This week’s museums were all about art for the first time. I was back home in Minnesota so I was able to hit up the 2 big art museums in Minneapolis; The Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

 

Walker Art Center

The Walker has always been, and continues to be, one of my favorite places. Growing up in St. Cloud doesn’t afford you a lot of cultural experiences and the Walker was a beacon of weird, new ideas within striking distance of my home. The building is situated near downtown Minneapolis and consists of 2 wings; the original Modernist brick building and a 2005 addition designed by Herzog & de Meuron. It’s also flanked by a large sculpture garden. It’s impossible to miss the angular structure jutting out from it’s rather flat surroundings and it makes me wonder if the bold expression of the newer wing will stand up to time.

Regardless of if the architecture ages well, the building is a good showcase for what the Walker is trying to do. It’s highly visible, contemporary and actually quite welcoming. There are a number of lounge areas throughout the building that encourage people to congregate and relax. There are also interactive kiosks that give you details about the collection, the building and the goal of The Walker.

 

 

The interior is a wandering puzzle of galleries, each with their own dimensions and theme. While the old wing is more traditionally white and boxy, the new wing has dramatic angles and multimedia spaces of various colors. I was delighted to see an entire gallery made up as an homage to the Wunderkammer with an assortment of almost-ironic articles that seemed to recognize the Museum of Jurassic Technology. As they entered this room, I overheard a young boy say “this is a real art museum” and a middle aged man decided “this is the best room.”

The collection is a mix of touring and permanent work. In light of our reading about the Pulitzer collection this week, it occurred to me that this can be a difficult curatorial balance to pull off. It feels almost antithetical to the museum to have a permanent collection and even odder that they have to rearrange and re-contextualize a finite amount of art to keep the gallery spaces feeling fresh. I’m sure there are great benefits to having a collection (like being able to draw upon it whenever you want to), but maybe they should auction off anything older than 20 years.

 

 

This feels like the perfect venue for computer generated and assisted art, not unlike work being made at ITP, but there was actually very little of that. I kept expecting to see an interactive gallery and more constructivist presentations being experimented with, but over-all this museum is pretty white-walls and hands off.

The website goes beyond the standard brochure-ware you normally see and attempts to be a general art news source. That seems like an interesting role to play, but it also adds a lot of noise to their home page for the casual visitor. Luckily the hours and events are conveniently placed in the upper left corner, so there isn’t much hunting one has to do for those.

 

 

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The MIA was quite a different experience from the Walker, and perhaps they both benefit from that. It’s a much more traditional museum that feels like an Institution, complete with a giant neo-classical building. I’ve never visited the MIA before and I was surprised by the scale and tone considering it’s in Minneapolis.

When you enter the building, you walk into a 3 story rotunda with a Greek marble statue in the middle. On either side there are wings that are as wide as Parisian boulevards that have galleries appending them all the way down. These galleries feature mainly ancient art and artifacts with maps and cultural explanations—not what I was expecting in an art gallery. With that in mind, I was even more surprised to see that the end of the hallway turned into another large rotunda that led to a contemporary art collection. The juxtaposition was quite unusual.

 

 

The presentation was all very formally arranged on the walls and in free-standing cases. However, the museum itself felt up-to-speed. There were audio guides and some of the placards had QR codes on them. There was even a large screen that visualized tweets related to the show that it was a part of (regarding globalization). I thought that was an interesting bit of naval gazing.

Like the museum, the website feels large, dry and not wanting for verbosity. It overwhelms you with options until you finally just settle into one section and pretend the rest doesn’t exist. You can only take so much in.

Overall, I didn’t think the MIA was quite as interesting or dynamic as the Walker, but it was a good example of a museum in the systematic tradition. Maybe I’ve become accustomed to a different kind of experience, but I kept looking for something to catch my eye. Considering it’s vast scale, that happened too little for me to want to return the next time I’m in MN.

 

368 Manhattan

This week we visited 368 Manhattan Ave, an apartment in Brooklyn which is designed to reflect the living situations of 2012.

The first thing I noticed was that the building itself is very contemporaneous to the time period it portrays. It was built in 2008, just 4 years before our imagined inhabitants lived there. It’s made of brick and steel, with unadorned static surfaces which were just beginning to be designed by computers, but barely portray the array of shapes and reflexivity we expect today. It’s indicative of the time where Williamsburg was just starting to become the wealthy neighborhood that defined it in the late teens and early twenties. By today’s standards it was a modestly sized structure, and originally didn’t have the top 10 stories which make up the bulk of the building we see now.

