This past week I went to New York City for a family vacation. The director of Boots, Juan William Chávez, recommended that I visit the MoMA and New Museum so that I could see what museums in other cities were doing with their spaces and compare it to the art scene in St. Louis.

At the MoMA, I saw Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection—a massive collection of 2,500 drawings bought by Harvey S. Shipley Miller, a trustee of the Judith Rothschild Foundation. Receiving the collection as a gift in 2005, the MoMA showcases a tailored selection of its recently acquired collection, 354 drawings to be exact, for the very first time. As I walked through the space, I was immediately overwhelmed…and happily so. On the walls, drawings were seemly haphazardly arranged on the walls, sometimes as many as 20 drawings hung on one wall. Works by Donald Judd hung side by side work by Gordon Matta-Clark. To hear Christian Rattemeyer, Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings, discuss the exhibition, click here: http://moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/36/featured

The Generational: Younger than Jesus exhibition at the New Museum had a unique feel: one full of energy and youth. The Generational is a triennial exhibition held at the New Museum, and this time, the targeted generation was artists younger than Jesus, 33 years old. The exhibition showcased 50 artists from 25 different countries, many of whom were exhibiting at a museum for the first time. A surprising number of works involved volunteers and museum attendants, from a museum attendant eating a banana and disposing its peel on the floor of the gallery [Installation (Banana Peel) by Adriana Lara] to a volunteer sleeping through the museum’s open hours on a white bed after taking sleeping pills (Chu Yun’s This is XX). Many artists commented on today’s culture including AIDS 3D collective in their piece, OMG Obelisk, and Liu Chuang, who in his piece, Buying Everything On You, approached random pedestrians and bought everything they were wearing at that particular moment. The exhibition was on five floors, first through fifth floor, due to the unique architecture of the museum itself, a stack of seven metal rectangular boxes. Here’s a link to the exhibition’s homepage:http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/411/the_generationalyounger_than_jesus

Looking back on the trip, I found it fun to compare the art scenes of St. Louis and New York City. I’m not sure which city I like better, but St. Louis is definitely reining in the art gap between the two cities with its new sculpture garden, Citygarden. Be sure to check out Katherine’s blog entry on the two city-block downtown garden.