THE THINGS THEY CARED ABOUT

The Main Street Museum doesn’t resemble a museum so much as an eccentric rural artist’s basement laboratory, a bit Ed Wood and a bit Silence of the Lambs. It’s a three-story wood-frame house on a postcard-pretty bridge in White River Junction, Vermont. The dark, low, interconnected galleries are encrusted with paintings, sculpture, taxidermy, and everyday objects, in an endless, airless clutter. The exhibits include: a glass candy jar stuffed with broken My Little Ponies, a vitrine that collects black plastic doll heads, a wall case showcasing “Round Objects” (like jar lids, drain caps, washers), and the desktop diorama of a plastic robot ravaging a naked Barbie doll.

The museum, led by young artist David Fairbanks Ford, is also a vibrant community center, with a small reading library and a stage for public lectures and performances. Its website explains: “ We are an ongoing, alternative experiment in material culture studies.” This experiment conveys deep anti-materialism and aesthetic abandon. The museum is only lightly curated; none of the displays have titles or labels. And there’s no indication that these artworks are precious. In fact, on the Sunday morning we visited, the building was unlocked and unmanned, with a wood box for visitors to deposit the $5 entrance fee.

The Museum is far too substantial, and effecting, to be kitsch, or some kind of hipster joke. One senses, amid the chaos, a genuine love for the objects, for the things themselves. Although the museum’s tone is Thrift Store Crazy, it’s no different than any other museum: an assortment of things that someone thinks is important.

Barbies Nightmare, Mixed-media assembly, Main Street Museum. Photo courtesy of Main Street Museum.

November 06, 2016 by Nalina Moses

CHILD-PROOF

The Cooper-Hewitt Museum is like a mullet, with a staid canopied visitor entrance in front, on East 91st Street, and a dreamy garden in back, on East 90th Street. That garden is half a block deep, with low trees and shrubs, an open lawn, meandering walkways, and flowering vines tumbling down the back of the building. It had been for paying visitors only until 2015, when the museum completed its renovations and it was opened to the public. The garden offers an intimate alternate to Central Park, which is just across Fifth Avenue. There’s a row of smart orange cafe tables under umbrellas, where one can meet a friend for coffee or wine, and wood benches under trees, where one can slip away with a book.

I stepped inside this Tuesday, after a difficult morning, to unwind before heading home. And I was surprised to find that the place was overrun with small children. Their strollers were lined up along the west fence and their blankets were laid out on the grass. These children weren’t visiting the museum, but had been brought by distracted parents and nannies so that they could run, scream, and snack on the lawn, under the wary gaze of a museum guard, while they themselves stood to one side checking their phones and, in general, checking out.

The garden was designed by a team of heavy-hitters including Walter Hood, Diller Scofidio +Renfro and RAFT. Furnishings are by Yves Behar and Heatherwick Studio. Right now there’s an installation of black and white benches designed by Hood, inspired by Roberto Burle Marx’s iconic curving paving tiles at Rio, that the children were climbing on and jumping off of. A great chunk of our popular culture (television, movies, musical theater) has been given over to children, engineered so that it’s appealing and inoffensive to their eyes and ears. Must this little space – a pocket of high design – be given over too?

August 28, 2016 by Nalina Moses

LOST IN SPACE

The Whitney Museum reopened two months ago in new expanded digs in the Meatpacking District, a colossus designed by Renzo Piano on Gansevoort Street that spans Tenth and Ninth Avenues. It has huge column-free galleries on its fifth through eighth floors, picture windows on its west facade with views to the Hudson River, staggered balconies on its east facade with views to the Highline, and an open glass-walled lobby that doubles as a public plaza.

It’s hard, from outside, to get a clear sense of the building. From Fourteenth Street its decks and railings gives it it the feeling of an approaching luxury liner. From Tenth Avenue it looks like a postmodern playhouse, a precarious stack of seven smaller volumes finished in different materials. The Gansevoort Street facade, where one enters, is dominated by the sloping hull of the gallery spaces that’s cantilevered above. This immense, inert mass is wrapped in blank green-grey metal panels that give no scale or sense of the interior.

And it’s hard, from inside, to get a clear sense of the building. The visitors’ pamphlet shows a building cross section rather than floor plans, suggesting that, like the old Whitney, it’s a vertical museum, experienced floor-by-floor. But there’s no hierarchy or variety in the gallery floors – they’re all the same. And there’s no element tying them together, like the iconic concrete stair in the old building. The ceremonial stair at the new building reaches from the ground floor to the fifth and then, abruptly, stops.

The new Whitney is a super-large building that feels as if it’s been conceived in small moments, without any central organizing principle. Many of its details are exuberant and exquisite: the staggered patio decks and runs of railings, the high glass curtain wall at the sidewalk cafe, the attenuated steel posts that support the cantilevered gallery floors, the punched ship windows at third floor study rooms. But the building has no heart. One walks through it searching for the vantage point from which all its operations make sense, and just can’t find it.

Photograph by Ed Lederman, courtesy of the Whitney Museum.

July 05, 2015 by Nalina Moses

ROOF PARTY

When I visited the newly-renovated Harvard Art Museums (HAM), a woman stepping out of one of the galleries stopped and groaned, to no one in particular, “Wait, where am I? I can’t tell where I’ve already been and where I’m going." That’s because the new building isn’t concerned with shaping a coherent museum experience, or with housing artworks, but with the heroics of its own architecture.

The renovation, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, combines three smaller, older university art museums: the Fogg, the Bush-Reisinger, and the Sackler. Those structures sat quietly in the maze of one-way colonial-era streets around campus. The new building takes the gracious, colonnaded, three-story Romanesque courtyard of the Fogg, about the size of a basketball court, as its entry. It’s this space that visitors step into from the street, where they queue for tickets, and where they linger at cafe tables before leaving. A new floor of small galleries rings the atrium above, and, above that, two new floors of offices and classrooms. The heightened atrium is capped with a glass and steel pyramid that, in its grandeur, recalls I. M. Pei’s entrance pavilion to the Louvre.

Each of the small, square galleries is lit dimly, crammed with artworks, and offers only limited views to the streets outside. So one staggers from one back out into the atrium and then onto the next, never quite certain of where she’s headed. The glass roof is strangely charismatic, pulling attention up, away from the galleries. Thought it funnels sunlight into the atrium, most of the galleries remain in shadow.

It’s not the galleries, or even the atrium, but the glass pyramid that’s the heart of this building. It’s been finely and extravagantly detailed, with a web of white steel ribs, ties and struts supporting sloped glass panels, in a display of technical wizardry that’s become Piano’s signature. But when viewed from up close, on the balconies of the upper floors, the framing seems dense, much heavier that what’s required to support the glass. And when viewed from the atrium it obscures any view to the sky. The pyramid would be best observed from above, by a bird. It does little to serve the art, and art-lovers, below.

Photograph by Peter Vanderwarker, courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop.

April 25, 2015 by Nalina Moses