Art lovers rejoice: Spectrum has a new feature just for you! Art critic Julien Hawthorne keeps the description short and sweet before putting his student life fees to good use at one of New York’s most noteworthy museums.
This is how it’s gonna work: I’m going to go through the CU Arts list of free museums and talk a little bit about each one.
This week is the Museum of the City of New York. Not an art museum per se (but who’s defining art anyway?), the Museum of the City of New York is certainly a must for New York history buffs, though they’ve probably already been…honestly, if you live in New York you should stop by. Even if you just need something a few blocks farther uptown than the Frick, the Met, or the Guggenheim.
I was actually on my way to the Izhar Patkin exhibit at the Jewish Museum (perhaps next week), when I made a split second decision to walk the last 20 blocks and ended up veering into the Museum of the City of New York. When I say this museum is not an art museum per se, I realize a paragraph later that that’s bullshit, because the heart of New York City history is photojournalism. Some of the first photographs you see belong to Jacob Riis’s slum expose, “How the Other Half Lives,” and the museum’s snapshots of early rural Manhattan, or New Amsterdam, and now infamous immigrant neighborhoods like the Five Points are historically and aesthetically stunning.
