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Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect at the Bronx Museum of the Arts
Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect at the Bronx Museum of the Arts

Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect at the Bronx Museum of the Arts

By Craig Lee

In an unexpected but deft move, Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect at the Bronx Museum of Arts (November 8, 2017 to April 8, 2018) begins in the lobby above the XM Café — a partnership with Fountain House, a community program supporting people with mental illness. Upon entering the museum, accessible to all through the free admission policy, visitors turn and see an open seating area filled with tables and chairs with the café’s food and beverage service counter against the back wall. Above, where one might find a menu display board, instead is the introductory wall panel for the exhibition. Rather than providing a comprehensive survey of Gordon Matta-Clark’s too brief (he died of pancreatic cancer in 1978 at 35 years of age), but prolific and influential creative practice in the 1970s, the exhibition is tightly organized around a handful of key projects and explorations.

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Arts & Culture, Bronx, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserComment
John Hughes, Irish Catholic NYC, and the Year of Revolutions
John Hughes, Irish Catholic NYC, and the Year of Revolutions

John Hughes, Irish Catholic NYC, and the Year of Revolutions

By John Loughery

In 1847, a rather breathless British travel writer, a Protestant named Susan Minton Maury, published her Statesmen of America in 1846 and was sufficiently impressed (not to say awed) by New York City's bishop, John Hughes, to devote twenty-five pages of her book — more space, in fact, than she gave to Daniel Webster, Chief Justice Taney, William Seward, or Martin Van Buren — to someone she described as “the historical man of the day” and the most impressive cleric in America. With his name appearing regularly in national newspapers, Hughes was certainly the most talked-about clergyman in the country.

This is an exclusive excerpt, adapted from the author's new book (released today!), Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America, courtesy of Cornell University Press.

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Antebellum & Civil War, Excerpts, Race & Ethnicity, ReligionGuest UserComment
Schools in Department Stores?: Continuation Schools and Department Store Employees
Schools in Department Stores?: Continuation Schools and Department Store Employees

Schools in Department Stores?: Continuation Schools and Department Store Employees

By Sandra Roff

“Mr. Selfridge” and “The Paradise” are two recent PBS series that dramatize working in the new department stores established in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Across the Atlantic, department stores were similarly enjoying success with stores opening and expanding to meet the demands of consumers. However, it was not just the sale of material goods to consumers that took place in these stores, but also activities that seemed to benefit employees. Forward-thinking employers believed they had a responsibility to provide for the welfare of their employees, whether it was for medical care, recreation, or even schooling: a movement known as Industrial Paternalism.

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Business & Labor, Education, Progressive EraGuest UserComment
The Cultural Origins of the Urban Crisis: An Interview with Brian L. Tochterman
The Cultural Origins of the Urban Crisis: An Interview with Brian L. Tochterman

The Cultural Origins of the Urban Crisis: An Interview with Brian L. Tochterman

Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich interviews Brian L. Tochterman about his new book, The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear, about the competing narratives that shaped the city after World War II, in the age of mass suburbanization and deindustrialization.

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Arts & Culture, Interviews, Politics, Postwar New York, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserComment
Foiling Attempted Kidnappings in Antebellum New York
Foiling Attempted Kidnappings in Antebellum New York

Foiling Attempted Kidnappings in Antebellum New York

By David Fiske

The Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave shocked audiences a few years ago — not just with its depiction of the cruelty often endured by slaves — but also because of its acknowledgement of a tragic historical reality: that in those days a free-born African American could be kidnapped and enslaved. Sadly, the story told by the film — ​of Solomon Northup’s kidnapping and subsequent servitude — was not a story that was unique. Before the Civil War, kidnapping was conducted with a certain degree of regularity.

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Antebellum & Civil War, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Reviewed by Jocelyn A Wills

One never knows where a family heirloom will lead. Brooklyn’s Renaissance began with a cultural artifact that Italian Renaissance scholar Melissa Meriam Bullard’s mother inherited from a distant cousin: a portrait of Luther Boynton Wyman (1804-79), a forgotten shipping merchant for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line, long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights, and “guiding hand” in the founding of the “arts-friendly community” along Montague Street during the 1850s and 1860s (with the Academy of Music, now “BAM,” as Brooklyn’s cultural center).

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Brooklyn, Antebellum & Civil War, Arts & Culture, Business & Labor, Reviews, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserComment