Street art at the library

Saturday after a visit to M0MA, we ventured across the street to the former Donnell Library Center to check out Pantheon,

a window exhibit featuring work by graffiti and street artists.

For me the whole appeal of street art is encountering art in an unexpected place, color and creativity where there is usually none. So when it's all collected together in a window, it loses something. Still, it was a pretty cool exhibition.

The location seems particularly fitting, considering the fate of the Donnell Library Center, which was one of the main branches of the New York Public Library for more than 50 years. In 2008 the library closed after the building was sold to Orient Express Hotels, with plans to raze the building and replace it with an 11-story luxury hotel, with the library operating in the lower level. Then of course after the financial crisis, the deal fell through and the library remains empty three years later.

Looking into a non-exhibit window at the construction inside.

I liked these door handles.

After that we got dinner at the Shake Shack (always worth the wait, even in the cold), were nearly attacked by a crazed squirrel hell-bent on stealing my fries, and saw a very funny movie.

Watts Towers

On our way to the airport we made one last stop: the Watts Towers.

Named for the neighborhood where they are located, the Watts Towers are a collection of 17 interconnected structures, the tallest of which is 99 feet high. They were all built by one man, an Italian immigrant construction worker named Simon Rodia, who created them in his spare time over the course of 33 years.

Constructed from steel pipes and rods, wrapped with wire mesh, and coated with mortar, the towers are embedded with pieces of porcelain, tile, and glass, and found objects such as bed frames, bottles, scrap metal, and sea shells.

These tiles spell out "SR 1921" (his initials and the year he started the project) and "Nuestro Pueblo," which is what he called the property. The flower shapes pressed in the concrete were made using garden hose spigots.

You can see a lot of fragments of vintage soda bottles.

The whole place is shaped like a boat. Our tour guide said he guessed that Simon intended to recreate the ship he sailed to America on.

In 1955, Rodia mysteriously left Los Angeles, giving the property away to a neighbor, and never returned. A year later his house, which was located within the structures, burned down. There is a wooden platform indicating where the house once stood, which was quite an unexpected revelation for me, as it's really hard to imagine this place as someone's backyard.


After the tour we watched this short film about the towers, made in the 50s while Rodia still lived there. Interestingly enough, the musical score, which was created just for this film, was later used in a very famous TV series. (I'll let you figure out which one.)

And so concludes my long and drawn out vacation slide show. I hope it was actually enjoyable for anyone else who was reading it!

LACMA

I know it's a little unbelievable that three weeks later I'm still posting about L.A. but that's really just a testament to how many awesome things we did there. Our last night in town we went to LACMA, the L.A. County Museum of Art.

Outside there are lots of Eames wire chairs scattered about (a nice counterpart to MoMA's Bertoias).

Also in the courtyard is this sculpture, called "Urban Light," which consists of 202 cast iron street lamps that once were used in the streets of L.A. The Hipstamatic Dali lens does some crazy things to it.

After looking at the William Eggleston photo exhibit and thinking "what a great museum," we realized that there were quite a few more buildings to explore. We saw Andy Warhols, Alexander Calders, Richard Serras,

Giacometti sculptures, Paul Klees, Philip Gustons,

Henri Matisses, Ed Ruschas, Donald Judds, and on and on.

I took a lot of pictures of the "Fashioning Fashion" exhibit. It really photographed well.



And also from "Eye for the Sensual."

So I was pretty impressed with this museum. Nine buildings filled with ridiculously incredible art. And it's free during the week for California residents! (Which of course didn't help us, but just sayin...I can't think of any NY art museums on par with this one that are also free for locals.)

I love you, you big dummy

Totally depressing.

Hanging out at the Eames House

Constructed in 1949, Case Study House #8 was designed by legendary designers Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen. The house is in Pacific Palisades, a fancy-looking neighborhood of L.A. just north of Santa Monica. I made a reservation to take a self-guided tour of the outside (only one tour of the interior is granted per year, to Eames foundation members).

When we got there it turned out that the tours are actually guided, which was nice as we learned a lot more about its history and design. Even though we couldn't enter the house, the design is so open that we could easily look inside and see the whole thing (with the exception of the upstairs)--I learned that the intention was to give the impression that the patio was an extension of the house.

Dave sitting in Ray's swing, which she thought provided the best view of the house.

Here's their doorbell.

The space between the house and their studio is of course nicely designed as well.

The pathway is made of a variety of materials, with various carefully placed potted plants.

A view of their studio, which is located about fifteen feet (maybe more...it's pretty close though) from the house. Note the giant praying mantis.

We noticed this little guy in a far corner of the property. It was a gift to the Eames for their grandchildren to use, and came from a London playground. Reminds me quite a bit of this...

We also noticed these toy dump trucks elsewhere on the property (it's a pretty huge piece of land). I love how everywhere we turned there was another little surprise. The yard is situation on top of a cliff overlooking the ocean--those Eames had pretty good taste.

