Sunday, March 3, 2013

WHAT'S THAT WHITE STUFF COMING DOWN?

Only a California girl like Ellie can get away with such a question!  She was looking out through the window of the Irish pub where we had stopped for lunch, watching an unexpected light flurry of snow and genuinely puzzled by the phenomenon.  But first...

After our morning cup of tea--we make sure to take a few bags of Yorkshire Gold wherever we go; no substitutes, thanks--we enjoyed a bowl of cereal and set out mid-morning for our first day in New York, heading over to Central Park for a long, leisurely walk down the west side of the park to Columbus Circle.  Winter has taken the green sheen from the lawns and the trees are bare, but it was still a pleasure to join the hordes of cyclists, runners and plain old pedestrians like ourselves, walking past crowds of sightseers taking pictures of each other standing on the "Imagine" mosaic that's set in the pavement by Strawberry Fields, in the shadow of the Dakota Building on Central Park West.  No snow.  No ice.  A glimpse of the sun.  Lots of squirrels, this one tucking into a stray red apple...


Snowdrops...



We had bundled up...



The temperature hovers around the late 30s and early 40s--chilly when walking into the wind, but generally quite tolerable.

Crossing over to Broadway at Columbus Circle, we strolled down toward Time Square, but decided to spare some aching joints and hailed a cab to take us down the Chelsea gallery area.  (I had put together a few copies of "Slow Looking" in a tote bag, just in case I found a gallery dealer interested enough for me to leave a copy; but got so involved with paying the cabbie that I left it on the seat.  So much for PR efforts!)

One of our first stops, fortuitously, was at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery--thanks to Ellie having spotted an advertisement for a forthcoming Benny Andrews show on the back cover of the Gallery Guide we picked up on our first gallery stop.  Ellie inherited from her parents a small piece by this lesser-known but extraordinarily gifted African American artist of the Charles White, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence generation that emerged after the Harlem Renaissance, and we were interested to find out more about current thinking about his work.  Once there, we found a number of old artist friends, whose works Ellie grew up with in her parents' collection: Alfred Jensen, Ann Ryan, Milton Avery... along with more lesser-known artists like Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, Fairfield Porter; and African American contemporaries of Andrews: Bearden, White, John Biggars, Eldzier Cortor--many of whom I met and interviewed back in the day when I toured the country gathering information for a monograph on Charlie White.  A very pleasantly nostalgic visit, made more so by the warm reception by gallery staff, and finally by Michael Rosenfeld himself.

Then more galleries.  Plenty of terrific art work currently on show in Chelsea.  Too much to write about here, except for a few highlights.  My own favorites in the next post.  Meantime, after a cab ride home, we had some pleasant rest time before heading out to meet Ellie's nephew, Danny, and his fiancee Rachel, for dinner at a local Upper West Side restaurant.  The place is teeming with them...  Danny and Rachel in good fettle.  We enjoyed a fine dinner, a glass of wine, and a long catch-up conversation.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am so envious. I miss NY in any weather., but when there is son in CP....yum!KFS