very simple

I was having a difficult time figuring out how to ‘celebrate’ July 4th this year, given the state of our country and the world, so I decided to go to the Whitney and spend some time with American art, and in particular African-American art. They’re having a large exhibit by Amy Sherald, most well-known for creating Michelle Obama’s portrait that normally hangs at the National Portrait Gallery. In addition, I got a member preview of their new “Untitled” (America) exhibit which is mostly art from their permanent collection but curated along a specific theme. I then took a little walk on the high line, one of my favorite things to do on a beautiful day in my beautiful city of immigrants.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus
November 2, 1883

…another protest. This saturday there was a pretty large-scale protest against DOGE cuts scheduled for Foley Square downtown, but with all of the recent events, it became more of a protest everything, including, now, the democrats that caved on the spending resolution and the kidnapping of green card holders by ICE. the protest started at Foley Square in front of the federal building, and then proceeded through the downtown streets until we hit the New York Stock Exchange, where members of SEIU staged a die-in.

with everything going on, I’ve been attending a few protests recently. The ones on presidents’ day didn’t make it on here, but I did post some pics on my instagram. Today there were nationwide protests at tesla dealerships, because of musk’s illegitimate and unconfirmed by the senate role in the new administration, and I headed down to the tesla dealership in manhattan to take part and, of course take pictures. Some protestors (not me!) actually made it inside the dealership, broke the glass door and got arrested, but otherwise people were pretty peaceful. We had a drum corps of one tiny lady with a snare drum, and a group of singers singing protest songs. Anyway, here are some pics.

In addition, here’s a little video of the singers.

Open streets in my neighborhood started up again a few weeks ago, and today was the first time it was both nice out and I was in town, so I took a little walk with one of my real cameras (a slightly used Olympus PEN E-P7 that I bought recently). the PEN doesn’t have a separate viewfinder, and the glare made it almost impossible to see the screen, so these were largely guesswork. I think they came out pretty well, all things considered.

Today did my (semi?) traditional walk down broadway that I’ve done at least a few times before on or around new years. it was a pretty grey day today, but I still snapped some pics with my new camera, and then ran them all through the “gritty NYC” filter (not really called that). Anyway. here’s from the upper west side down to the flatiron, where I ultimately ended my walk because Eataly was right there.

One of the few things I decided to do during this, the end of our second pandemic year, was actually go see the Jasper Johns exhibit at the Whitney. I got a membership to the museum in February 2020, the last time I went, and then, well, everything ended. So this is a tiny bit of full circle – deciding that my vaccinated and boosted self could brave Omicron for one day at a place that required vaccines, masks and social distancing to visit.

Fun Fact: Johns, who is still kicking it at 91, lives in the next town over from my parents, and my dad insists on saying “he lives right down the road”.

Also, this is some serious Americana.

yesterday, NYC officially ended our lockdown pause and entered phase 1 of reopening. Over the almost 90 days that I’ve been home since mid-march, I’ve collected photos that I never posted on instagram or elsewhere, and thought I would just round them up here, now that we’re very slowly emerging from our shells.

I’ve been trying to take walks early in the morning, before too many people are up and about, mostly on days where I have some other reason to leave my apartment (and it could be anything – if I had packages delivered the day before, a morning walk means my doorman puts them all together for me and I pick them up on my way back in the building after they’ve sat overnight. Today it was just that it was sunday and I needed some fresh air. So I grabbed my sneakers and my gloves (even though I planned on touching nothing) and my improvised face covering, and walked over to the park, where the flowers and trees don’t know there’s a pandemic and insist on blooming like it’s spring or something.

These are all just iPhone shots. Pictures were a bit of an afterthought until I saw the tulips.

(I realize I’m going to run out of these soon and I’m going to have to start just posting my backlog of random other stuff I’ve never gotten around to posting, but in the meantime, MORE ART!)

This week, I’m going a little further back in time. In the winter of 2018, the Whitney mounted a massive Warhol show that perfectly coincided with my time off from work for the holidays, so I spend a nice friday afternoon wandering among the crowds and the art (remember when we used to just wander among crowds?).

this week’s ‘art in the time before COVID-19’ is from a trip to the Museum of Modern Art immediately before we all started shutting down. The beginning of March, which was the beginning of public nervousness and social distancing, also coincided with some major art shows around the city and the opening of this fairly major show at the MoMA. My stepmom and I decided to venture out to this (rather than, say, theater, where I couldn’t at least run across the room from a coughing person), and we were some of the very few people to do so – A show like this would normally attract sold-out crowds and lines, but instead it was like a private viewing.

This was the last time I left my apartment for anything other than work (which became work-from-home a few days later) or essentials.

From the MoMA’s description of Judd’s work:

By the mid-1960s, Judd commenced his lifelong practice of using industrial materials, such as aluminum, steel, and Plexiglas, and delegating production of his work to local metal shops. With the help of these specialized fabricators, he developed a signature vocabulary of hollow, rectilinear volumes, often arranged in series. In the following years, “boxes,” “stacks,” and “progressions” continued as Judd’s principal framework to introduce different combinations of color and surface. Judd surveys the complete evolution of the artist’s career, culminating in the last decade of his life, when Judd intensified his work with color and continued to lay new ground for what ensuing generations would come to define as sculpture.