Empty Museum

Usually, going to a museum in NYC, especially during the weekend, is a crazy event. Packed with people. Lots of bumping and craning to see stuff. I was amazed to see that The Jewish Museum was not like that. Amazed and a little saddened. While I enjoyed that I didn't have to elbow my way to the paintings and sculptures, I thought that the museum needed more people.

Z had told me that he loves going to museums. He likes doing things he hasn't done before. So I asked him to come with me to see the Action/Abstraction exhibit that featured Pollack and deKooning. He was all for it. He met me at my place and we hopped the train and then two subways to the Upper East Side. I remembered 1, 2, 3, Little Pigs Make 5 and turned left to go over to 5th Ave from our stop. We found the museum blocks away without a problem and without much sweating as we found as much shade as possible. He had a snack before we went in. Of course.

We had to go through a metal detector. He had to check his bag. I asked the woman at the desk for one student and one adult and she barely looked at my ID from my undergrad days. Seeing that she wasn't checking, I quickly asked Z if he remembered to bring his ID and he said he forgot it. The woman charged us for one adult and one student. Fine. Next time I'll say two students first and then if they ask for ID, we'll try to finagle it then. I paid and Z was like, why are you paying? I was like, deal with it. She asked if it was our first time there and we said yes. She welcomed us and asked for my zip code. I opted out of the audio tour.

We handed our tickets to the guard and he was like, let me show you, as he took our brochure. He flipped it over and did a lot of pointing. Then he said, free on Saturdays, come back, tell everyone you know. Thanks. Information that would have been helpful the day before. We went in and then I went to the bathroom. When I came back, Z had the audio tour in hand. He did his audio thing and I walked around and read everything instead.

I liked the exhibit. There were three Pollock pieces and some deKooning. Mostly, it was their contemporaries. I liked how it was set up. It focused on two critics of the time who developed a sort of rivalry.

Z set off a chiming alarm when he leaned in towards a sculpture. Heeheee. I think that the alarm had a hair trigger because when we walked away, I heard it going off several more times and no one was really near the sculpture. Everything was copyrighted so we couldn't take pictures. Leave it up to Z to yank out his phone covertly and take a few pics. I knew he would do that.

The last part of the Action/Abstraction exhibit was interactive. We wrote on chalk boards. We wrote on dry erase boards. We wrote notes on yellow stickys and hung them up. We moved around huge magnets that had words on them and made up new sayings. It was awesome!!! Z called me into the little room with the stickys after I was done with it to show me the post-it he wrote. You probably know what it said. Z Hearts Christina. Say it with me: Awwwwwww.

We went into the Warhol's Jews exhibit and looked at the portraits. Then Z hung up his audio tour thing. I was like, you didn't have to give them your license or anything to ensure that they got the radio back? He was like, yeah I gave them four dollars. Heehee. Four bucks for the audio tour? He said it was worth it so he didn't have to sift through all the reading stuff. He reads books but I guess he doesn't want to read at a museum.

We went into the third exhibit which was works influence by Warhol. There was a piece that was a lot of spools of thread hanging. A tiny glass ball on top of a pole was at eye level (my eye level so "low") in front of it. I looked through it at all the walls. Everything was upside down. But then when I looked through it at the spools, I saw Warhol's campbells soup can. I was like, there's a picture in it somehow. Z was like, no it's the spools. He stood in front of the spools and I saw him upside down. Then the guard came over. He was like, Am I too close. She smiled, nodded, and then asked, do you know what you're seeing? I was like, is it the spools? She said yes and then told us to walk to the other end of the room. Sure enough, it looked like the campbell's soup can, upside down. When we looked through the ball, it was right side up. We walked back and forth a few hundred times because it was so dang cool.

The rest of the museum was their permanent exhibit, which I really wasn't interested in. Lots of menorahs, a wall-sized explanation of the Talmud, and a lot of information about the Holocaust. There was a children's room--Z tried to put together a puzzle but the magnets weren't working and it kept falling off the wall. So then we left.

I asked if he wanted to walk across the park so we had to take only one subway downtown instead of taking one across and having to switch. He was up for that so we entered the park where the runner's track is around the reservoir. Then we found the subway. Which was not running downtown. What the? There was a sign telling us to go up to 112 and then turn around on such and such a line. I was like, no. So we walked a few blocks down. Still no downtown service. Then we wound up walking farther West so we could find the 1/2/3 and finally we hopped the subway back to Penn. So much for my short cut through the park.

It was a great day ending at home with sushi from Trader Joe's. So now that you know all about the Jewish Museum, go on Saturday. It's free.