Life Underground and alligators in the sewers

 Thirty years ago the Metropolitan Transit Authority started their Arts for Transit program in an attempt to lighten up everyone’s commute with both beautiful and whimsical artwork placed throughout the city’s subway stations. Mosaics, glass, bronze and other materials now adorn the previously decaying and forgotten walls and corridors of our subways.

Located in the 14th Street and 8th Avenue station are over 100 little cast-bronze sculptures depicting life in NYC.  Every day, more than 30,000 people walk through this Subway Station at rush hour, passing by his little bronze sculptures.

The sculptures are located in unexpected places: under stairs or pillars, on railings, on benches and  suppose to surprise commuters. Most of these  bronze figures are no more than 8 inches tall.
Life Underground   is a permanent public artwork created by American sculptor Tom Otterness for New York Subway. It was commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Arts for Transit program for US$200,000 — one percent of the station's reconstruction budget. 

Otterness drew inspiration for his characters from New York’s Tammany Hall era, when powerful political bosses ruled the city. He also looked to the work of famous caricaturist Thomas Nast. Images of coins, tokens and moneybags are present in most of the figures.

 Before installing the sculptures, Otterness built a full-scale model of the 14th Street subway station steps in his studio.


 The work took 10 years to complete and the artist ended up making four times the amount of work he was originally commissioned to create.   He said, "I kept putting more and more work in. I put probably five times what they paid me to put in. Finally my wife stopped me..."



One of the bronze sculptures  on the station makes reference to the old legend of alligators in the sewers.  It's long been rumored there are thriving colonies of alligators lurking in New York City's sewer system.  According to the tale in 1930s wealthy people brought baby alligators back from Florida vacation.  But when the funny pet grew they flushed them  down the toilet. The alligators eat sewer rats and became bigger and bigger. 

Meyer Berger, reporter,  who wrote the About New York column for The Times, recounted in 1957 that in the mid-1930s, sewer alligators “seemed to thrive below the pavement” in “rather frightening numbers.”  The column  added: “They were destroyed systematically and the threat of an alligator invasion died away.” In 1959 the writer Robert Daly published a book  "The world beneath the city". In this book he told about the interview with the superintendent of  New York Sewiering  System who claimed to see alligators. Other books continued the legend.

You can find the works by Otterness  in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and  the Guggenheim Museum in New York.  But it is much better to go to the Subway and try to find all of the  almost 150  small bronze figures.

America today- the mural from AXA in Met museum

The mural in the Metropolitan museum of Art

In 1919 a  group of American intellectuals  founded the New School.  The professors of Columbia University  stand against   the First World War. They were censured by the Columbia's president,  resigned from Columbia and joined with other progressive educators to create a new model of higher education for adults.  From its inception, the school has held an important place in the intellectual life of New York City and provided employment for numerous European scholars who fled from the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.

The New School

 When faced with the need to construct their own facility in 1930, the leaders of the New School desired a building whose architecture would reflect the institution’s progressive philosophy. The first building constructed for the New School for Social Research was designed in 1930 by Joseph Urban, a well-known architect  and theater designer who was trained in  Vienna.

In the same year the New School’s director,  Alvin Johnson,  commissioned  the mural for the school.  The mural was painted by  the artist Thomas Hart Benton.  The artist lived in New York City for twenty years  and  was a  teacher at New York's Art Students League, offering students grounding in European art history, as well as an awareness of European modernism.

 “America Today” was Benton’s first major mural commission.  The ten  panels depict a panoramic sweep of rural and urban life on the eve of the Great Depression.   The mural evokes the  belief in American progress that was characteristic of the 1920s.

Benton said:"It is true my murals include the synthesis of the color and tempo of the jazz age as represented by racketereers, fast women, gunmen, booze houds and so on... My subjects portray American life of the 20th century  realistically".

In  1982 The New School  sold the mural because it was too difficult for the school to maintain it.  Axa equitable bought the mural in 1984 and displayed  it in the company headquarters  at 787 Seventh Avenue.  In 2012 after lobby renovation AXA donated the Mural to the Metropolitan Museum.

