Climate change and sea-level projections developed by the New York City Panel on Climate Change

The Rising Currents exhibition and studio work at P.S.1 demonstrated the challenges that New York City faces from climate change, as well as the opportunities we have to rethink how we interact with the built and natural environment. 

New York City already faces real and significant climate risks. We currently experience hot, humid summers and severe weather events, including heat waves, torrential downpours, snow and ice storms, and nor’easters. These weather events affect every New Yorker. As our climate changes, increasing our resilience to these events will become even more necessary.

Siegfried (Part 1 of Die Nibelungen) 1924. Germany. Directed by Fritz Lang

These notes accompany the Nordic Gods and Directors program, which screens on February 17, 18, and 19 in Theater 3.

In a sense, there are two Fritz Langs, with his life, career, and sensibility split almost literally in half by the rise of the Nazis. The German Lang is monumental, existing in a realm of the fantastic, the superhuman, the surreal. The American Lang is naturalistic, existing in a real world inhabited by ordinary earthlings, people with feelings, folks with whom we can identify. The crossover film was M (1931), Lang’s first talkie, in which Peter Lorre’s child murderer is accorded a sympathetic hearing, evoking the genuine emotion lacking in Lang’s work over the preceding twelve years. This is not to suggest that Lang (1890–1976) ever became a conventionally naturalistic and humanistic director in the course of his honorable and mostly successful American career. He was as much a progenitor of film noir as he was of the expressionism from whence it sprung, and his later ramblings—from Brecht to Zola, from the Philippines of Tyrone Power to Jean-Luc Godard’s Capri in Le Mepris—bespeak no ordinary career.

From left: Art room at Bridges Juvenile Detention Center; student work displayed in the hallway of the Detention Center

Bridges Juvenile Detention Center is a secure facility located in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, surrounded by a strip of used auto-parts stores and wholesale supply outlets. It houses both boys and girls, although the two groups are kept at a far remove from one another, and it has all of the familiar trappings of your standard-issue television or film depiction of prison: guards, jumpsuits, concrete, barbed wire, and barred windows. But it also has an art room. And a library. And hallways full of drawings and paintings and poetry.

When I got off the elevator at the Architecture and Design department for a quick meeting with Juliet Kinchin about a new exhibition she was curating called The New Typography, I was surprised to see some original posters from the 1920s lined up along a wall, and many tiny pieces of stationery systems, brochures, flyers, and ads carefully spread out on a table. We don’t usually get to see the real artwork until just before the show, when installation is underway, and until then, we use exhibition catalogs or digital images for reference.

I felt like an anthropologist in the presence of an early human ancestor. As a graphic designer, I could relate to these pieces more than any other art I had worked with at MoMA. These ninety-year-old posters communicated loud and clear, and still looked amazingly cool. But when I took a close look, their difference from contemporary graphics was apparent: these works had a hand-crafted feel—a beautiful contrast to the clean geometry of the layout.

From left: Theo H. Ballmer. Neues Bauen (New building). 1928. Poster for traveling exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund. Offset lithograph. Gift of The Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund. Walter Dexel. Fotografie der Gegenwart (Contemporary photography). 1929. Poster for an exhibition in Magdeburg, Germany. Linocut. Gift of the designer. Walter Dexel. Die Sport Ausstellung Magdeburg (Sport exhibition Magdeburg). 1929. Offset lithograph. Special Purchase Fund

American painter Jackson Pollock came of age at a time when jazz was very popular; the big bands were swinging on the radio, and he was drawn to it. In selecting the seven painters for the Portrait in Seven Shades suite, I was drawn to Pollock and his work because although he was reclusive, I believe music gave him a sense of belonging, a connection to society. Pollock moved away from figurative art and became known as an Abstract Expressionist. Once, when asked, “What is modern art?” he answered, “Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we’re living in.”

“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” The work of this pioneer of modernism and master of color is the inspiration for “Chagall,” the sixth movement of Portrait in Seven Shades, a suite of music based on seven artists in MoMA’s collection. This piece is inspired by two of Chagall’s iconic works—I and the Village (1911) and Calvary (1912)—and by costume designs and renderings Chagall created for the character of Zemphira, a gypsy from the ballet Aleko.

Robin Rhode. Car on Bricks. 2008. Multiple of wall drawing and bricks. Publisher: Edition Schellmann, Munich. Edition: 15. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art. © 2010 Robin Rhode

As they reach the top of the escalators on the second floor at MoMA, visitors are greeted by a recent acquisition by the South African–born, German-based artist Robin Rhode. Car on Bricks (2008) consists essentially of an idea that the artist has issued in an edition of fifteen unusual multiples, each consisting of a wall drawing and two piles of bricks.

The tragically unrequited love, the driving need to be accepted as a serious artist, the longing for success that never quite came (he sold only one painting during his lifetime)—most people are just as familiar with the story of Vincent van Gogh‘s life as they are with his art. Full of thick strokes and rich colors, van Gogh’s paintings express his passion and pathos. His many self-portraits show him to be sad or dispirited. Aware of his struggles, we are drawn into his paintings. The reality he captures is one we want to experience.

Installation view of Tim Burton at MoMA

As we approach the midpoint of the five-month Tim Burton exhibition (November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010), I am reflecting on what may be our visitors’ first impressions of the show. Hopefully those who came to MoMA familiar with Tim’s films—whether they know him as the director responsible for cult favorite Edward Scissorhands (1990), the imaginative and innovative creator of The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the mischievous mind behind the irreverent Mars Attacks! (1996), or the filmmaker who brought the tale of tonsorial terror that is Sweeney Todd (2007) to the big screen—were pleasantly surprised to find another Tim Burton on display alongside the anticipated props and storyboards. Approximately 70 percent of the works in the exhibition had never been published or shown in public, and it is these works—projects both personal and professional, realized on paper and canvas, or via installations and sculptures—that give visitors a view of Tim as illustrator, cartoonist, photographer, and writer of verse, among other creative roles. These diverse works are united by their intimate, subjective nature; each conveys Tim’s distinctive way of viewing his world and the characters who populate it. The revelation of the private art of Tim Burton to MoMA’s visitors may be similar to my own personal revelation during our first meeting with Tim at his studio in London almost two years ago….

When Wynton Marsalis, the Music Director at Jazz at Lincoln Center, asked me to compose a long-form piece that could take any direction as long as it had a theme, it didn’t take me long to come up with a truly inspiring concept: music based on art. In Portrait in Seven Shades, each movement is dedicated to a different painter, and while it was hard to narrow my selection down to only seven artists, there were a few choices that were obvious to me—one of them being Picasso.