I visited the Museum of the City of New York, El Museo del Barrio, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Noguchi Museum this weekend. I also went again to the Metropolitan Museum of Art – this being perhaps my tenth time there and I still have not walked through all the galleries – and I attended a calypso concert and a performance of The Comedy of Errors. I hardly planned any of this but this city makes it so easy to consume so much information (or any other consumable) with so little effort.
About two weeks ago I started going to the library to catch up on reading. I have been reading many books since I moved here but most of them were only related to consumerism because of my job. My plan for the weekend was to go to a museum then camp at a coffeehouse and read after that.
The Museum of the City of New York was exhibiting a history of activism in NYC with descriptions and artifacts from different community protests. Featured were stories about whether Puritans could stay, whether Catholics could come, slavery, labor rights, women’s suffrage, the Scottsboro boys case and associated theatre performances in the city, desegregation of public housing by race, the protest at Stonewall Inn, rights of bicyclists to use roads, and Occupy Wall Street. I love lists and I love this way of learning. I regret not taking better notes of that exhibit because I now want to include information from it in Wikipedia.
I cannot say much about the Museo del Barrio because I did not find it very informative. They have a great space but the exhibits are not well described and I think that since this is a cultural museum to promote a specific region of nationalities there should be fundamental educational exhibits proving the significance of the culture, which there are not. I suspect that many visitors to the museum do not start with any basis for understanding, for example, Caribbean culture, but this museum presupposes that.
The Museum of Arts and Design was cool but it has real competition from the the Met – every museum here does. I went to the Noguchi Museum in Queens. I had seen an exhibition of this artist in 2005 at Seattle Art Museum and I really enjoyed the experience, and I like the Black Hole Sun sculpture in Volunteer Park in Seattle. There are similar sculptures at the museum here. While I was at the museum there happened to be a concert and I happened to meet a coworker, Dan DiClerico, at the museum. He has been a supporter of my Wikipedia work and it was nice to see him at the museum. It felt strange to find someone I know at a place in this huge city, and neither of us had ever visited this museum before. Some other times I have had this experience.
After I left the museum there was Shakespeare in the park across the street so I went. The play and performance was excellent. Strangely, the play organizers had arranged for a vendor there to provide “iced coffee” and I was wondering what that was so I had some. It was horrible – they made drip coffee then iced it and brought it out on this summer day to dispense from a tub. Who would think to do such a thing?