These past two weeks, us AAP students were overwhelmed with amazement, exploring and running from galleries to studios to art expositions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.
In Linda Norden‘s seminar, we visited the Francis Picabia show and ran downstairs to see Nan Goldin’s slideshow at The MoMA. We trekked to MoMA PS1, saw Mark Leckey’s expansive exhibition and finished our day pleasantly sitting and staring up inside of James Turrell’s celebrated Skyspace called Meeting. We also had another full day of exploration at the Independent New York and New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) where we had the opportunity to view as much art as possible in a short amount of time. The following week, we visited The Whitney Museum of American Art to meet with curator, Donna De Salvo. Later that day, we visited The Grey Art Gallery, NYU’s fine art museum for a tour of the show Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City.
In Jane Benson‘s class, we visited Miguel Luciano and were lucky to hear him speak about his exhibition at BRIC (which stands for Brooklyn Information & Culture) which focused on Puerto Rican politics by displaying Schwinn bikes and gang iconography. We finished up the week with a visit to Diana Shpungin‘s studio and hearing her lecture about her projects with SITE:LAB, a creator of temporary site specific art projects. Finally, we ended the week with a visit to The Armory Show in Manhattan where we all felt inspired again in spite of feeling all “arted out.” On the following Friday we visited the 8th Floor Gallery in Chelsea to meet with the art director of the Rubin Foundation, Sara Reisman.
In Masha Panteleyeva’s class, we have been learning about Robert Moses’ achievements in city planning and architecture. This week, we took a trip to Astoria, Queens to the Museum of the Moving Image to meet with one of its architects to learn about his architectural and design decisions and processes. In our studio class with Beverly Semmes, we displayed our figure model drawings in AAP NYC’s gallery, and had a successful critique on our third studio assignment.
We’re all doing well and excited about our surroundings, taking in NYC everyday. Some of us are involved with dancing, art classes, internships, the recent Cornell Fashion Collective, and more. We are missing our friends and colleagues up in Ithaca and hope they are enjoying the first snow day closing in 24 years.