The Breuer building is now Sothebys November 16, 2025
Posted by judylobo in Zoo.Tags: art, Art exhibit, Auction, Breuer, Frick Museum, Len Lauder, Maurizio Cattelan, Metropolitan Museum, NYC, photography, Pritzker, Sothebys, Whitney Museum
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Sotheby’s bought the Breuer building which was opened in 1966 and housed the Whitney Museum until 2015 when the Whitney opened its new digs downtown. For 10 years the Breuer was a temporary home to the Met and then to the Frick while they were renovating their museum. I always liked that building and visited all of the time so I was curious as to what Sotheby’s would be doing to that museum space.I visited last week and had a mixed reaction. Clearly a museum is not encumbered with sales as its goal. They curate their shows with the intention of showcasing an artist and the work. Sotheby’s goal is to sell. So the first thing I noticed was how they chopped up some of the old open spaces in order to hang more work. I found these spaces cluttered and claustrophobic.I was happy when I found a larger area where one could breathe and finally see those oddly shaped windows facing East 75th street. Four of the six floors housed many private collections including the Len Lauder and the Pritzer family collection. The auction is Tuesday the 18th so there is not much time to see the work. It will be interesting to see how long each collection remains in the Breuer post sales. If you are wondering what Sotheby’s did to its former building on York Avenue – Cornell Weill bought the building and will expand its already large footprint in that neighborhood. Oh, by the way…Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016) which is a fully functional toilet fashioned from just over 100 kilograms of solid 18-karat gold is in a separate room with a guard. I wonder who will buy that work. I did not bid on it.
American Sublime April 27, 2025
Posted by judylobo in Zoo.Tags: Amy Sherald, art, Art exhibit, Breonna Taylor, Christine Sum Kim, Michelle Obama, NYC, Whitney Museum
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Our visit to the Whitney’s Amy Sherald’s exhibition was uplifting. Most of us were introduced to her when she was chosen to paint the portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama but there is so much more to discover. “Amy Sherald is a storyteller. She creates precisely crafted narratives of American life, selecting, styling, and photographing her sitters as the foundation for her nuanced paintings. Thus, while Sherald (b. 1973; Columbus, Georgia) bases her works on specific people, they are more than traditional portraits. They center everyday Black Americans, compelling in their individuality and extraordinary in their ordinariness, inviting viewers to step into Sherald’s imagined worlds. In this exhibition, paintings of such ordinary Americans join her iconic portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and, heartbreakingly, Breonna Taylor, to produce a resonant ode to the multiplicity and complexity of American identity.” There is also a wonderful video which I encourage you to watch about her life and technique. This wonderful exhibit is on thru August 10. While at the Whitney I highly recommend Christine Sum Kim’s ‘All Day All Night’ . She is a deaf artist with a brilliant wit. I found myself laughing out loud at her insightful work.
Edges of Ailey January 19, 2025
Posted by judylobo in Zoo.Tags: Alma Thomas, Alvin Ailey, art, Art exhibit, Basquiat, Dance, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, Kevin Beasley, photography, Rashid Johnson, Romare Bearden, Whitney Museum
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We had wanted to see this exhibition since it opened back in September but life sometimes interferes with art. We finally went last Sunday and we were wowed. Edges of Ailey is the first large-scale museum exhibition to celebrate the life, dances, influences, and enduring legacy of visionary artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey. It consists of an immersive exhibition in the Museum’s 18,000 square-foot fifth-floor galleries—featuring works by more than eighty artists and revelatory archival material—and performances in the Museum’s third-floor theater, including AILEY in residence for one week each month during the exhibition. Included are performance footage, recorded interviews, notebooks, letters, poems, short stories, choreographic notes, drawings, and performance programs and posters gathered from Ailey’s archives and others forge a vital through-line in the gallery. The artworks are arranged by themes that shaped Ailey’s life and dances. Sections span an expanded Black southern imaginary that enfolds histories of the American South with those of the Caribbean, Brazil, and West Africa; the enduring practices of Black spirituality; the profound conditions and effects of Black migration; the resilience for and necessity of an intersectional Black liberation; the prominence of Black women in Ailey’s life; and the robust histories and experiments of Black music; along with the myriad representations of Blackness in dance and meditations on dance after Ailey. Artists exhibited among Ailey include Basquiat, Romare Bearden (a personal favorite of mine,) Faith Ringgold, Alma Thomas, Jacob Lawrence, Rashid Johnson, Kevin Beasley, Kara Walker and many more. This wonderful exhibit is on through February 9th.
My Native American Name July 30, 2023
Posted by judylobo in Zoo.Tags: art, Art exhibit, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Native American, NYC, photography, Whitney Museum
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I was finally feeling a bit better post surgery and (sort of) ran to the Whitney Museum to see this exhibit. It closes August 13th and if you can get there, I highly recommend it. I was not familiar with her work but happy to finally explore and adore it. I also love her name. If I were Native American I would like my name to be ‘Raised by Wolves’. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (born 1940) is a Native American visual artist and curator. She is an art educator, art advocate, and political activist. She has been prolific in her long career, and her work draws from a Native worldview and comments on American Indian identity, histories of oppression, and environmental issues.This exhibition is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), an overdue but timely look at the work of a groundbreaking artist. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date. Her artistic traditions are incorporated and reimagined with concepts rooted in Smith’s own cultural practice, reflecting her belief that her “life’s work involves examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology.” Employing satire and humor, Smith’s art tells stories that flip commonly held conceptions of historical narratives and illuminate absurdities in the formation of dominant culture. Smith’s approach importantly blurs categories and questions why certain visual languages attain recognition, historical privilege, and value. 
While at the Zoo 