The tour I took was booked online and we had the option of a 2D or 3D tour. I opted for the 3D tour, which was actually a complete reconstruction, because the original address isn’t equipped to handle transports. There were some obvious anachronisms, like a smart panel (circa 2018), but the effect was pretty much the same. We got to interact with a host of probable inhabitants and ask them about their life, which I thought was especially evocative. The avatars’ AI was abysmal at handling questions about modern tech, and we got a good laugh out of confusing it for a while.

In the early 21st century it was very common for a single person or family to reside in these apartments for years, or even decades on end. Because of this, all of the furniture and appliances were generally owned by the occupants and were often accompanied by personal objects and decorations. It wasn’t until the late 20′s and 30′s that apartments became associated with the roving class and operated as temporary residences.

368 Manhattan is around 550 square feet; pretty roomy for two people. But again, that’s 550 square feet of permanent space where most of the cooking, sleeping, bathing and entertaining was done. So it had to accommodate a range of uses that are now done in restaurants, BNBs, and venues.

In it’s day it was a clean and well maintained residence, but there are many things that we would find lacking. Firstly, there was very little by way of environmental calibration. That wouldn’t have been too bad in 2012, but later inhabitants had to suffer the environment with little more than “air conditioners.” There was also no holodeck. Brooklynites routinely visited their place of work or school physically, which required a daily commute using a car, subway or bike. It’s almost unimaginable that the location of the body was so integrated with communication at the time.

There’s a clear ancestry between our way of life and that of 2012, but it’s also become drastically different. So much of their daily routine was constrained by physical requirements, and perhaps that explains the premium that they clearly placed on spaciousness and mobility. Did they have it any harder then than we have it now? I’d say not. New York was in a time of prosperity and quality-of-life is relative… to your neighbors, not your ancestors.

This week I visited a couple of museums that represent the way people live in late 19th and early 20th century New York City. The first was the Tenement Museum which represents the living situation of some of the poorest immigrants who came to America. The second is the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt; a brownstone in the flatiron district of New York, which could only be afforded by the most affluent families in America.

A commonality between these museum visits is that they were both guided tours, and the museum was itself the object of interest. They were both decorated in their respective period styles to reflect the living situation of their inhabitants. It immerses the visitor in a way of life that’s truly tangible and accessible. It’s easy to imagine running through the hallways as a kid or eating dinner with your family.

Tenement Museum

I took the “Hard Life” tour at the Tenement Museum, which was one of several options. On this tour we saw the reconstructed living quarters of 2 families. One was from the 1860s and the other from the 1920s which were both periods of economic depression in America. These apartments are the embodiment of  hardships that faced the poor and disenfranchised in a younger NYC. Basic quality-of-life considerations such as running water, lighting and ventilation were luxuries. Tenement neighborhoods were defined by their population density—by some measurements these were the densest living situations anywhere in the world.

The building itself was obviously very derelict, and we were led through the dark rooms observing how the structure had changed over time and how it contrasts with modern homes. We learned about the story of specific families that had lived in that building, which was an interesting way of weaving the personal side of the story into the narrative. The rooms were furnished with object that they would have used for their professions and also curated by living relatives. Visual handouts (e.g. photos and documents) were passed around and there was an audio recording of a woman describing her up-bringing in the building.

Beyond the house that we toured, the museum seemed pretty ideologically modern. There’s a learning center attached to the gift shop, so people can read up on related topics. Also attached is a theater that’s playing a documentary about the lower east side, so you can stay engaged as you wait for your tour. Overall, the experience seemed pretty well orchestrated.

The Tenement Museum didn’t let us take photos, but they have a selection of them available on Flickr.

 

Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace

The Teddy Roosevelt birthplace represented the opposite end of the spectrum from the Tenement Museum, although they captured a similar time frame. The house is situated next to Gramercy Park, which at the time was considered a wealthy suburb of New York City. I was a little disappointed to learn that the original house had been torn down and this was actually a reconstruction using parts of the identical building that had been next door, but the affect was basically the same.

The starkest difference with the tenement accommodations (and frankly, modern NYC living) is the sheer amount of space in this house. It housed a large family and 4 or 5 servants at any given time. But as luxurious as the space must have been, I can’t help but think that modernity has enhanced our lives so much more than money could have at the time. Even this wealthy estate didn’t have electricity and was heated with a coal burning fire, which must have had ill effects on the asthmatic young Roosevelt.

 

 

The home is currently run by the parks department and was ultimately just a good excuse to hear some stories about Teddy Roosevelt. I wasn’t quite as piqued by the actual building, partly because I knew it wasn’t the original, and partly because Teddy only lived there until he was 14, so it lacked his fingerprint. But it did serve as a good foil for the tenement museum and also my tiny 1 bedroom apartment. The tour guide repeatedly expressed his jealousy that this house was a wedding present to Teddy’s father.