American Museum of Natural History
22 May
High school students in Fossil Mammal Hall of the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, 1900
Source: New York State Education Department, Division of Visual Instruction
Interior view of the first floor of the Bird Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Rows of display cases feature birds in this long room. Above, the central part of the ceiling is removed,1895-1910?
Source: New York State Archives. Education Dept. Division of Visual Instruction
View of displays in the Ethnological Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Masks, statues and other artifacts are displayed inside and on top of display cases. A Haida canoe hangs from the ceiling, 1895-1910?
Source: New York State Archives. Education Dept. Division of Visual Instruction
Tags: History
The McKittrick Hotel
21 May
Sleep No More takes place at the fictional McKittrick Hotel, a reference to the film Vertigo. The hotel was completed in 1939 and “intended to be New York City’s finest and most decadent luxury hotel”. Six weeks before opening, and two days after the outbreak of World War II, the legendary hotel was condemned and left locked, permanently sealed from the public until it was restored and reinvented by Punchdrunk and Emursive. The McKittrick Hotel is actually three adjoining warehouses in Chelsea’s gallery district at 530, West 27th Street. The address is the former home of megaclubs Twilo, Spirit, Guesthouse, Home, Bed and more. The 100,000-square-foot (9,300 m2) space has been transformed by Punchdrunk into “some 100 rooms and environments, including a spooky hospital, mossy garden and bloody bedroom.”
Tags: Fiction, History, Spirituality, Stories, Theater, Writing
Lee Lozano
20 May
Lozano’s notebooks are full of drawing exercises and language play. “Which is heavier, red or blue?” she wrote in August of 1968 “Red seems heavier,” she concluded.
Lozano refused to interact with women. She considered this a form of living art and called it The Boycott Piece, performing it from 1971 until her death twenty years later.
Issa Samb
16 May
Behind an old iron gate in a side street, a bizarre Gesamtkunstwerk opens itself up. Under the high roof of a huge rubber tree hangs a web of strings studded with slips of paper and signs, expressionistic-abstract paintings and worn-out pieces of clothing, all held in place by clothespins. … For decades, the artist Issab Samb, alias Joe Ouakam, has created a universe in which the signs of everyday life are transformed into altars of a private obsession.
In the 1960s, Ouakam, along with filmmaker Mambeti and others, belonged to the founders of the group Laboratoire AGIT-Art. Their multi-media actions were directed against the formalism of the Ecolé de Dakar; out of the “socialization of the aesthetic” developed an aesthetic of the social. This installation could function as a didactic piece for present-day artists – all that’s missing is a sign reading “National Museum” on the gate. (From)
Tags: Community, Spirituality, Stories, Travel
The museum dedicated to the art of ventriloquism
9 May
Ventriloquism, or ventriloquy, is an act of stagecraft in which a person (a ventriloquist) changes his or her voice so that it appears that the voice is coming from elsewhere, usually a puppeteered “dummy”. The act of ventriloquism is ventriloquizing, and the ability to do so is commonly called in English the ability to “throw” one’s voice.
Edward Rothstein writes: “There is nothing quite like the gasp that escapes your mouth as you walk through three small buildings on a residential street here and find yourself mutely stared at by 1,400 eyes and grinned at by hundreds of painted lips over leathery chins.”
The Vent Haven Museum grew out of the passion of William Shakespeare Berger, a Cincinnati businessman, who began accumulating the paraphernalia of the ventriloquist’s art in 1910. He later served as president of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists and before his death, in 1972, endowed this museum, which began in his home. Ventriloquists, or vents as they call themselves, continue to donate dummies and photographs. In various rooms there are tributes to 20th-century vents like Edgar Bergen, Paul Winchell and Shari Lewis, along with displays about great dummy makers like Charles Mack, Frank Marshall and the McElroy Brothers. And while the 750 or so dummies do not seem overly impressed, their guild’s masters apparently are: every July more than 400 vents gather nearby for a “conVENTion,” which includes a visit to the museum to pay homage. Text by By Edward Rothstein
Tags: Spirituality, Travel
