Much has been written about Lillian Gish over the course of her 75-year career, and as the Museum’s retrospective of the actress’s films nears a close (concluding with a screening of the Museum’s newly preserved print of Orphans of the Storm on Monday, December 13), I would like to pay particular attention to the writings of three of Gish’s friends, colleagues, and critics—Anita Loos, Andrew Sarris, and Mike Kaplan—who offered the kind of personal insights that aren’t often evident among all of the written discussion of her career.

Here is a slideshow of photos from our hit Counter Space public program, Kitchen Culture. Over 100 people joined us for an incredible dinner in October, inspired by a 1925 German cookbook and prepared by Executive Chef Lynn Bound and the Cafe 2 team.

This is the final blog post for the conservation of Claes Oldenburg’s Floor Cake.

Below you can see the individual layers after cleaning.

I’ve never considered myself particularly “tech-savvy,” but recently I began to rethink that notion. Over the past year or so, I have been experimenting with technology. At first the whole process seemed counterintuitive to what we try to do as museum educators. For me, the appeal of teaching has always been the engagement with people and facilitating meaningful interactions with works of art and with one another. I was not sure if that could actually be accomplished online, but I was willing to explore the possibilities.

In recent years, with the increasing turn toward the digital, photography has become more complex and varied in its range of possible representational renderings. Photography is at a point of transformation, and in organizing the New Photography 2010 exhibition, I wanted to be responsive to these changes and bring together a group of artists who have expanded the conventional definitions of the medium.

These notes accompany screenings of Marcel Pagnol’s Cesar on December 8, 9, and 10 in Theater 3.

Although Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) directed 18 films, his identity as a cinema auteur is a little hard to pin down. Some of his best work was done in filmed adaptations of his stage plays, several of which were directed by others. He had a hand in writing all of the movies he directed, but he also wrote screenplays for others. To top it off, he was also a producer with his own studio.

This dollhouse is a replica of the 1872 Victorian town house in the East End of London where artist Yinka Shonibare now lives. Born in London, Shonibare spent most of his youth in Lagos, and his dual African and English cultural identity plays a large role in his work, which often takes the form of headless figures wearing the elaborate clothing of upper-class Victorians.

Teaching artist Kiran Chandra has been taking the teens in her Text & Image workshops on a trip through the strange and sometimes confusing arena in which the written word and the visual arts collide. Whether viewing the work of Raymond Pettibon, Christopher Wool, and Paul Chan, or traveling down to Chelsea to meet with the staff of Printed Matter, Inc., these activities have definitely expanded the participants’ ideas of what it means to “write” an artwork or “read” a painting. Here, she discusses one of the group’s earliest art-making experiments.

For this project, New York–based artist Robert Lazzarini‘s first experiment in “complex nonlinear distortion,” the artist composited attributes of different cups and saucers to arrive at an archetypal object. He first drew the cup and saucer using three-dimensional modeling software, and then he laser-scanned a well-proportioned spoon and fed the scan directly into his computer. He next applied multiple sine wave patterns along different axes through these virtual objects. You got all that?

Lorna Simpson is best known for her photography, which often combines images of black women with text as a way to explore society’s relationship with race, sex, and ethnicity. Frequently elusive, her works involve the viewer in the creation of their meaning while also confronting the viewer with the underlying racism still found in American culture.