"Every year, the New York Botanical Garden transforms the concrete jungle into a lush dollhouse of plants, bark, flowers, and other natural elements for its beloved Holiday Train Show, which I have yet to visit, much to my dismay as a die-hard yet secular Christmas fan. Still, this enchanting miniature model - including a replica of the Whitney Museum of American Art (left)- helps us see the sprawling city with new eyes. (photo courtesy the New York Botanical Garden)"
"I stood for an hour and a half before the two-panel Preface for Chris (1973), in a state of uplifted contemplation with absolutely no idea who Chris was. It was a sunny, cool day in July. At the Cranbrook Art Museum, my Mitchell studies were again being helped by others: Madlyn Moskowitz, the museum's registrar, who had recently supervised the diptych's reframing, and Caitlin Haskell, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. I thought the two panels could be two pages, the join a spine."
The New York Botanical Garden's Holiday Train Show recreates urban landmarks as a miniature landscape of plants, bark, flowers, and natural elements, offering a new perspective on the city. Joan Mitchell's two-panel Preface for Chris (1973) juxtaposes vertical rectangles of dark blue and mint green with periwinkle clouds and calligraphic marks. The left panel's clustered oblongs read as book-shaped forms or the clustered shape of a poem, while the right panel opens into distinct areas with a similar cloud motif. The diptych's join functions like a spine, suggesting pages or letters exchanged between places and emphasizing texture, reframing, and atmospheric whites and pale yellows.
Read at Hyperallergic
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