880 building. The museum building is a total of over 20 structures, most of which are not visible from the exterior. The City of New York owns the museum building and contributes utilities, heat, and some of the cost of guardianship. The Charles Engelhard Court of the American Wing features the facade of the Branch Bank of the United States, a Wall Street bank that was facing demolition in 1913.

In my personal views, I assess The Met as both a cultural and obviously an architectural landscape. The artworks from around the world contributes to the cultural part, while the long history of work the museum went through to get to its current state is amazing! I focused on the architect of the museum in this visit due to its history. Prior to doing my own research, I did not know the largest art museum was right here in New York City, and that it was the third most visited museum in the WORLD. This blows my mind as I pass by it frequently as I stroll by Central Park. It also makes me regret to not visiting it more often, as the price of admission went from pay what you wish to set prices.

The last time I visited the MoMa I wasn’t legally able to drink nor purchase cigarettes! It was a field trip in my teen years during highschool for an art history class, so my memory of the exhibitions and the museum itself was very vague. The MoMa is located in midtown Manhattan, right below the beginning of Central Park, and several blocks away from Radio City Music Hall & The St. Patrick Cathedral. The museum was closed for renovation from June 15th to October 21st 2019. Upon its completion of $450 million of renovation, the MoMa fully opened to the public on October 21st 2019. MoMA has added 47,000 square feet of gallery space, bringing the museum’s total art-filled space to 175,000 square feet spread across six floors. The expansion has allowed for even more of the museum’s collection of nearly 200,000 works to be displayed. They stated that the goal of this renovation is to “help expand the collection and display of work by women artists, Latinx artists, Black artists, Asian artists, and other artists from marginalized communities.”

Upon reaching the MoMa, one of the new and most surprising additions that came out of the renovation is that MoMA now offers a free art space on the first floor, open to the public. Two exhibitions are currently on view, “Energy” and a solo exhibition from painter Michael Armitage. They kept all the classic art works fro 1880s-1940s on the 5th floor of the museum.  Some examples would be Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”, and “The Olive Trees”, Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, and Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” are all on display on the same floor.

In my views, the renovation of the museum was a successful one. The art space expanded even with its limited space available. The free exhibition on the ground floor will definitely help attract larger crowds, and with a new flagship store, dining options (The Modern, Terrace Cafe, and Cafe 2), and expanded hours, there are even more ways to make the most of your visit. With the addition of the interactive “The Paula and James Crown Creativity Lab”, which is a new and experimental space to explore ideas, questions, and art processes that arise from our collection and exhibitions. You can drop in anytime to participate in lively conversations, engage with artists, make art, reflect and relax, and find suggestions for exploring the Museum. Overall I will assess MoMa’s new architectural identity as both a cultural and architectural landscape.