We kicked off MIX: New Performance at MAD with Martha Colburn’s performance, Myth Labs. She began with a retrospective of short films dated from 1994-Present. These films included I’m Gonna (1997), There’s a Pervert in Our Pool! (1995), Meet Me in Wichita (1995) and others. The films portray Colburn’s cut-and-paste animation set to poetry,music and sound effects. Next she showed two short films, Don’t Kill the Weather Man and Myth Labs, which were both accompanied by live music. Instruments included the cello, foley, drums, violin, saw and moog. After this, the musicians were given a chance to do a group improvisation.
We had our inaugural public program at 2 Columbus Circle last night: 5 artists from our exhibition Second Lives joined Chief Curator David McFadden and Curator Lowery Sims in the galleries for discussion on their works. A good crowd turned out to listen, look, and ask questions.
For those who don’t know, MAD offers public programs of many different types (lectures, gallery tours, films in our fantastic new theater) on Thursday nights, when we are open until 9 and admission is pay-what-you-wish. Check out our calendar for details on happenings at the Museum.
All photos are courtesy of our fabulous intern, Irina Sarnetskaya (thanks Irina).
Chief Curator David McFadden with Curator Lowery Sims
By any measure, yesterday’s Grand Opening was a great success. Around 4000 people came through the door; we had a capacity crowd with a line around the block for most of the (rainy) day. Can we repeat yesterday’s accomplishment? Will even more people decide to come check out the new museum? Will the entire museum staff collapse from a combination of exhaustion and over-excitement? (My guesses: yes, yes and probably around 6:15 tonight.)
Photos of second day goodness to come throughout the day.
Studio Cam, 4:37 PM Sunday
Crowds in the Second Lives galleries, 4:25 PM Sunday
Better late than never, here’s a nice video to complement Elayne’s post on deinstallation of the 40 West 53rd Street galleries. In this clip, our art handlers are removing Annet Couwenberg’s “Embroidery Penetrates” from the wall of the gallery.
Thanks to Skip La Plante for allowing us to use his music – for those who don’t know Skip’s music, he composes and performs his music on homemade music built from trash (the particular instrument here is a kind of homemade zither called the Kanon). And kudos to Elayne for some excellent narration.
This is a bit of a fan letter. Ever since I started working in the design world, my favorite part of the work-month is my Metropolis magazine delivery. If you’re reading this, you probably already subscribe, but here’s my homage anyway. There is an uncanny resemblance between their content and my daydreams. My obsession with new buildings in Dubai and Abu Dhabi showed up in their November 2007 issue; Palo Samko’s rocking chair, which we featured during our sustainable design program October and which I keep thinking about turned up last month; and this month, it’s kitchen design – a personal preoccupation. But they provide the voyeuristic fulfillment of sneaking a peak into the professional kitchens of Chez Panisse, Stone Barns and others. What a great photo assignment that would have been.
So lucky for us, Martin Pedersen, Metropolis’s Executive Editor, will be joining us as the moderator for Thursday night’s program, Architecture & Recovery. He’ll be carrying on the conversation after Kate Stohr from Architecture for Humanity and Jens Holm from the Rockwell Group speak about their work on The Guardians Institute, an amazing New Orleans community center started by Herreast Harrison. Herreast is also flying up to join us, and to show off what I heard are the incredible beaded-costumes worn during the Mardi Gras festivities. The Guardians Institute was founded to teach this beadwork and other crafts to the local New Orleans community – it will be great to hear more.
Rendering of Guardian Institute, New Orleans, LA
Courtesy of Rockwell Group
Sort of cliché, but welcome to the MAD Blog! Why does Museum of Arts and Design need a blog? It is our hope over the coming months/years/eons that this blog will serve a couple of purposes. First, we hope to give a glimpse inside our museum, with everything from posts from our curators about how they plan exhibitions to chats with our registrars about the nuts-and-bolts of museum operations. We also hope that this blog will become a forum for discussion between artists and educators, and also a repository and collection point for information on topics of interest.
Big aspirations, we know, but hopefully if we start broad, we’ll find plenty to talk about!
So thanks for checking us out and feel free to comment.
