Tag Archives: columbus circle

RECANATI-KAPLAN TALKS: GRAHAM NASH

A Graham Nash self-portrait from 1972 is one of two dozens works on view at City Winery (photo courtesy City Winery / Graham Nash)

Who: Graham Nash, Anthony DeCurtis
What: Live and livestreamed conversation
Where: 92nd St. Y Center of Culture & Arts, 1395 Lexington Ave. between 91st & 92nd St., Buttenwieser Hall at the Arnhold Center and online
When: Thursday, June 1, $25 online, $35 in person, 8:30
Why: On “A Better Life,” the second song on Now, his first album of new material in seven years, two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Graham Nash sings, “Let’s make it a better life, leave it for the kids / It’s a lovely place, welcome home to the human race / We can make it a better life — one we can be proud of / So that at the end of the day, I hope we hear them say / that we left them a better life.” In his most recent book, A Life in Focus: The Photography of Graham Nash (November 2021, Insight Editions, $60), the musician, visual artist, and social activist explains, “I’ve been taking photographs longer than I’ve been making music.”

Coming off three shows at City Winery in which he played songs from throughout his long and distinguished career, the eighty-one-year-old Nash will be at the 92nd St. Y on June 1 at 8:30, in conversation with Rolling Stone contributor Anthony DeCurtis. Now contains such other tracks as “Right Now,” “Golden Idols,” and “I Watched It All Come Down”; meanwhile, two dozen of his pictures are on view through July 11 at City Winery in the exhibition “Graham Nash: Enduring Images,” including photos of Columbus Circle, David Crosby, Balboa Park, Johnny Cash, Jerry Garcia, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and an old house in Santa Cruz. At the 92nd St. Y talk, which can be attended in person or online, Nash will also perform some songs from the new record, demonstrating once again how he’s made this life better for all of us.

MOVIE NIGHTS WITH MACHINE

Eyes of Laura Mars is part of fashionable Machine Dazzle film series at MAD

Who: Machine Dazzle
What: Movie Night with Machine
Where: The Theater at MAD, Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
When: October 25 & 27, December 20, January 10, $10, 7:00
Why: Walking around the Museum of Arts and Design exhibition “Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle” is like wandering through a glorious movie set, with colorful costumes and artworks that tell one heckuva bizarre story; you fully expect the mannequins to suddenly come to life and enter this surreal world. The retrospective of the work of performance artist Machine Dazzle, on view through February 19, is supplemented with a film series hosted by the queer experimental theater genius, born Matthew Flower in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, in 1972, consisting of movies that influenced him as a child of the 1970s and ’80s. It kicked off October 13 with the epic Clash of the Titans and continues October 25 with Robert Wise’s underrated Star Trek: The Motion Picture (can’t wait to hear what Machine will have to say about the Federation uniforms!) and October 27 with Irvin Kershner’s tense neo-noir thriller Eyes of Laura Mars, about a glamorous fashion photographer who is being stalked by a serial killer; the cast includes Faye Dunaway, Tommy Lee Jones, Brad Dourif, René Auberjonois, and Raúl Juliá, and one scene takes place in Columbus Circle, where the museum moved in 2008.

Machine will be on hand to introduce the screening and participate in a discussion afterward; it should be too much fun listening to him talk about the costumes and scenery, and there will be giveaways, costume contests, custom-designed step-and-repeats, photoshoots, and other cool stuff. Be sure to come back December 20 for Robert Greenwald’s Xanadu, when we can all pay tribute to the late Olivia Newton-John and celebrate Machine’s fiftieth birthday, followed January 10 by Guy Hamilton’s Agatha Christie adaptation Evil Under the Sun, featuring Peter Ustinov as Detective Hercule Poirot and also starring Maggie Smith, Jane Birkin, James Mason, Roddy McDowall, and Diana Rigg. In addition, on November 8 from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm, the museum will host “Teacher Workshop: Activism and the Art of Machine Dazzle,” comprising a curator-led tour, an art workshop, and refreshments.

NEVER BUILT NEW YORK

A model of Eliot Noyes’s never-built Westinghouse Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair is turned into a bouncy castle for kids as part of Queens Museum exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Queens Museum
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Through February 18, $8 adults, $4 seniors, free for children eighteen and under
718-592-9700
www.queensmuseum.org

Oh, what might have been. There are only a few more days left to get a gander at a Gotham that just was not meant to be in the sensational exhibit “Never Built New York,” which on February 18 will go the way of all the projects that comprise it. Curators Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin have brought together paraphernalia from nearly eighty structures, including newspaper clippings, computer renderings, models, architectural drawings, sketches, blueprints, watercolors, photographs, and more, that, for one reason or another — money, safety, graft, time, politics, war — never took form. The would-be projects range from John Rink’s 1858 Plan of the Central Park, Richard Morris Hunt’s 1866 New-York Historical Society, Alfred Ely Beach’s 1870 Beach Pneumatic Railway, and Rufus Gilbert’s 1871 Elevated Railway to several possibilities to replace the World Trade Center, Zaha Hadid’s 2012 425 Park Ave., and Work AC’s 2015 Guggenheim Collection Center. Among the familiar names who attempted and failed to reshape parts of the city are Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Daniel Libeskind, Robert Moses, R. Buckminster Fuller, Isamu Noguchi, Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, Marcel Breuer, Michael Graves, Santiago Calatrava, and McKim, Mead & White.

The Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum temporarily includes a series of projects that were never built (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Moses wanted to construct the elevated Lower Manhattan Expressway from the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges. Fuller wanted to put up a pair of enormous domes, including one for a stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Norman Sper was going to fill in the Hudson River to connect Manhattan with New Jersey. Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates included the world’s largest clock in their design for the Whitehall Ferry Terminal. Norman Bel Geddes’s “Rotary Airport” floated eight hundred feet off the Battery. In 1925, Harvey Wiley Corbett’s “How You May Live and Travel in the City of 1950” featured half-mile-high skyscrapers and four levels of streets for automobile traffic. There are also proposals for the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, Times Square, the Metropolitan Opera, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Terminal, Lincoln Center, Battery Park, Columbus Circle, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Botanical Garden, and an Olympic Village. The show is capped off by the genius idea of temporarily adding many of the projects to the museum’s glorious Panorama of the City of New York, a 1:1200 model of every street and building in the five boroughs that is kept up-to-date; be sure to use the virtual reality headsets to learn more about some of the projects and see what they might have really looked like in relation to the actually built city around them.

“Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake” includes two related videos dealing with ritual mourning and cleansing (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Also at the Queens Museum is “Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake,” a multimedia exhibit by the California artist that features a unique exploration of water and relieving oneself in China as well as a pair of videos involving ritualistic mourning and cleansing, one of a grounded ship, the other of a beached whale; “Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence,” a complex journey into incarceration and trauma; “Julia Weist with Nestor Siré: 17.(SEPT) [By WeistSiréPC]™,” dealing with internet connectivity and file sharing in Cuba; and “Anna K.E.: Profound Approach and Easy Outcome,” in which the Georgian-born artist, who lives and works in New York City and Germany, has created a site-specific wall commission for which, in two of the pieces, she reenacts paintings by Otto Dix and Balthus at the Met, dominated by her feminine gaze.

GOTOPLESS PRIDE PARADE AND RALLY FOR FREEDOM

gotopless

Columbus Circle to Bryant Park
Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza
Sunday, August 28, free, 11:00 am – 3:30 pm
raelusa.org
www.gotopless.org

“Free your breasts! Free your mind!” Sunday, August 28, is GoTopless Day, in which women around the world will bare their breasts (and men will wear bikini tops) in celebration of Women’s Equality Day (August 26) and to further protest for gender equality. Parades and rallies are being held all over America; you can find the one closest to you on the BoobMap, but pay attention to local laws so you don’t end up getting fined and/or arrested. Here in New York City, it is legal for anyone and everyone to take their top off as long as the police don’t determine they’re participating in disorderly conduct (which would have to involve more than just marching in a topless parade, asserting one’s rights). People will start gathering at eleven o’clock at West Fifty-Eighth St. between Eighth and Ninth Aves., and the parade will begin at one o’clock, making its way toward Bryant Park. Then, from two to four, the GoTopless Rally for Freedom will take place at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza at Second Ave. and Forty-Seventh St., where you can keep it off for topless pride. “As long as men are allowed to be topless in public, women should have the same constitutional right. Or else, men should have to wear something to hide their chests,” explains Maitreya Rael, the French singer-songwriter, race-car driver, and founder of gotopless.org who also leads the Raelian Movement, which believes in atheistic intelligent design, claiming that all forms of life on Earth were created by scientists from another planet. There’s no information on whether the extraterrestrial scientists, including the one Rael met in December 1973, were topless or not.

FOUR GIANT RED SNAILS

A quartet of snails have made their way to Columbus Circle through the snow and traffic (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Columbus Circle
Convergence of Broadway, Eighth Ave., and Central Park West at 59th St.
Through January 6, free
www.pinksnails.com
four giant red snails slideshow

Making your way through midtown Manhattan might be impossibly slow these days, with all of the tourists and holiday shoppers clogging the streets, but if you think you’re having trouble getting anywhere, there are four giant red snails in Columbus Circle that haven’t moved an inch in weeks. The eight-foot mollusks have actually made it from Central Park to Gaetano Russo’s statue of Cristóbal Colón, but they seem to be stuck there, bringing striking color to an otherwise very white and gray area. Made of recycled plastic from landfills, the snails are part of an international REgeneration Art Project created by Italy’s Cracking Art Group and presented by the Villa Firenze Foundation and Galleria Ca d’Oro’s Gloria Porcella. The Cracking Art Group — Renzo Nucara, Marco Veronese, Charles Rizzetti, Alex Angi, Kicco, and William Sweetlove — is dedicated to “changing the history of art through a strong social and environmental commitment to a united revolutionary, innovative use of plastic materials that evoke a strict relationship between the natural and the artificial,” so what better time to see these Dolittle-like creatures than during the holiday season in New York City?

