And a full Moonhenge it was, too. Like a Manhattanhenge, only a lot cooler.
Hudson River Greenway, Manhattan West
August 24th, 2018
Tag: photography
The Bittersweet Past of Domino Park
The Dancing Cranes and Disappearing Act you saw yesterday and the day before, are some of the historic features that render a walk along the Domino Park all the more fun.
The 80-foot tall Gantry Cranes were used to unload bulk sugarcane from freight ships for storage at the Raw Sugar Warehouse, 21 columns of which stand in their original place along the Elevated Walkway (not pictured).
The bridge with the misters performing the Disappearing Act, stands in front of the Syrup Tanks, four of the fourteen large-scale tanks that were used to collect high volumes of liquid sweetener generated in sugar processing, dating back to the 1950s.
And the magnificent industrial brick giant you see below is none other than the Domino Sugar Refinery, closed in 2004 after 150 years production of the white sweet crystals we now love to hate. The entire building is undergoing renovation, with the facade being preserved in its entirety and the interior converted into ”creative office space”.
The Domino Park website shows many of the park’s features today next to black & white photos of their original use accompanied by historical notes, from where the following excerpt:
“Because of its ease of access by larger shipping vessels, Frederick C Havemeyer Jr. selected this area in 1856 to establish the F. C. Havemeyer & Company refinery, which would eventually become known as the Domino Sugar Refinery. At its peak in 1919, the Domino Sugar Refinery employed approximately 4,500 workers from a wide range of backgrounds and ethnicities.
Immigrants from Germany, Poland, Ireland and other European countries — and in its later years — Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other people of Caribbean descent as well as African Americans all endured difficult working conditions at the Refinery in search of opportunity and prosperity. While the Refinery figured prominently in the explosive growth of Williamsburg’s industry and economy, it is the diversity of community surrounding this site that has become its lasting legacy.”
August 21st, 2018
The Disappearing Act
”Spanning a collection of historic timber piles, one look underneath the bridge reveals that most of Domino Park is actually situated over water, on a pier once supported by nearly 1,200 of these wood piles. A set of misters surrounding the bridge emit a gentle cloud of fog that envelop passersby in the shoreline’s wind patterns.” [@DominoPark]
PS: The fog is lit up at night.
August 21st, 2018
The Crane Dance
Domino Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
August 21st, 2018
A/D/O || ENVIRONS
A/D/O is a space set up in Greenpoint, Brooklyn for the local creative community. It takes its name from the Amalgamated Drawing Office, a team led by Sir Alec Issigonis that built the very first MINI in 1959.
Spirit of the City was a modular system of revolving mirrored columns set on a grid configuration.
The installation ”explored the physical and emotional response that individuals experience when navigating urban environments” i.e. offered infinite instagrammable moments to a young hip crowd.
By United Visual Artists.
A/D/O and environs – a walk in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
August 21st, 2018
Obsession || Nudes by Klimt, Schiele and Picasso *Safe For Telework*
From the Scofield Thayer Collection.
Scofield Thayer (1889-1982) was editor and co-owner of the Dial, a journal that published writing and art by the European and American avant-garde from 1919 to 1926. An aesthete, he was a brilliant abstract thinker and a complex, conflicted personality. In the early 1920s, Thayer underwent psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna. While in Europe, he assembled a large collection of some six hundred artworks – mostly works on paper – with staggering speed, acquiring them from artists and dealers in Vienna, London, Paris and Berlin.
While Pablo Picasso’s work had been shown in America, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were unknown in this country at that time. Both artists were remarkable for their frank portrayals of female nudity and sexuality.
In 1924 a selection from Thayer’s collection was exhibited at a New York gallery and won acclaim, but it found little favour when shown in his native city of Worcester, Massachusetts. Offended by intolerant views toward provocative art, Thayer drew up his will in 1925, leaving his collection to The Met before retreating from public life until his death in 1982.
An exhibition of the bequest has been planned since its arrival at the Museum in 1984, but its diversity, unevenness and vast quantity proved a challenge. While a select group of paintings by artists of the School of Paris is always on view, the light-sensitive watercolours, drawings and prints have been rarely displayed. This exhibition, held on the centenary of the 1918 deaths of Klimt and Schiele, presented these erotic and evocative works together for the first time.
It ran from July through October 2018 at The Met Breuer.
