Saturday, April 25, 2015

Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York

Storm King Art Center, commonly referred to as Storm King and named after its proximity to Storm King Mountain, is a 500-acre open-air museum located in Mountainville, New York. It contains what is perhaps the largest collection of contemporary outdoor sculptures in the United States.  The plateau on which stands a 1935 residence, designed to resemble a Norman chateau and later converted to the museum building, was torn apart in the 1950s by bulldozers gathering gravel for the construction of the New York State Thruway; it had to be rebuilt when the art center was established on the 

The core collection includes pieces by modern masters, such as Alexander Calder, David Smith, Mark di Suvero, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, and Louise Nevelson; these are joined with more recent large-scale sculptures by contemporary sculptors, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alice Aycock, Andy Goldsworthy, Alexander Liberman, Sol LeWitt, and Roy Lichtenstein. Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield (2009) is one of the newest additions to the collection, and consists of seven long rows of undulating land forms. 

















Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York

Amazing museum, which capitalizes on natural light first exploited by 1929 National Biscuit Co. carton making and printing plant (listed on NRHP in 2003) for box printing.  Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries is the museum for the Dia Art Foundation's collection of art from the 1960s to the present. The museum, which opened in 2003, is situated on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, New York. Dia:Beacon occupies a former Nabisco box-printing facility that was renovated by Dia with artist Robert Irwin and architects Alan Koch, Lyn Rice, Galia Solomonoff, and Linda Taalman, then of OpenOffice.  Exhibit space is 240,000 sq. ft.

hangman
Uh Oh !













Max's on Main, Beacon, New York

Max's is local dive with pulled pork et al.


246 Main St.

Richard Serra, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York

Richard Serra, born in 1939,








Friday, April 17, 2015

Mertz Library, New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York, New York

Built in 1902 (Robert W. Gibson), this is one of the finest botanical libraries in the world.  The Lillian Goldman Fountain of Life features a joyful sea nymph and a pair of heroic seahorses pulling a seashell chariot through the crest of a wave. As cherubic attendants struggle to control the beasts, a startled mermaid and merman hurry out of the way. The heroic composition epitomizes the Beaux Arts aesthetic at the end of the 19th century in New York. The sculpture is an ideal complement to the Library Building, which was designed by architect Robert Gibson in the Beaux Arts style.





Orchid Show, Haupt Conservatory, New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York, New York





The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory is a greenhouse, a major part of the New York Botanical Garden. Inspiration for the park and the conservatory stemmed from Nathaniel Lord Britton and his wife Elizabeth. The couple had visited the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew on their honeymoon and thought a similar park and conservatory should be built for New York City.  The conservatory was designed by the major greenhouse company of the time, Lord and Burnham Co. The design was modeled after the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Garden and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in Italian Renaissance style. Groundbreaking took place on January 3, 1899 and construction was completed in 1902.  The 1978 renovation was a turning point for the conservatory as it exists today. By the 1970s, the building was in a state of extreme disrepair and had to be either substantially rebuilt or torn down. Enid Annenberg Haupt (editor Seventeen magazine) saved the conservatory from demolition with a $5 million contribution for renovation and a $5 million endowment for maintenance of the building.







Moth Orchid

Pansy Orchid