It’s been rainy here in New York City, but mostly it’s been hot and sweltering, hot like everywhere else in the world where it’s summer. On days like these, one way to keep cool in the city is by escaping to a museum. New Yorkers have the enviable opportunity to cool off in a different museum on every single day of the month if they wanted to. The one I chose to cool off in last week was the Guggenheim Museum.
The Guggenheim is an architectural highlight along Manhattan’s landscape. Upon first passing, one can’t help but gawk at its architecture. Its stark, yet dull-grey concrete color. Those continuous curved lines of the ziggurat [ascending structure] rising from its base. The unusual shape of all its parts, in sharp contrast to the typical, boring rectangular boxes that is every other building surrounding it. (On its front side at least, directly across, is the green of Central Park.)
This was architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece. It’s the only museum he designed in his illustrious career, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of eight of his outstanding works of architecture. The Guggenheim Museum took 16 years to build, and opened six months after his death in 1959. How heartbreaking. We always think of the art, the artist, their creativity— but how devastating that must have been to the creator himself, to miss the final moments it was completed and celebrated.
The real reason however for my pilgrimage to the Upper East Side of Manhattan was to witness the work of Jenny Holzer. She is an artist whose medium is the written word, displayed in public spaces. I first encountered her art in the late 90s, where her words seemed to find me everywhere. Galleries with her electronic LED messaging on full display. On light projections on buildings, on T-shirts in museum shops. On marble benches, inscribed with her modern poetry, yet looked as if they were remnants from the Italian Renaissance. Her words expressed humor and courage, bold statements delivered with grace. The aspiring writer in me fell in love with her art.
Around that time, the fashion designer Helmut Lang opened his first New York boutique in the SoHo neighborhood. On prominent display was an installation of her work, smack in the middle of the store, strong statements forcing you to confront them as you read the words running vertically from ceiling to floor. It was really at the beginning of the era of fashion collaborating with fine artists, and it left an impression on me, art meeting commerce…