Egon Schiele || Sorrow, 1914 || Drypoint
Egon Schiele || Squatting Woman, 1914 || Drypoint
Egon Schiele || Girl, 1918 || Lithograph
Egon Schiele || Reclining Nude with Boots, 1918 || Charcoal on paper
Egon Schiele || Standing Nude with Orange Drapery (recto): Study of Nude with Arms Raised (verso), 1914 || Watercolor, gouache and graphite on paper
Egon Schiele || Nude in Black Stockings, 1917 || Watercolor and charcoal on paper
Egon Schiele || Observed in a Dream, 1911 || Watercolor and graphite on paper
Egon Schiele || Two Reclining Nudes, 1911 || Watercolor and graphite on paper
Egon Schiele || Self-Portrait, 1911 || Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper
Egon Schiele || Seated Nude in Shoes and Stockings, 1918 || Charcoal on paper
Gustav Klimt || Reclining Nude with Drapery, 1912-13 || Graphite
Gustav Klimt || Two Studies for a Crouching Woman, 1914–15 || Graphite
Pablo Picasso || Fondevila, 1906 || Oil on canvas
Pablo Picasso || Head of a Woman, 1922 || Chalk on paper
Pablo Picasso || Erotic Scene (La Douceur), 1903 || Oil on canvas
The Met Breuer
August 19th, 2018
Carving Gods and Nobles
In noble materials
Marble head of Athena
Greek, Hellenistic, ca. 200 b.c.
The goddess originally wore a helmet of marble or bronze, added separately. The ears are pierced for metal earrings. The head comes from an over-life-sized statue that possibly represented the goddess striding forward. The statue may have stood outdoors, as a monumental votive image of the warrior goddess in her role as protectress of a city rather than within a temple as a cult statue.
Bronze portrait of a man
Roman, Late Republican or Early Imperial, ca. 1st century b.c.
In the early first century b.c. Greek artists were fashioning portraits of Roman patrons that presented a straightforward image of their subjects in a veristic style. This phenomenon existed across the ever-expanding Roman world, but the finest and largest group of such portraits in marble survives on the Cycladic island of Delos, which was an important commercial centre in the Late Republican period and home to numerous Roman merchants.
The portrait exhibited here is a good example of the veristic style, which appealed to Roman citizens who valued individuality. Bronze was the preferred medium for Roman honorific statues because of its ability to achieve the closest possible fidelity to nature.
Mosaic floor panel
Roman, Imperial, 2nd century a.d.
Stone, tile and glass
Excavated from a villa at Daphne near Antioch (modern Antakya, Turkey), the metropolis of Roman Syria
The rectangular panel represents the entire decorated area of a floor and was found together with another mosaic (now in the Baltimore Museum of Art) in an olive grove at Daphne-Harbiye in 1937. In Roman times, Daphne was a popular holiday resort, used by the wealthy citizens and residents of Antioch as a place of rest and refuge from the heat and noise of the city.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
August 19th, 2018
Hair Styles for the Zoom Era: Tie the Knot
No hair stylist? No problem!
Pierre Jean David d’Angers (1788-1856)
Ann Buchan Robinson, 1831
Marble
This masterpiece of carving was probably commissioned from David d’Angers, the leading portrait sculptor of the Romantic era, by the sitter’s husband, a New York entrepreneur with business connections in France. Formal purity is paramount: nothing distracts from the transition between smooth skin and the swept up coils of an extraordinary hairstyle that was the height of fashion about 1830. The tilt of the head and slightly pouted lips impart refined lifelikeness to the portrait. Robinson’s idealized serenity is typical of David d’Angers’s female portrait busts; those depicting men tend to reveal far more about the sitters’ inner personality.
Lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Museum of the City of New York
August 19th, 2018
ICP Museum || The Shadow Dance
Stills from ”Press and Outline”, 2014 – a 16mm silent film by Gina Osterloh
Moving image on Instagram
ICP Museum, Lower East Side, Manhattan
August 16th, 2018
ICP Museum || Good Bye BoBBy
On June 8, 1968, thousands of people lined the train tracks from New York to Washington, DC, paying their last respects and expressing bewilderment and sorrow at the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The train carrying the senator’s body took eight hours to make the trip toward Kennedy’s final resting place, Arlington National Cemetery. Photographer Paul Fusco documented the funeral train’s journey and his images have become emblematic of the loss of idealism during a period of political upheaval in the United States. Dutch visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker Rein Jelle Terpstra has been tracking down the bystanders’ views of this day. He has collected more than two hundred images, including snapshots and home movies of the train. In RFK Funeral Train: The People’s View, Terpstra combines a multiscreen video projection that stitches together this collection of vernacular photographs and audio and video remembrances of these mourners with prints by Fusco. Through this project, Terpstra adds a new chapter to a collective memory that is slowly disappearing.
ICP Museum, Lower East Side, Manhattan
August 16th, 2018
The Humble Fabulist 