 In the exhibition at the Met museum,  the mural is installed in a reconstruction of the New School’s 30-by-22-foot 1931 boardroom, which allows viewers to experience it as Benton conceived it.  There is a black and red color scheme, the same one created for the boardroom by the New School building’s modernist architect, Joseph Urban.

“For this, we are tremendously grateful,” stated Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum. “The Metropolitan’s presentation of Benton’s great mural will shed new light on this visually and intellectually stimulating landmark in American art of the early 1930s, especially as the Museum will display the mural as the artist originally intended it to be seen. Positioning the mural’s new home in the context of the Metropolitan’s diverse collections, the exhibition also tells a unique story rooted in New York’s own cultural history.”

Tthe exhibition will run through April 19, 2015

The Phoenix: Xu Bing at the Cathedral

Weighing over 12 tons and measuring more than 90 feet ( 30 meters) long each, the pair, called Feng (male) and Huang  (female) hang from the ceiling of the nave at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.
The Cathedral,  located in  Manhattan's Morningside Heights neighborhood north to the  Central Park, is the fourth largest Christian church in the world.   I wrote about the cathedral in one of my posts. 
 The Cathedral’s stunning stained glass windows provide the perfect backdrop the  glittering and colorful giant installation.  Thousands of little lights and vibrant colors give soul to the cold, heartless steel, making the birds look absolutely stunning. 
“The Phoenix: Xu Bing at the Cathedral,” installation   opened March 1 and runs through January 2015- so you have time to visit it.
The birds are made of unexpected materials: layered shovels form the feathers,   crowns  are made of weathered hard hats  and birds’ bodies sculpted from  salvaged construction debris.

Born in 1955 in the China, Xu Bing  was exiled to the countryside as part of Mao’s “re-education” during the Cultural Revolution. In 1990  the artist  moved to the U.S. in 1999 he received a MacArthur genius grant. He has since taken up partial residence in China, maintaining studios in both Brooklyn and Beijing.
New York Time wrote: In 2008, Xu was asked to design an art piece for a new building in Beijing’s central business district. When he entered the construction site, he was faced with a camp of migrant workers whose work conditions left a lot to be desired. The phoenixes are the artist’s direct response to what he saw there—the human face of China’s rebirth: Poor people who are building luxury buildings while being treated like scrap metal.

When asked about the birds’ placement, one in front of the other inside the massive Gothic-style church, the artist said  “The girl is closer to God.” Both Feng, the male, and Huang, the female, faced the decoratively carved bronze doors, as if poised to take flight in the middle of the night. “If they faced toward the church,” referring to the altar, Mr. Xu explained, “it would have seemed too religious.” 
Throughout China’s history, every dynasty has had its form of phoenixes.  In ancient and modern Chinese culture, these birds an often can be found  in the decorations for weddings or royalty, along with dragons.   Chinese considered the dragon and phoenix symbolic of blissful relations between husband and wife, another common yin and yang metaphor.  It was believed that the phoenix's song controlled the five tones of Chinese music. The song includes all five notes of the traditional Chinese musical scale.It's flight represents the capacity to leave the world and its problems behind, flying towards the sun in clear pure skies.
The Phoenix: Xu Bing at the Cathedral is the second presentation of these works in the United States. They were previously on view at MassMoCA, North Adams, MA, and have been exhibited in China at the Today Art Museum, Beijing, and Expo10, Shanghai.

Seward Johnson, the founder of "Grounds for Sculpture"

Seward Johnson, the grandson of Robert Wood Johnson (co-founder of Johnson and Johnson) and a cousin of actor Michael Douglas was born in New Jersey in 1930. He grew up with five siblings and went to serve four years in the navy during the Korean War. His earlier work focused on painting, after which he turned to sculpture in 1968. Having no formal training beyond a series of classes in Cambridge, MA, his first cast work of sculpture won the Award in Steel Art competition which included 7,000 entries.

