Last weekend my three friends and I took a lil road trip to NYC. It is impossible to put NYC into words. There is so much to see and do. So much culture! So much humanity and time spent on the subway! So many personalities weaving in and around each other every day! In other words, New York City is special.
We were trying to go to the galleries in Chelsea and got off on the 23rd St stop, but it ended up being in Long Island City next to the MoMA PS1. So we went there. Carolee Schneemann was one of the artists featured, as well as video from the underground art scene of the 60s and 70s. Cathy Wilkes was also on view, but her work didn't resonate with me the way Carolee Schneemann's did. Schneemann began as a painter in an Abstract Expressionist, male-dominated field. Apparently it was suggested to her that she become a nude model instead of a painter. Thankfully she rejected that notion, but did use her body to express the power of a free woman. I saw work that I had only read about: photo documentation of The Interior Scroll,, a performance in which Schneemann pulls a scroll from her vagina and reads it aloud as she unrolls it. Meat Joy, in which scantily clad men and women sensually play with each other's bodies and a variety of raw meat. I could not hear the Motown soundtrack that was supposed to be playing during the performance, so I was disappointed that I did not get the full effect of the piece. But Schneemann was a pioneer of performance art, of feminist art, and of the requirement of artists to break down social taboos. She worked with a variety of processes, from performance to collage to video. It's definitely worth a trip to see her work before it comes down March 11, 2018.
At the original MoMA, Louise Bourgeois's prints were on display, along with a few of her sculptures. As I had only seen her spiders in Washington, D.C. and Bentonville, AR, I did not realize that she had worked in prints and art books. Or that she was the one responsible for drawing a woman as half a house. Her interest and application of architecture to her prints were so unique, and I also did not know that she was into feminist art and what it means to have a female body, from daughter to mother and back again. Her screenprints were the most exciting to me, especially in the fabric artist books that were on display.
For our evening entertainment, we went to the comedy clubs The Grisly Pear and The Comedy Cellar, both great fun! If you don't have tickets for the Comedy Cellar and show up around show time, you might still get in if you're lucky! It's worth a try! If you check out their website, they save a few seats for showtime in order to not oversell the seats. We were able to get in to the 12:15 show. So if you're in NYC and looking for a good laugh, it's worth it to check out the Comedy Cellar and The Grisly Pear. :)