Tag: art

Oscar Hammerstein II Farm

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”In 1941, during a lull in his career, Oscar Hammerstein II and his wife, Dorothy, came to Bucks County looking for a retreat from New York City. While driving up the hill to Highland Farm, Dorothy spotted a rainbow and sensed this would be a magical place for her professionally floundering husband and their family. The move proved immensely wise as the bucolic countryside truly inspired Mr. Hammerstein. Legend is told that he was so moved by the views of cattle and corn fields in the early morning that he was inspired to write, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” the opening song for Oklahoma!, on the front porch. Arguably, his most famous works were written while residing at Highland Farm including South Pacific, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music.

The Hammerstein family lived at Highland Farm for 20 years. During their residence, the home was constantly alive with many guests and children. Mr. Hammerstein was known to fly different colored flags as a message to the local children. One said, “Come and swim.” Another meant, “Let’s play tennis.” And still another said, “Stay away today.”

Oscar died at The Farm in August 1960 and was buried in New York. After his death, Dorothy moved from Highland Farm and sold it a year later. By the mid-1980’s, Mary and John Schnitzer had purchased the home, renovated it, and operated a Bed and Breakfast for almost 15 years. Mary sold Highland Farm to Shawn Touhill, a local developer, in 2003.

In 2007, Highland Farm was purchased by Doylestown resident, Christine Cole. While looking for a Bucks County barn to renovate, she was shown Highland Farm and instantly fell in love. Her business plans changed and she embraced the idea of becoming an innkeeper and starting a new venture. She immediately began remodeling and redecorating the home.” [source]

Each guest room has a theme dedicated to one of Hammerstein’s musicals; ours was the South Pacific, once the family’s master bedroom.

While the house is still operating as a B&B, the innkeepers have formed a nonprofit organization in an effort to raise funds to restore the property and build a museum and theatre education centre, in the premises.

Highland Farm B&B – The Oscar Hammerstein Museum

Doylestown, PA

February 14-16, 2020

Afterwork @MoMA

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Reaping the benefit of having MoMA at walking distance between home & work.

  • Dorothea Lange || Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona. November 1940
  • Dorothea Lange || Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle. June 1938
  • Dorothea Lange || Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. March 1936
  • Dorothea Lange || Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. March 1936
  • Dorothea Lange || A Destitute Mother: The Type Aided by the WPA. March 1936
  • SITE, James Wines || Highrise of Homes, project (Exterior perspective)1981

    James Wines, a founding member in 1970 of the SITE (Sculpture In The Environment) architectural group, described the Highrise of Homes project as a “vertical community” to “accommodate people’s conflicting desires to enjoy the cultural advantages of an urban center, without sacrificing the private home identity and garden space associated with suburbia.” The plan calls for a steel-and-concrete, eight-to-ten-story, U-shaped building frame erected in a densely populated urban area. The developer would sell lots within this frame, each lot the site for a house and garden in a style chosen by the purchaser. The result would be a distinct villagelike community on each floor, with interior streets. A central mechanical core would serve these homes and gardens, while shops, offices, and other facilities on the ground and middle floors would provide for the residents’ needs.

    Developers considered Battery Park City, New York, as a possible location for the project, but it was never built.
  • Marlene Dumas || Chlorosis (Love sick), 1994 [detail]
  • Marlene Dumas || Chlorosis (Love sick), 1994
  • Marlene Dumas || Chlorosis (Love sick), 1994 [detail]
  • Frances Benjamin Johnston || From the Hampton Album 1899-1900. Geography: Studying the Seasons
  • Frances Benjamin Johnston || From the Hampton Album 1899-1900. Geography: Studying the Cathedral Towns
  • Frances Benjamin Johnston || From the Hampton Album 1899-1900. Stairway of Treasurer’s Residence: Students at Work

”After setting up her own photography studio in 1894, in Washington, D.C., Frances Benjamin Johnston was described by The Washington Times as “the only lady in the business of photography in the city.” Considered to be one of the first female press photographers in the United States, she took pictures of news events and architecture and made portraits of political and social leaders for over five decades.

In 1899, the principal of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia commissioned Johnston to take photographs at the school for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The Hampton Institute was a preparatory and trade school dedicated to preparing African American and Native American students for professional careers. Johnston took more than 150 photographs and exhibited them in the Exposition Nègres d’Amerique (American Negro Exhibit) pavilion, which was meant to showcase improving race relations in America. The series won the grand prize and was lauded by both the public and the press.