Auto portrait 

Seward Johnson's works are exhibited internationally and are included in private collections, museums, and public art collections.
There are three distinct series of his works:" Celebrating the Familiar man", "Icons Revisited" and "Beyond the Frame" series, that over 30 works based on Impressionist and Post- Impressionist masterworks.
In 1974, Johnson founded the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture- an educational, non-profit art casting and fabrication facility. Right next to the Atelier Institute there is one of the best sculpture parks in the world, also founded by Stewart Johnson.
  You can read more about the park "Grounds for Sculpture" in one of my posts.

"Double Check"

In 1982 sculpture created “Double Check,” a life-sized bronze of a businessman, sitting on a metal bench in Liberty Park and making final preparations before heading into a nearby office building. Liberty Park and the statue were heavily damaged when New York City was terrorized on Sept. 11, 2001. In the days following the 9/11 attacks, Johnson’s sculpture became a memorial as first responders and passersby decorated it with flowers, flowers, notes and candles.

 Before 9/11, the sculpture was simply part of the downtown landscape. Afterward, it became an icon. Seward Johnson, sculptor and the owner of the sculpture, has called his sculpture an iconic "stand-in" for those who didn't make it.

Edouard Manet "Le Dejeuner Sur L’herbe"

Henri Matisse "Dance"

J. Seward Johnson Jr. s recent work focuses on recreating well-known nineteenth-century paintings that allow the viewer to step inside and experience the two-dimensional work in three-dimensional reality. “I want my work to disappear into the landscape and then take a viewer by surprise. After he gets over the shock of being fooled, it becomes an emotional discovery. Then he owns the sculpture. People often revisit their favorites. They become like friends." said Seward Johnson.

Claude Monet "La Terrasse A Sainte-Adresse"

Seward Johnson's 'Were You Invited?' is inspired by French Impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir’s nineteenth-century masterpiece, 'The Luncheon of the Boating Party'. Sculptor renamed the painting Were You Invited? and recreated it in 3D. The viewers can actually step into the scene and mingle with the diners.
In addition to the members of the Impressionist’s boating party are four figures seated around another table at the far end of the tableau. Joined in convivial conversation are realistic representations of sculptor Johnson himself with artists Bill Barrett, Red Grooms, and Andrzej Pitynski

Pierre Auguste Renoir "The Luncheon of the Boating Party"

  Steward Johnson is 83 now but he remains active in the art community. He also publishes a science magazine, works as president of an oceanographic research institution in Florida, and is the founder of an off-Broadway theater "The Joyce and Seward Johnson Theater"   in New York. On May 4, 2014, Grounds For Sculpture opened the largest and most significant exhibition in its history—a presentation of work by its founder, Seward Johnson. The exhibit will feature more than 287 works, including 91 painted trays. Seward Johnson: The Retrospective will be on view through September 21, 2014.

C24: BANG BANG!

Twenty years ago, Chelsea was best known as a relatively quiet residential community. Since then, the neighborhood has transformed dramatically into a cultural mecca.  Chelsea is  one of  the largest   art districts in New York. From 16th Street to 27th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, there are more than 350 art galleries. C24 Gallery is a relatively new addition to Chelsea art landscape- it  was established in 2011.

When I was walking along the 24th street  on the sunny morning in the early June, the large balls with the moving pictured hanging from the ceiling of the gallery grabbed my attention.

It was BANG BANG, the first New York solo show of New York based Swiss artist Katja Loher (born in 1979).  Katja  projects her videos onto the surface of large shiny orbs hanging in the gallery space.  She stage her works as s Videosculptures, which she calls Videoplanets and Miniverses. They are created in the artist's New York studio, in close co-operation with dancers, choreographers, musicians and designers. The Miniverses are small orbs and the large one are  Videoplanets.

Katje said in her interview:  

I always start with the idea, or the message, and then I let it become its own creature. It forms in your head, matures in your heart, and then you watch it come alive. I tend to make beautiful things. Like a lot of nature, it's just how I choose to communicate.

"Bang Bang" is the start of a lot of things.... My friends and I have been using it quite often lately. We'll say, "This is so bang bang! He or she is totally bang bang!" There's no better word for things I really like.