The Universal Magic of New York Harbor

The chosen place, Governors Island, as a granite island in the middle of New York Harbor, has an amazing context. This natural bay where the Hudson and East rivers meet and the moon drives the waters of the Atlantic through the Verrazano Narrows, causing the tides to swirl around the navel of the world, Manhattan, is without compare. Here is where generations came ashore to build America, fusing their collective cultures together to form a peerless metropolis. The water was the center. New York was built on the shores, so that its magnificent silhouette would be reflected by the waves. Tunnels and athletic bridges labor to connect all its boroughs. Like the Bosporus and the Bay at Rio de Janeiro, New York Harbor has a seemingly universal magic. God created a place, which every civilization would choose for its own. Every morning, Manhattan is born again out of briny fogs. With Ellis Island and Liberty Island, Governors Island has been elected to share this bay. Together they have witnessed an intense history, or have themselves become the symbols of it.

These notes accompany the Vsevolod I. Pudovkin program, screening April 28, 29, and 30 in Theater 3.

Vsevolod Illarionovitch Pudovkin (1893–1953) was, like Sergei Eisenstein, a pupil of Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970), and all three of them were heavily influenced by the work of D. W. Griffith, particularly his mastery of editing. All three also wrote copiously on film theory, finding intellectual justification for the choices they made in creating their movies. Few American filmmakers made much effort to convey their thought processes, and most seemed happy to leave the impression that their work was largely intuitive. When Peter Bogdanovich asked John Ford how he did a particular shot, Ford replied soberly, “With a camera.”

Many of MoMA’s employees aren’t just guardians of the Museum’s collection: they are artists in their own right, and have found inspiration for their own work through their engagement with artwork shown at MoMA. Our jobs do sometimes force us to hurry by breathtaking works, with no time to let their power wash over us.  But at other moments—whether retouching a paint job, placing a wall label, or installing a work of art—we find ourselves alone, in empty galleries, confronted with some of the greatest works of art made in the last century. This new series of blog posts will focus on a few of MoMA’s many employee/artists, and will address the ways in which they have incorporated their daily work experiences into their own artistic processes.

As Production Manager in the Museum’s department of graphic design, Claire Ellen Corey produces various components of many of MoMA’s exhibitions, installations, and marketing campaigns. Outside of her duties at MoMA, she’s also a painter, a practice that has been informed time and again by all she has learned within the Museum. In fact, Corey combines techniques of painting and the tools of graphic design to create her multilayered paintings, ultimately producing her final image on an ink-jet printer.

When we first met with the educators from MoMA’s Education Department to discuss the Shape Lab installation, we knew instantly that this project had to be FUN for us, the designers—and that FUN needed to be part of the design for the visitors.

Shape Lab is an interactive educational space for families. The educators’ intention for this space is to encourage visitors to interact with the space and explore the different ways artists use shapes in painting and sculpture. The space was filled with interactive tools and furniture, educational toys, art books, and shape learning activities. The original project request was to design an identity for its title wall. Instead, we designed a multifunctional activity wall, which both communicates its message and functions as a fun learning game.

How well do you know your MoMA? To the left are images of works from the MoMA collection that are currently on view in the galleries. If you think you can identify the artist, title, and location of each work, please submit your answers by leaving a comment on this post. We’ll provide the answers—along with some information about each work—next Friday, along with the next Do You Know Your MoMA? challenge.

ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S CHALLENGE: Too elementary for you? Next week I’ll really try to stump you. Congratulations to Jonathan Janov and Laura Rosa, who tied for first place in last week’s post. Doris Bremm also correctly identified all six works, but alas, she spelled Joan Miró’s first name wrong.

1. Pablo Picasso. Three Musicians. 1921.
2. Gerald Murphy. Wasp and Pear. 1929
3. René Magritte. The Portrait. 1935
4. Yves Tanguy. The Furniture of Time. 1939
5. Joan Miró. Bather. October 1932
6. Rufino Tamayo. Animals. 1941

The installation of the Tim Burton show took thirteen days, beginning on October 28, 2009, and ending (save some inevitable last-minute tweaking) on Friday, November 13. As the first institution given the opportunity to exhibit Burton’s unseen work, the urge to present a comprehensive selection was hard to resist. With 716 pieces of framed art, objects, and media to put in place, the pressure was on—especially since we knew that a series of special openings had been scheduled before the general public arrived: Tim’s private opening on November 16 for his friends and collaborators, a Department of Film benefit honoring Tim on November 17, and the opening reception on November 18. The realization that we would soon be hosting Johnny Depp, Danny Elfman, Helena Bonham Carter, Catherine O’Hara, Bo Welch, Glenn Shadix, Diane Wiest, Colleen Atwood, Danny DeVito, Jeffrey Jones, Crispin Glover, and others—not to mention Tim himself—added to the sense of excitement shared by everyone on the MoMA installation team.

Did you know that museum visitors spend an average of three seconds looking at a work of art? What can a viewer possibly glean from that brief encounter? When I invited poets Matthew Rohrer and Joshua Beckman to do a reading at MoMA, I knew that they would be able to change that statistic for a lucky few. They know how to encourage diverse audiences to join them in the process not only of composing poems, but of looking at and contemplating art and creating a fresh experience with it. So I challenged them to use MoMA’s public as a resource to write poems about works of art in the collection or about the museum experience in general. In their preliminary field work, they spied on museum goers, listened to their conversations, recorded people’s activities, and trained a group of teens from MoMA’s Teen Voices Project to do the same. Our goal was to bring an assortment of people, art, and poetry together, and to spawn unexpected social interactions.

Today is the fortieth annual Earth Day, and MoMA is committed to its green efforts. In December MoMA’s Operations Team completed the installation of solar panels on the roof at MoMA QNS, the permanent home for storage of MoMA’s collection and a facility for conservation, study, and research. The project included the installation of 161 solar panels tied to the main Con Edison electrical feed to the building, which is located in the building’s basement. The panels are photovoltaic, meaning that they convert the energy of the sun into electricity. The solar roof at MoMA QNS will generate solar energy for the facility, which will further decrease the Museum’s carbon footprint and subsequently lower energy costs—as such, it represents a major step in making MoMA a more environmentally responsible institution.

At the opening of the Rising Currents exhibition at MoMA, curator Barry Bergdoll used the word “glocal” to describe the impact of this exhibition. At first I thought I misheard, but then I realized he meant that the exhibition was part of the growing global grassroots movement to address the impact of climate change with smart, local solutions.

These notes accompany the Dziga Vertov program, screening April 21, 22, and 23 in Theater 3.

Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) presents some unusual problems with regard to his inclusion in this series. If we define an “auteur” as a filmmaker with a vision who places the stamp of his personality on his work, that presumes that there is a discernible personality or way of looking at the world. While no one could possibly miss the fact that from a technical standpoint, Vertov was a great innovator and expander of the medium (a rival to D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, or Alfred Hitchcock), there is reason to question who this guy really was. We do know he was born Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman in what is now Poland (then part of the Czarist empire) and was the elder brother to two other distinguished filmmakers, Mikhail (cameraman on several Vertov films and later a director) and Boris Kaufman (cinematographer for Jean Vigo, Abel Gance, Elia Kazan, and Sidney Lumet).