Humanities >> Museum Previews, Exhibits and Walking Tours
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Throughout time, women have been involved with art making in a variety of ways as artists, patrons, and collectors. In spite of the integral roles they have played, many women artists have not been included in the traditional narrative of art history, facing challenges due to gender biases and also difficulties in finding training and venues to exhibit and sell their work as a means to gain recognition.  In the beginning of the twentieth century, things began to change for female artists with social shifts towards equal rights encouraging them to address issues of identity in our own time.  Using the Met's collection, this guided tour will trace the evolution of female painters since the time of the Renaissance, exploring a number of women artists on view in the Met's European Paintings Galleries, the Nineteenth Century Wing and the Modern and Contemporary Galleries.  Images discussed will range from the Baroque period and the work of Artemisia Gentileschi and the painters of the ancien regime such as Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, to those of the female Impressionists Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, and American women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including Georgia O'Keeffe and Susan Rothenberg.  

Throughout time, women have been involved with art making in a variety of ways as artists, patrons, and collectors. In spite of the integral roles they have played, many women artists have not been included in the traditional narrative of art history, facing challenges due to gender biases and also difficulties in finding training and venues to exhibit and sell their work as a means to gain recognition.  In the beginning of the twentieth century, things began to change for female artists with social shifts towards equal rights encouraging them to address issues of identity in our own time.  Using the Met's collection, this guided tour will trace the evolution of female painters since the time of the Renaissance, exploring a number of women artists on view in the Met's European Paintings Galleries, the Nineteenth Century Wing and the Modern and Contemporary Galleries.  Images discussed will range from the Baroque period and the work of Artemisia Gentileschi and the painters of the ancien regime such as Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, to those of the female Impressionists Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, and American women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including Georgia O'Keeffe and Susan Rothenberg.  

This illustrated lecture explores street art, from 1970s New York City graffiti to gallery artists like Keith Haring, who utilized this artistic form of vandalism as a springboard to broadcast their own voices of contemporary culture.  All of the major metropolitan areas of the world boast a thriving, expressive community of artists who have taken their thoughts, observations, and opinions to the street.  From Miami to the US heartland, the West Bank to Reykjavik, some of the most talented and original artists in the world today like Banksy and Shepard Fairey embrace this vital, contemporary art form is embraced by .    

Celebrated as one of America's preeminent landscape painters, Thomas Cole (1801–1848) was born in northern England at the start of the industrial revolution, immigrated to the United States in his youth, and traveled extensively throughout England and Italy as a young artist. He returned to America to create some of his most ambitious works and inspire a new generation of American painters. This exhibition will examine for the first time the artist's career in relation to his European roots and travels, establishing Cole as a major figure in 19th-century landscape art within a global context. Thomas Cole's Journey marks the 200th anniversary of Cole's first Atlantic crossing, when he emigrated from England to the United States in 1818, and examines in-depth Cole's return journey to England in 1829–31 and his travels in Italy in 1831–32, revealing the development of his artistic processes. Seminal works created by the artist in the years immediately after his return to New York, between 1832 and 1837—notably The Oxbow and The Course of Empire—are presented as a culminating creative response to his complex experiences of British art and society and of Italian history and landscape. In addition, Cole's abiding passion for the American wilderness resulted in his fervent visual warning in these paintings to his fellow American citizens of the harsh ecological cost of unchecked development of the land. This exhibition brings to prominence the dialogue between American and European artists in the mid-19th century by hanging Cole's work in direct juxtaposition with works he studied on his formative journey, including paintings by J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, among others. It concludes with an examination of Cole's extraordinary legacy in the work of the next generation of American landscape painters whom he personally mentored, notably Asher B. Durand and Frederic E. Church.

This tour will take you inside de Royal Dinges Factory, the commissary, production space, and headquarters of Wafels & Dinges, an outrageously popular street food brand in New York City that was founded in 2007 with a mission to introduce true Belgian waffles to the United States.  Students will see how they make their spectacular Liège waffle dough and have an opportunity to cook their own while sipping fresh-brewed coffee. Learn how they store, supply, and maintain their carts and trucks; and get an insider’s look at this dynamic and growing business.   Afterwards, the tour will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus and the Gowanus Canal, once an industrial center and major cargo transportation hub that is today a burgeoning area for industrial and design businesses, art galleries, co-working spaces, and new developments.  