Years later, writer and philanthropist Lincoln Kirstein discovered a leather-bound album of Johnston’s Hampton Institute photographs. He gave the album to The Museum of Modern Art, which reproduced 44 of its original 159 photographs in a book called The Hampton Album, published in 1966.” [source]

February 7th, 2020

Remaster || Trash & Vaudeville

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They make an interesting pair, don’t you think?

  • Irena Haiduk, REMASTER, 2020
  • Irena Haiduk, REMASTER, 2020

REMASTER is Irena Haiduk‘s ongoing cinematic adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita (written 1928-40). Her project is guided by one of the central principles offered by the novel: the existing infrastructure of this world must be used to create a new one. Glittering surfaces, velvet furnishings, bright flowers, and shifting light conditions create a seductive environment containing fragments of spells and hidden designs. The sound of a cat’s purr reverberates around the galleries with both comfort and threat. [source: The Swiss Institute]

Trash and Vaudeville, was founded by Ray Goodman in 1975, back when St. Marks Place was the epicenter of the City’s rock-and-roll and bohemia. Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, the Ramones, and everyone who was anyone in the rock scene, were regulars. Tommy Hilfiger would buy clothes and resell them in his upstate stores Underground and People’s Place. It introduced Doc Martens to New Yorkers, the first ever shop in the United States to carry the brand. In 2016, it was relocated to 96 East 7th Street, not far from its original location, just far enough from the noodle shops that have taken over St. Marks Place.

January 20th, 2020

Kleindeutschland, St. Marks Place

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On our way to the Swiss Institute, we passed by this wonderfully preserved building. Back home I looked it up, and it was only then I realised that the area was once the centre of Lower Manhattan’s German community. No coincidence then, that the Swiss chose the very same location for their Art Institute.

  • Deutsche-Amerikanische Schützen Gesellschaft || German-American Shooting Society Clubhouse
    12 St. Mark’s Place. Built 1888-89. Designed by William C. Frohne, architect
    A standing reminder of the important German immigrant community, the majority of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in the 19th century, when the area was known as Kleindeutschland || Little Germany
  • Raúl de Nieves || Humility (999), 2018. Resin, beads, dirt, artist hair. [detail]
  • Ramaya Tegegne || Genzkens/Wilsons, 2019. One of five Nefertiti bust replicas, with sunglasses
  • Raúl de Nieves || Humility (999), 2018. Resin, beads, dirt, artist hair. [detail]
  • Raúl de Nieves || Humility (999), 2018. Resin, beads, dirt, artist hair. [detail]

The Swiss Institute

January 19th, 2020

She Who Sees the Unknown

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She Who Sees the Unknown: Kabous, The Right Witness and The Left Witness (2019), commissioned by The Shed, features a VR film, sculptures, and a bedroom installation. Upon entering a bedroom modeled after my childhood room in Iran, the audience will lie down on a daybed and put on a VR headset to view a film about Kabous, a jinn who brings nightmare and sleep paralysis to human body. Surrounding the bed are two 3D-printed sculptures of the ‘witnesses’ of Kabous (I have re-appropriated these two witnesses from different illustrations and named them the fictional characters of The Right Witness and The Left Witness).

– Written, created, and directed by Morehshin Allahyari; VR development by Pariah Interactive

The Shed

January 11th, 2020

Argument, Debate & other Thorny issues of the Human existence

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by Agnes Denes

  • The Human Argument IV—Light Matrix, 1987/2012
  • The Human Argument IV—Light Matrix, 1987/2012
  • The Debate–One Million B.C.–One Million A.D., 1969 – Hand-carved plastic resin, electroplated plexiglass on illuminated base

    ”Look, these forms you see aren’t skeletons but you and I at a dinner party discussing the state of the world or the stock market. They are Hamlet and Socrates and Descartes and da Vinci. Children with imagination so eager to question, so desperate to communicate and to know the reason for this incredible journey through space. The never-ending spinning of the days following nights and nights becoming washed in sunlight, the winters and summers, the repetition and absurdity of it all, and to be born just to die, and all the while, the debate goes on to find an answer for this aberration that we are: Homo Communicatus, Homo Literatus, Homo Desperatus (or if you wish, animale, rationale, mortale.)”
    – Agnes Denes, 1967-68
  • The World of Thorns, 1968. Electroplated plexiglass and synthetic polymer paint on light box [detail]

From a retrospective of the work of Agnes Denes, at The Shed.

January 11th, 2020