We weren't allowed to take any photos of the indoors but I found this site that has a few interior shots. I love the bookcase. It's hard to see but they have several LTR tables lined up in the hall between the kitchen and living room. And now I of course really want one. Sigh.

Sculpture in Queens

Saturday we went on a little cross-borough adventure, starting in the Bronx (obviously), moving on to Brooklyn to buy a plant and have some lunch, and then on to Queens to check out the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park. (There was also an unscheduled detour that I'll get into tomorrow, and then another jaunt into Brooklyn for dinner.)

In the outdoor garden at the Noguchi museum, which is filled with his sculptures. Noguchi was a sculptor, designer, and landscape architect. He designed a very nice coffee table that I wouldn't mind getting my hands on, and if it weren't for Robert Moses he might have designed a number of New York City parks that, from looking at the plans, seem like they might've been a lot of fun--one of them was to be called "Play Mountain."

This might have been one of the coolest ones.

Part of the interior of the building is open, with trees growing up from inside and poking out.

We'd already been to the sculpture park, which is more or less across the street from the museum, but thought we'd check it out again. Most of the sculptures were under construction (we literally saw people hard at work, hammering away). But we did get to see a few things, like the above tree made of steel and vinyl. (I have to admit it made me look twice.)

These plaster constructions look like snow angels in reverse. There were quite a few of them laying in the grass.

Looking up into a giant cubic sculpture.

A view of a building from the park. Not sure if it's still an office furniture warehouse but I like the signs.

Day 2 in Kansas City: museums and baseball

I'd meant to get the rest of my pictures of Kansas City up here last week but it just never happened. You know how it is, recovering from vacations, transitioning back into your regular workaday drudgery. Anyway, I figured now is as good a time as any to start.

Friday we spent most of the day wandering around the neighborhood of Westport, with a few minor detours. We also went to a couple of pretty decent art museums, the Kemper and the Nelson-Atkins, both practically nextdoor to one another.

The Kemper is the smaller of the two, but it gets points for having this giant Louis Bourgeois sculpture out front. Unlike the one at Dia Beacon, though, you can't walk through it and under it and so forth (well, I guess you could, though there are signs threatening that the sculpture is monitored by security cameras).

The immense lawn of the Nelson-Atkins features sculptures of shuttlecocks, designed by Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen, which I like even more now that I've learned of their genesis: "They responded to the formality of the original neoclassical building and the green expanse of its lawn by imagining the Museum as a badminton net and the lawn as a playing field. The pair designed four birdies or shuttlecocks that were placed as though they had just landed on opposite sides of the net."

I also love that something I own (albeit in a different color) is on display in a museum. There were a few other iconic pieces of midcentury furniture design in the Nelson-Atkins--you almost want to just have a seat (probably frowned upon).

One of the museum's guestbooks--apparently a lot of people like unicorns.

Later that night we went to another baseball game, although it was rained out a little over halfway through. That is, there was a 2.5 hour rain delay, which we decided to leave about 30 minutes into, assuming the game would be called. They did end up finishing around 1 a.m. And we got soaked in the parking lot trying to find our car.

One of the things the stadium is known for is its fountains, which are turned on at various points throughout the evening.

Touring Russel Wright's home

Saturday we also went to the Russel Wright Design Center in Garrison to tour the grounds and interior of Manitoga, the one-time home of renowned mid-century designer Russel Wright. Wright designed fabrics and furniture but he's best known for his line of ceramics, which is still in production today.

The tour guide* insisted that we weren't getting the full experience because the water level was so low and there was no waterfall due to the lack of rain. And because the hemlock trees are dying. But I thought the whole place was pretty amazing-looking. So imagine what it might look like when conditions are perfect.

Even though it looks very natural, everything has been carefully, painstakingly placed, from the trees to the rocks, to the moss. The moss, especially, is lovely, with areas completely covered in it (called "moss rooms," apparently).

The dying hemlock trees. (At least they make for really cool pictures.)

A couple of outdoor chairs for relaxing and taking in the views.

Here's the kitchen of the main house, of course outfitted with a variety of Russel Wright ceramics. I realized that we didn't really get any decent shots of the inside of the house, so I recommend taking a look at this flickr set to get a sense of how crazy it is in there. The floors are made of stone. There's a tree growing inside! And now I totally want to grow plants on the roof of my future house.

The real highlight of the tour for me, though, was the studio, where Wright actually spent most of his time. I loved just about everything about it, especially how the windows open out to ground level. The overall design is simple, clean, and beautiful. It felt very peaceful in there.

A gorgeous bedspread. I would love to wake up and look out those windows. The bookcase might be my favorite feature, though you'll have to check the flickr set for a photo.

I don't really need any new dishes but after looking at all those lovely ceramics I kind of want to buy a few. Maybe a pitcher or a lidded bowl of some kind. We'll see.

*I feel the need to mention that our tour guide was a tall, tan, bleach blonde woman wearing a rhinestone-bedecked Stooges baby doll shirt. She brought along her ten-year-old (estimating here) daughter, who wore a matching Stooges shirt and purple zebra print leggings. They were awesome.