ART
Su-Mei-Tse: Recent Works
Through Sat., Jan. 22
The massive alps rise ominously. In the foreground of the video, artist Su-Mei-Tse sits astride her cello in a bright green field. She plays a piece of classical music and waits; in a moment, the blue-gray mountain before her echoes back. She responds and the duet continues.
Tse's second video-seen on the opposite side of the large screen-features dozens of uniformed men sweeping sand into piles across a vast desert landscape. The two works collide in your ears, eyes and mind with their comparative and symbolic possibilities.
In chaotic Soho, it's an escape that rescues your peace of mind.
Peter Blum Gallery, 99 Wooster St. (Spring & Prince Sts.), 212-343-0441; (Tues.-Fri. 10-6, Sat. 11-6) , free.
-Julia Morton
A Collector's Cabinet of Curiosities: Objects for a Wunderkammer from 16th to 19th Centuries
Through Sat., Jan. 29
The desire to understand all, to reduce a vast library of knowledge into a single volume. This was the motive that drove the earliest Medieval collectors. Ultimately, their passions inspired the creation of art and natural history museums.
On display in the gallery are purchasable examples of artifacts considered essential for a classic cabinet of curiosities-a Wunderkammer. Ornate scientific tools, macabre amusements, wood crafts and alchemists crystal.
Chasing reason and magic, these princely hoarders shopped the world in search of wonder. Now here for your inspection are 120 pieces of their ancient treasure.
Peter Freeman Inc., 560 B'way (betw. Prince & Spring Sts.), 212-966-5349; Tues.-Sat. 10-6, free.
-Julia Morton
I Want to Be Loved By You | through March 20The Brooklyn Museum has captured Marilyn Monroe's Hollywood life in a series titled, appropriately, "I Want to Be Loved By You: Photographs of Marilyn Monroe." The exhibit highlights more than 200 photographs by such photographers as Bert Stern, Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The images are arranged in a series of walk-through rooms, taking visitors through a timeline of Monroe's life in the spotlight. At the time of her first publicity photographs, shot in 1945, the future bombshell was still known as Norma Jeane Baker and was little more than the shy brunette teenager who'd been bounced from foster home to foster home. Her final photo shoot would be held just days before her death on August 5, 1962. Photos from the years between show glimpses of a personal life that included tumultuous marriages to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller.
Photographer Bert Stern photographed Monroe more than 2500 times, and she had final approval on every shot (he was also the last person to shoot her). Fifty-nine of his photographs are on display here, including many from Vogue. Those Monroe didn't like are X'ed out with a red pen; it's in these never-before-seen rejects and the accompanying descriptions that we learn just how close Marilyn was to her photographers. She's so striking and poised, such a natural charmer, that one feels almost like an intruder when staring at the images.
Covers from Look and Life are also on display; here, we see Monroe as an up-and-coming star. There are short film clips from her most well-known films-including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and even a reel of her famous happy-birthday wish for JFK. There's that famous still from The Seven Year Itch (white dress lifting up over air grate on Lexington Ave.), and a framed picture of DiMaggio that once belonged to Monroe herself. And, of course, the exhibit would not be complete without the Gene Korman photo used by Andy Warhol for Marilyn.
The exhibit's photographs are beautiful, but they are also haunting and sad. It's clear that there was a quieter, more thoughtful side to Monroe-that of a voracious reader who wanted nothing more than to be taken seriously as an actress and theatrical scholar.
The Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Pkwy. (Washington Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-638-5000; Weds.-Fri., 10-5, Sat.-Sun., 11-6, $8 sugg. don., $4 st.
-Rachel Sokol
NYC | Through Sat., Jan. 29It's not conceptually challenging. It doesn't present edgy artists or new subjects, offer old masterpieces or innovative materials. DFN Gallery's "NYC" exhibition is simply a presentation of drawings and paintings that look at New York-our home.
Walking around the gallery, you'll come across moments you've experienced. In street scenes like Ben Aronson's expressionist Down Lexington, the towering gray avenue is briskly painted with its thin slice of pale sky above, and its gnarled, aggressive traffic rushing down on you below. Then there's Olive Ayhens' From the Underground, with its funky, outer-borough, raised train platform in the foreground, and off in the distance, the glamorous spires of Manhattan.
Wish You Were Here, a painting by John Hardy, depicts the infamous Tribeca restaurant Teddy's. The street angle chosen highlights the city's unorganized geometry of spaces and solids, curves and concrete, weird decor and alluring ads. Dan Witz's painting Morval Deli glows in darkness, focusing our eyes on the bright, busy facade of signage-the corner deli seen as a nourishing beacon.
There are several exceptional watercolors, such as Washington & Fourteenth Street by Frederick Brosen. Capturing the delicate color and visual harmony of cobblestone streets and detailed, 19th-century brick buildings, this work allows us to fully appreciate scenes like this...ones we pass affectionately, yet rarely have the time to stop and admire.
In the back of the gallery is the second sphere, this one 24 inches in diameter, which features a view from the top of the former World Trade Center's north tower. We see the south tower, lower Manhattan and New Jersey, and as we round the spherical painting, we go uptown, then out into Brooklyn, and back around to the south tower. The technical achievement alone is impressive, but the artist has also recorded a view now lost forever.
Though the show is quaintly nostalgic with its bridges, roller coasters, crime scenes, family strolls, overgrown industrial parks, and plants dying in windows, the images give the familiar streets we take for granted a new frame of reverence.
DFN Gallery, 176 Franklin St. (betw. Greenwich & Hudson Sts.), 212-334-3400; Mon.-Sat. 11-7, free.
-Julia Morton