an afternoon at the Met

My older son joined me for a visit to the Met today. I have been wanting to see the Rei-Kawakubo exhibit since it had opened. Today was my opportunity to go.

Amazon.com Widgets

The designer is exploring so many big ideas in her work. It's hard to talk about it with out sounding like the worst and most pretentious writing about art.
What I will say is that despite raising a host of serious issues being around the clothing creates a joy in the viewer.

Some of the clothing seems really wearable.

All of it makes you think about what it means to clothe your body.

Since I had gotten to see what I most wanted to I let my son take the lead.

We visited a bit of an exhibit about WWI propaganda posters.

We wandered through the Egyptian exhibits. I was startled to see a mummy who looked remarkably like my beautiful niece.

We took in some decorative art.

Seeing the excellent furniture at the Ann Arbor Arts fair made me extra appreciative of the workmanship I saw today.

I am storing this simple yet effective textile embellishment technique in my mental files.

This Tiffany window has been re mounted and re-lit so it give a better sense of what these windows look like with actual sunlight streaming through. Flat cold fluorescent light is a poor second to whatever technical lighting magic they did here.

There is a local synagogue with a large stained glass window of Mount Sinai above the ark. I don't know which studio created the window but it is made with layers of glass like Tiffany windows. The play of changing light as the sun moved during services was so mesmerizing that I couldn't pay attention to services. I this window were in my house I probably could do nothing all day but watch the colors emerge across the face of the window during the day.

My son wanted to see arms and armaments. I loved seeing the surface decoration.

My head is filled with wonderful things. It's time to get to work.

Comments

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog