Bonnard interior, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Where to begin writing about five days of looking at art and being with people  I love in New York!  It was such an overwhelming experience I can only think in terms of lists.  With Gordon I visited the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum and MOMA.  With my stepbrother, John, I visited Chelsea galleries.  By myself I went to the Met and some SOHO galleries.  We balanced all the art with lovely walks in wonderful outdoor spaces.  Gordon and I started one morning with a long walk through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, lingering in the Japanese garden,  and by the lotuses and waterlilies.  John gave me a fascinating tour of  Central Park on foot.  And, after dark one night, he shared with me the new elevated park built on a former train track only a block or so from his home.  The sky was huge, the moon was full, and the wild grasses and simple wildflowers beside our feet were softly illuminated.  The only word for it was magical.

So, out of all that art, what leaps to mind when I think back over my trip?  This afternoon, once off the plane, I took a nap and dreamed about a tapestry in peaches and blues, heavily patterned, serene, reassuring.  It represented, I think, some kind of amalgam of all those visual experiences and their emotional and psychological weight.  I think it represents not only the art hung in the towering rooms of these great museums, but also the complex weaving of thousands of faces in the subway and park and on the streets– of every nationality, color and mode of dress.  It made me smile over and over to observe people strike up a conversation between subway stops– the Muslim explaining his religion to the Puerto Rican couple, who showed him the tee shirts they’d just bought, the Hispanic girls who worked so hard to understand my questions and help me find my way, the young medical students talking about their particular cadavers, the smooth, perfectly groomed elderly man, in red shoes and hat, proud of the baby clothes he’d just bought to give as a gift.  The dream tapestry’s pattern was probably inspired, at least a bit, by the Bonnards and Vuillards I saw hanging together in the Met.  The peachy tones were probably from the terra cotta sculptures I saw, and studied for inspiration.

Roxy Paine, roof garden sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art

John told me to be sure to go up to the Met’s roof garden to enjoy the sculpture by Roxy Paine, installed across an area probably 40′x25′.  It was a series of limbs made of stainless steel, glistening in the sun, pointing the way for us to look, in the same way I use tree limbs in my work, and casting bold shadows on the floor and on the viewers.

Some large retrospective gestures that were supposed to excite the viewer, instead bored me.  I’ve seen this work in many museums, and on magazine covers, but it does not speak to me as it speaks to the curators.  I was mesmerized, however, by the installation at MOMA of the saved objects that made up the worldly possessions of one Chinese woman.  The piece was conceived of and created by Song Dong and his mother, as an act of healing in the aftermath of her husband’s death.  The poignancy of her story, and the tattered, exhausted nature of the things she had saved all her life added up to something real and compelling. I still see the tapestry of empty plastic soda bottles, capped in various colors, displayed together in the shadow of the remains of the framing of her original home, beside every shoe she had ever owned, and every toothbrush.  It had elements of everyone’s secret closet.

Interestingly, I saw the newly discovered “first” painting by Michelangelo.  It was on loan to the Met from the Kimbrell in Ft Worth, and was a small painting on panel, based on a popular etching of the time.