Coincidental with the recent announcement from New York City’s quasi-official tourism bureau that the city has “reawakened” for tourism, NYC’s tiniest museum has declared itself open for business again. Like every other visitor attraction hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mmuseumm has had to keep its two doors shut. The mini-museum which is situated at 4 Cortlandt Alley in Manhattan has been on locked down like every other institution, but now there are five ways to experience Mmuseumm’s new exhibition: timed tickets, private tours, a 24-hour observation window, print catalog and digital access. Click here to learn all about the fascinating attraction and to participate in this uniquely New York cultural experience.
Her are some of the new exhibitions on view at Mmuseumm :
Are We Being Heard? Tools of Protest From Hong Kong: 40 citizen-made tools of protest, including a used molotov cocktail.
Is This Modern Slavery? A look at common household items that have dark supply chain roots.
The Enduring Racism of American Real Estate: understanding the damaging implications of the seemingly innocuous “we buy houses for cash” signs.
Pipelines of Knowing and Unknowing Complicity: objects that served a central roll in devastating occurrences, such as bank credit cards used to sponsor individuals purchasing weapons and carrying out mass shootings in America.
Children Lead The Way: a collection of protests signs made by youth for the youth-led climate march.
“You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.“
Gretchen Vitamvas. Modern Plague Doctor. Art In Odd Places 2021. Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Gretchen Vitamvas)
For those of us with New York City hardwired in our DNA, this year away from the greatest city in the world has been difficult. With vaccination rates up, and with NYC’s iconic sights and institutions reopening, things will normalize very soon. Until then, we will have to be content with video visit, such as the one below.
Aboveground at Philadelphia’s famous Independence Mall visitors discover an impressive collection of monuments to American history. Often called the “Cradle of American Liberty,” the popular tourist site contains sculptures of Founding Fathers, buildings inside of which the U.S. Constitution was written and signed, and symbols like the Liberty Bell that Americans have imbued with patriotic meaning.
Underground, that American history gets complicated and challenging. Along the 200-foot platform of the SEPTA Independence Mall-5th Street subway station, Philadelphia-based artist Tom Judd created a 3,000 square foot patchwork of images from the city’s early history.
“Portal to Discovery,” commissioned through SEPTA’s Art in Transit program, is composed of dozens of images assembled like a collage. Many of the image combinations are jarring. Such as Judd’s pairings of the slave owner Thomas Jefferson and abolitionist William Sill, who is known as the father of the Underground Railroad.
Judd began work on “Portal to Discovery” by collecting hundreds of images from Philadelphia’s history and putting them together to see what would resonate for the viewer. “As a visual artist, I don’t come up with a verbal idea and then try to figure out how to make it visual,” said Judd. “I literally work in a visual language. I put images together that I find interesting. That’s how it starts.”
Opened with little fanfare during the pandemic lockdown, the installation is a permanent addition to Philly’s Old City tourist attractions.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Ursula K. Le Guin in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness
Book Theater, Kadokawa Culture Museum, Tokyo
Nabokov’s annotated teaching copy
In Bruges
Everything that you need to know about our world can be learned by watching The Third Man.
In anticipation of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, Brooklyn artist George Cochrane has worked on a contemporary illuminated manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy—all 350,000 characters of the epic poem, plus illustrations, in the original Italian for nearly seven years. Last month, he took the project to Kickstarter, where it was fully funded in less than six minutes. The project offered four different editions, as well as related artwork, starting at $80. Two backers chose the Empyrean Edition at $10,000; Cochrane wrote to supporters on March 16, “as far as we know that’s the SINGLE MOST EXPENSIVE BOOK ever offered on Kickstarter.”
Although they have already raised more than $260,000, the pledge page remains open, so there’s still a chance to participate. The books will be printed in Italy and San Marino.
Even if you are not a particular fan of Dante, you have to see this amazing book project.
THE WRITER
Richard Wilbur
In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which
The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.
I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash
And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark
And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,
And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.
It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Rome over the last few days because of the news that a new archeological site will be opening in the coming year in the heart of the Eternal City. If you haven’t heard, the sunken square at Largo di Argentina, which is closed to the public, but home to hundreds of feral cats, is undergoing a €1 million renovation providing access to the place of Julius Caesar’s assassination for the first time in more than a century.
Of course this lead me down the internet rabbit hole until I happen to stumble upon the fabulous video below. The timelapse and hyperlapse film is the work of Russian photographer Kirill Neiezhmakov. If you have ever visited Rome, it will leave you longing to return, and if you’ve never been, A Gift from Rome will have you pricing flights.
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