Explore this neighborhood that has developed into a mecca for art lovers and makers. Artists from all over the city and the world have painted these six blocks in Brooklyn with an astounding variety of imagery. This internationally famous outdoor gallery of street art goes beyond hip and cool – these street artists display a virtuoso handling of material and media, wildly inventive illustration styles and themes, along with trenchant commentary on current social economic, political and social issues. Everyone will find something interesting and revelatory, on lampposts and sidewalks, on doorways and gates to rooftops and high walls. Crowded with old school graffiti, wild style masterpieces, inventive sculptures, stencil work, stickers, wheat paste posters and monumental spray paint murals, the concentration and diversity of artwork is hard to imagine or believe.

Since the spring of 2009, New Yorkers and visitors have been enjoying the High Line, a public park built on an abandoned elevated rail structure on Manhattan's West Side.  The High Line has sparked a design revival in the neighboring Meatpacking District and Chelsea, with work by some of today's best-known architects, including Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, and Shigeru Ban.  Join us for an architectural walking tour along 1.5-miles of this elevated park from south to north.  Learn about the design of the park and the many new buildings that have sprung up alongside it.  

The Lower East Side art scene is in full bloom!  Learn how the Lower East Side transformed from a slum to a fashionable art hub.  Visit four prominent galleries exhibiting the most critically acclaimed artists.  As we navigate our way to the galleries, we will view murals by the edgiest street artists.  We will end the tour at Louis, a combination luncheonette and marketplace within the Public, an Ian Schrager hotel located at 215 Chrystie Street.

The old Lower East Side comes alive in this walking tour.  Central to the tour is the Jewish neighborhood, whose teeming tenements formed the heart of the most crowded place in the late nineteenth century world, including stops before a gloriously restored historic synagogue and the Jewish-owned bank tower where struggling immigrants built their nest eggs.  We also briefly visit the surrounding wards, marked at the time by gangs, flophouses, homeless newsboys and the noisy, smoke-belching elevated railway, as well as the seventeenth century Jewish cemetery that is the oldest human site in Manhattan.  Along the way, Velona tracks unforgettable photographs by Jacob Riis and others to the exact spots they were taken, portraying the struggles and desperation of immigrant life.  

New York's burgeoning art scene promises great variety, one of the hallmarks of contemporary art.  On this tour we will sample the work of artists whose multidisciplinary approaches — from paintings to prints and photography to video and new media — afford us the opportunity to experience the latest trends.  Galleries selected will all be in close proximity to each other and nearby lunch suggestions will be provided.  The new Whitney is just far away enough for those determined to exercise and extend the adventure after the tour ends.  The High Line, also within walking distance, is a perfect place for memento selfies of your day!  

The palace of Versailles and its gardens have attracted travelers ever since it was transformed under the direction of the Sun King, Louis XIV, from a simple hunting lodge into one of the most magnificent and public courts of Europe. French and foreign travelers, including royalty, ambassadors, artists, musicians, writers, scientists, grand tourists, and day-trippers, all flocked to the royal palace surrounded by its extensive formal gardens. Versailles was always a truly international setting, and not only drew visitors from Europe and America, but also hosted dignitaries from as far away as Thailand, India, and Tunisia. Their official receptions at Versailles and gift exchanges with the king were among the attractions widely recorded in tourists' diaries and court gazettes. Bringing together works from the Met, the Château de Versailles, and over 50 lenders, this exhibition, running April 16 through July 29, 2018, will highlight the experiences of travelers from 1682, when Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles, to 1789, when the royal family was forced to leave the palace and return to Paris. Through paintings, portraits, furniture, tapestries, carpets, costumes, porcelain, sculpture, arms and armor, and guidebooks, the exhibition will illustrate what visitors encountered at court, what kind of welcome and access to the palace they received, and, most importantly, what impressions, gifts, and souvenirs they took home with them.

Walk the streets of the Great White Way� as we trace the history of New York’s Broadway theater district from Oscar Hammerstein in the 1890s to Walt Disney in the 1990s. With a century of history behind them, the 40 surviving Broadway theaters stand as stunning works of art in themselves, as well as monuments to the lively history of American theater. Many were built as lavish headquarters for Broadway’s great impresarios, who spared no expense in their decor. The Belasco Theater on 44th Street was designed to the specifications of the extravagant David Belasco, the self-styled “Bishop of Broadway”� who, among other eccentricities, wore a clerical collar. The Little Theater, built for aristocratic New England producer Winthrop Ames, originally sat a tiny audience of 300; its precious Georgian style facade looks less like a typical Broadway theater than a Colonial New England manor house. Producer John Cort’s theater was designed as a recreation of the Petit Trianon in Versailles. Today these jewels sparkle among all the brash new skyscrapers that have transformed the once dingy and dangerous Times Square. The tour includes it all: theaters, skyscrapers, and city planning at its most controversial.