BLUTH’S ORIGINAL FROZEN BANANA STAND

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT will celebrate its return with free frozen bananas in New York on May 13 (photo by Stuart Wilson/Getty Images for Netflix)

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT will celebrate its return with free frozen bananas in New York on May 13 & 14 (photo by Stuart Wilson/Getty Images for Netflix)

Monday, May 13, Sixth Ave. at 50th St., free, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Tuesday, May 14, Columbus Circle, free, 12 noon – 7:00 pm
Wednesday, May 15, Yankee Stadium, Gate 6, 3:30 – 8:00
Thursday, May 16, Times Square, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
www.netflix.com

Mitchell Hurwitz’s Arrested Development seems to have been in its own state of arrested development for years. The cult sitcom, which follows the trials and tribulations of the rather dysfunctional Bluth family, ran on Fox from 2003 to 2006, after which rumors have persisted that it would move to another network or maybe even be turned into a feature film. Ten years after its debut, however, Arrested Development is finally back, with fifteen new episodes airing on Netflix beginning on May 26. Everyone is joining in the fun, with Jason Bateman as Michael, Portia de Rossi as Lindsay, Will as Gob, Michael Cera as George Michael, David Cross as Tobias, Jeffrey Tambor as George, Jessica Walter as Lucille, and Ron Howard as the narrator; among the returning cast of guest characters are Henry Winkler as Barry Zuckerkorn, Mae Whitman as Ann Veal, Scott Baio as Bob Loblaw, and Liza Minnelli as Lucille Austero. To celebrate this new stage in the bizarre life of this wacky series, Bluth’s Original Frozen Banana stand, which the Bluth family started sixty years ago and had its official ribbon cutting fifty years ago, will be serving free treats across from Radio City Music Hall on Monday, May 13, from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm; in Columbus Circle on Tuesday, May 14, from 12 noon to 7:00 pm; in front of Gate 6 at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, May 15, from 3:30 to 8:00; and in front of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square on Thursday, May 16, from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, with a 12 noon reunion of the Never Nudes. Be on the lookout for stray fox feet, Mr. Bananagrabber, and spliffs, and never forget that “there’s always money in the banana stand.” And now, everyone join in: “Big yellow joint / big yellow joint / I’ll meet you down at the big yellow joint!”

TATZU NISHI: DISCOVERING COLUMBUS

Visitors can get up close and personal with Gaetano Russo’s statue of Christopher Columbus in fab installation by Tatzu Nishi (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Columbus Circle
59th St. at the intersection of Broadway, Columbus, and Eighth Aves.
Extended through December 2, free with timed ticket
www.publicartfund.org
discovering columbus slideshow

For one hundred and twenty years, Sicilian sculptor Gaetano Russo’s Carrara marble statue of Christopher Columbus has towered high in the air in the middle of Columbus Circle, far from view atop a seventy-foot granite column. But now German-based Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi makes the Italian explorer much more accessible inside a customized American living room in the genius installation “Discovering Columbus.” Over the last decade, Nishi has created temporary structures built around existing architectural monuments in Guatemala City, Hamburg, Singapore, Basel, New South Wales, and, most famously, Liverpool, where he designed “Villa Victoria,” a functional hotel suite constructed around a statue of Queen Victoria. For his first project in the United States, Nishi has chosen to bring Russo’s thirteen-foot-tall statue, which was presented to New York City in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s famous voyage, face-to-face with visitors, who can climb up six flights of stairs to enter an idealized, temporary American room replete with chairs, couches, a mirror, framed prints, a bookshelf — and the Columbus statue standing in the center, atop a coffee table. Everything was carefully selected by Nishi, from the newspapers, furniture, and artworks (by the likes of Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock) to the flat-screen television and specially designed wallpaper, which features cartoon images of such American icons as Michael Jackson, Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley, and McDonald’s. Visitors, who enter with free timed tickets that must be reserved in advance, can look but not touch (photos are allowed) as they walk around the statue, examining every nook, cranny, and crevice of the extremely weathered work; be sure to check out under Columbus’s cloak for a section that has not been nearly as ravaged by snow, rain, heat, wind, and bird droppings. And be sure to check it out from the ground on the southern side as well, where it appears as if Columbus is standing at the window, enjoying the remarkable view. It’s a spectacular opportunity to see such a landmark up close and personal, no matter your feelings about Columbus, whose discovery of America and treatment of the native population seem to increase in controversy every year. Nishi did not choose this specific monument for political reasons; instead, the Public Art Fund project is a joint venture with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, which will begin a major restoration of the statue after the installation closes to the public on November 18 [ed. note: now extended through December 2], keeping the stairs and scaffolding in place for the conservation team, which will work to maintain the promise made at the statue’s dedication on October 12, 1892: “in imperishable remembrance.” Tickets are going fast, so don’t hesitate to book a time now for this once-in-a-lifetime experience.