Lehman College Art Gallery
A Lovely Little Gem in the Bronx
Good god but it’s nice to feel winter starting to roll into spring again. It feels like every time I forget, like every mid-February I think to myself “Well, it’s going to be dark and cold and miserable forever, I guess,” and then get so pleasantly surprised when the days start to get a little bit warmer and a little bit brighter and the daffodils start to poke their green-turning-yellow heads out of the cold ground. It makes me feel hopeful, in a green-turning yellow way too.
This weekend I took the D train uptown to the Lehman College Art Gallery and I really enjoyed it.
Lehman College was first established in 1931 as a branch of Hunter College serving the Bronx and then became an independent college(under the umbrella of CUNY, the City University of New York) in 1967. The art gallery was opened in 1984 and “specializes in thematic group exhibitions that bring together famous artists with emerging talents”
The Lehman College Art Gallery is currently displaying the exhibition Surprises Unknown: The Gift of Wrapping, which is basically celebrating art that showcases things being wrapped up, or things covered with other things. It’s very specific and cool and a gallery theme that I would never in a million years have thought of.
I would hazard a guess that the inspiration for this exhibit came primarily from the artist duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who I would highly reccomend checking out. A lot of their well-known large-scale public art involves wrapping major structures(in this case, the Arc de Triomphe) in cloth and rope, which provides the dueling effects of concealing it from the viewer while highlighting it in a way which hasn’t really happened before. What’s really under there? Do you actually know what the Arc de Triomphe looks like? Are you sure?
I absolutely loved this one— it used this technique of painting that I had never seen before where the squiggles of paint are three-dimensional enough to look like threads or beads, and that also creates this kind of pixellation effect that creates such a convincing depiction of dimension and depth of whatever it is that is being covered by that rug.
I got a tattoo last year of a piece that I’d seen at the Bard Graduate Center to celebrate going to a museum every weekend(roughly) for a year. I’m just about to celebrate my second year of museums and I’m planning on getting a collection of symbols from the above early Andy Warhol lithograph as a tattoo sometime soon!
Lehman College has a lovely little gallery space that appears to be primarily student-driven and it’s entirely pleasant to take the train up, get a little lost walking over there, and then spend an hour thinking about artistic depictions of things that have been covered up. Annus Mirabilis in particular is truly one of my favorite pieces I’ve seen recently and it’s always so exciting to find something like that in a place that you might not expect.
ADMISSION: Free
GIFT SHOP: No
BATHROOM: Yes
WHEELCHAIR ACCESSIBLE: Yes
UPCOMING MUSEUMS:
March 28 - Living Torah Museum
April 5 - Louis Armstrong House Museum
April 12 - Madame Tussaud's
April 19 - The Frick Collection
Amazing Cathy I love it