Director, Glenn Lowry: Genzken's romance with New York City started on her first visit as a teenager, in the 1960s. In the mid-1990s, she began staying for extended periods. Laura Hoptman, Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.
Curator, Laura Hoptman: And one of the first objects that she made as a result of these trips was called I Love New York, Crazy City. What it is comprised of are all the paper objects that Genzken collected during her crazy days and even crazier nights in New York, which include bills from hotels that begin with the Waldorf Astoria and end with a youth hostel somewhere downtown, bar tabs, citations from hotel security, handbills given to her for discos, and the like.
Glenn Lowry: This series of scrapbooks speaks to Genzken’s fascination with the architecture of midtown Manhattan and captures a pivotal moment in New York in the mid-1990s.
Laura Hoptman: You can see when you look at the work some of the gritty, underground and underbelly of New York that you could have experienced walking the streets of downtown but you cannot experience today.
Glenn Lowry: This is the first time Genzken used collage, and the juxtaposition of found objects would become her primary artistic language—one she is still using today, in ever more elaborate forms.