Dalia Wolfson is a sophomore at Hunter College High School in New York City. She speaks English, Russian, Hebrew, and can discuss airplanes,
vacation locations, Mexican film and other topics in Spanish. In her spare time, Dalia enjoys intense hiking, trying out different tea flavors, drawing
with charcoal, participating in school clubs, writing in notepads, playing tennis, and being a bookworm in the Big apple.
"The Sixth Borough" is on view at Governor's Island through September 25. It's FREE to the public and the ferry is FREE from Lower Manhattan!
There are some places where proud New Yorkers do not lurk. The Staten Island Ferry, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, for example, seem to appear as blips on an insider’s map of the city; places to take your third cousins after their eyes start hurting from the flash of photographing Times Square. But if those token sites are tourist landmarks, then Governors’ Island is a passing thought – the forgotten isle. It is an enchanting experience, then, to visit this forgotten location and discover New York’s treasures anew. This summer, however, Governors’ Island isn’t just a historic area but is transformed, courtesy of the organization No Longer Empty, into The Sixth Borough.
The Sixth Borough is an exhibition based in the rooms of four historic houses on Colonel Row, a set of residential homes previously occupied by military officers and their families. These houses have not been properly restored or renovated; decay and water stains are clearly visible. But while only art materials now inhabit these rooms, Colonel’s Row is truly no longer empty. Instead, its filled with people’s memories and feelings – past and present- invested in creative work. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Governors’ Island,
No Longer Empty,
The Sixth Borough
"Landscape #1 (Dutchess County, NY)" by James Casebere
Imagine Jasper Johns’ “Map,” that spillage of rectangles arranged haphazardly into the USA, red state leaking to blue state, bound only by the lines of stenciled yellow letters. That, roughly, remains the state of American Art (in capitals) – undefined, multicolored and searching for some form of definition.
At this year’s Whitney Biennial (which closed on May 30), the museum world celebrated – or mourned – the creative works of fifty-five American artists for the 75th time. Throughout the large, gray chambers of Breuer’s architecture, a variety of mediums appeared: ink, paint, gouache, pencils, and aluminum, but also beer, dirt and blood. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
2010 Whitney Biennial,
James Casbere,
Julia Fish,
Maureen Gallace,
Whitney Museum of American Art
Wassily Kandinsky. Several Circles. 1926. Oil on canvas. 140 x 140 cm. The Solomon R. Guggebheim Museum, New York, NY, USA.
Circe circle, dot dot. This is what Kandinsky‘s…not. While this particular rap lyric is true to the shapes that the Russian artist would explore later on in his career, those circles can’t be summarized in so many words. No, the circumference of each round shape was deliberate, its placement on the canvas was planned and the color transparency was carefully pondered by Wassily. He started from a point - a desire to raise art to the level of music – and expanded it outward, into a whorl of tints, tones and thrilling compositions. Perhaps, Euclid’s definition of a point could be applied to Kandinsky’s beginning: “A point is that which has no part.” Kandinsky took that bottomless point and gave it a part while setting it apart – the point became a site for the compass tip, from which the circle could be drawn. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
The Guggenheim Museum
Draw back the crimson curtain. It’s a vague summer afternoon here in New York City — the weather has spun its little gray kaleidoscope of rain and clouds far too many a time for the atmosphere to be determinate — and the matinee has begun, no outrageous bugles or theme music to be heard of. On the stage sits Estragon (Nathan Lane), growing increasingly frustrated with a boot stuck on his bare, scabbed foot. Eventually, he is joined by Vladimir (Bill Irwin), tall and all sharp, ungainly edges, who proceeds to muse aloud about the two thieves who witnessed — or did they? –Jesus on a cross and were alternatively saved, damned, or not even there at all.
According to the subtitle, this is meant to be a “tragicomedy in two acts”. And, consequently, a pale plot does unravel. As the minutes tick by, Lane and Irwin to and fro in a landscape consisting primarily of a naked tree (playwright Samuel Beckett‘s decorating requests went no further than that) and some rocks and mounds, added by set designer Santo Loquasto. They bicker, embrace, exchange hats and curses ( Estragon: “Gonococcus! Spirochet!”) and, ultimately, wait for Godot. In the midsection of every act, they are joined by the jovial, overbearing and aristocratic Pozzo (John Goodman), who keeps his servant Lucky (John Glover) on a rope, with the latter dragging around a portable loony housewife’s kitchen: rusty pans, picnic baskets, chicken bones and the like. Yet everything — foolish arguments, Lane’s naps, Irwin’s musical ditties — sooner or later, are meant to pass the time. Godot never comes, by the way, but the audience knows this instinctively. The question lies not in Godot’s arrival but in those in-between moments, the perpetual anticipation and that rubbery tension of interaction between the actors. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Bill Irwin,
Nathan Lane,
Roundabout Theatre Company,
Samuel Beckett,
Studio 54,
Waiting for Godot
Francis was a man of the flesh. Forget plein air watercolors with frilly parasols and cotton clouds, dismiss the large swaths of Kandinsky blue spread across the canvas and welcome the true Bacon of art. Currently staged in clean, spacious white rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Francis Bacon retrospective invites the viewer to experience the paintings of an artist who never quite fit through the Expressionist label, never squeezed through the figurative art category nor promoted the abstraction and Surrealism of his days.
A Dubliner by 1909 birth, Bacon fled to London in his teens, and a large portion of his life was spent in that very city, gambling, drinking and witnessing the rapid cycle of decay, rebirth, destruction and terror of Europe burning. The Met exhibition chronicles Bacon’s exposure to the intense influences of wars, lovers and interior design (his first career), from a seminal 1944 crucifixion study to a jet of water in 1988. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Francis Bacon,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
$5 Tickets
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