Georgia O’Keefe’s painting, Manhattan, hangs on the ground floor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, alongside this quote from the artist:
“One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”
My 10-year-old niece recently wrote me a thank you note for a Christmas gift, and included this rendering of New York, as she felt it, on her first trip there before the holiday.
I was surprised to see Starbucks feature so prominently, but heartened she included the Met.
My sister and I took my 10-year-old niece to New York for the first time last weekend. We walked up Fifth Avenue and admired the holiday windows at Tiffany’s (tiny carousels!). We saw Mary Poppins on Broadway. We took a lot of cab rides. And we spent Sunday morning at the Met.
Oh, the Met. Seeing one of the world’s great museums through 10-year-old eyes made me love it all over again.
I wasn’t sure my niece would be engaged, but she found something interesting everywhere we went: the fantastic new Art of the Arab Lands galleries, the Egyptian temples, the Chinese garden courtyard, the giant Buddhas. All of it, amplified by taking photos with her iPod Touch (“I’m a really good photographer,” she mused somewhere in the Southeast Asian wing).
There’s a lot to be said for preserving museums as places of quiet contemplation. “I’d like to see museums offer refuge from our devices,” blogged arts writer Judith Dobrzynski recently, lamenting the trend toward “participatory art museums.”
Normally, I’m something of a purist on this issue; I don’t even use audio guides when I visit museums. Then again, I’m an adult with no kids, and I crave quiet contemplation along with my art.
Last weekend forced me to reconsider. If mobile cameras prompt ‘tweens to consider 14th century Buddhist murals–and discuss them with their parents when they return home–they can’t be all bad.
One of the best things about visiting New York is the people-watching. A couple hours in Central Park, and you’ll see every stripe of humanity: Russian-speaking au pairs, 70-year old rollerbladers with orange hair and legwarmers, heartland tourists in navy polo shirts, young men flaunting their abs, very large people walking very small dogs.
Same holds for Grand Central Station, that great crossroads of Gotham. Over the weekend, I visited the Jewish Museum’s quirky Maira Kalman exhibit , and this picture of Grand Central (above) stood out. It mirrored what I saw on the streets not 20 minutes before.
Another favorite view of Grand Central sits in DC, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Grand Central Station #2 (below), a video installation by Jim Campbell, shows ghostly figures in constant motion through the terminal. Even if I didn’t know the title of this piece, I think I’d guess the location based on the golden, filtered quality of the light.
To see what it’s like in motion, check out a related piece:Grand Central Station 5. Some things are only in New York.
