Picture Collection

In celebration of the National Day of Listening, the Art and Picture Collections have been collaborating with StoryCorps to produce an all-day drop-in event to consider your art and your life.

We invited six artists to the StoryCorps booth to record the story of art in their lives. And, on the National Day of Listening (the day after Thanksgiving), we will hear excerpts from their tales as we look at images from their oeuvre. The artists will participate in a panel discussion about their StoryCorps experiences, while the audience will be invited to share what art means in their personal lives. And StoryCorps representatives will be on hand to explain how to record and document your own story.

Artists Michael Cline, Annette Cords, Anujan Ezhikode, Builder Levy, Justin Lieberman, and Charles Mingus III each traveled with a significant other to the StoryCorps booth in Foley Square to be interviewed about how art has influenced, molded, and changed their lives. Their stories were recorded by StoryCorps and will be archived in the Library of Congress, where their lives can be celebrated through the art of listening for years to come.

Excerpts from the recording session will be played throughout the day on November 27. As a bonus, join us at 2 pm for an artist panel, where they will share their stories and their recording experiences in person at NYPL for the National Day of Listening, a day to slow down and listen to the stories of the people in your life. We are also looking forward to hearing your stories in art. Whether you create doodles, mashups, crochet, or marble sculpture, we want to listen to where they come from.

When: Friday, November 27, 2009, 10 am to 5 pm
Where: South Court Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 42nd Street & 5th Avenue

Schedule:
10 am Artist storytelling slideshow, followed by audience interviews
12 noon Artist storytelling slideshow, followed by audience interviews
2:15 pm Artist panel (arrive at 2pm to hear the artists in person), moderated by Arezoo Moseni
3:45 pm Artist storytelling slideshow, followed by audience interviews

We are really grateful to the wonderful folks at StoryCorps for making this event possible. Please join us and listen to the stories of six contemporary artists, and tell the story of what art means to your life.

I live for the day when some person who’s regarded as an arbiter of cultural taste is asked to name their favorite books. “I know you’re expecting an answer like Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, but, truth be told, the one story that really sums up the human condition for me is issue number 55 of The Amazing Spider-Man.” They then proceed to deliver a literate, succinct defense of their preference which would do credit to an Oxford professor’s deconstruction of Beowulf. I know this might sound weird, but then I also hope for the day when the consumers of culture, and not a coterie of critics, decide what they want to read, see, and hear.

Hidden treasures are what make looking for materials on the Mid-Manhattan Library’s Art and Literature floor so interesting. Three-quarters of the books and DVDs that people request will be about art and plays and architecture and novels and cartoons and poems and buildings I’ve never heard of until today. That’s why it’s interesting to flip through the pages of each book that’s pulled from the shelves. I want to see what kind of sculpture Antoine-Louis Barye produced (more on this later), what factors influence the design of an airport, and just what sort of poem is “Aniara” by Harry Martinsson (more on this later, too).

Early one morning, as I pulled myself up from the bathroom floor with a most terrible headache, I swore an oath to never drink again. I vowed to empty the rest of that demon vodka down the sink, thwarted only by the fact that I had drunk all of it the night before and there was none left to dispose of. I made a promise to myself to remain sober and self-possessed throughout the remainder of my days, and while I have thus far failed miserably in this endeavor, I nonetheless continue to derive strength and inspiration from the many images of drunken folly archived in The Picture Collection. Created during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when that most beloved of crusades, the temperance movement, gained particular momentum in the United States and Europe (capped off by that very successful and victorious era in U.S. history known as Prohibition), these images very acutely document the destructive and evil forces of alcohol. When I am overcome with temptation, which is always (I am swigging from a bottle of absinthe right now), I look at these images in order to be reminded of the foolishness of my ways, and now I am posting them online so that you, dear readers, will benefit as well. As these pictures make perfectly clear, without immediate intervention we will all soon be terrible mothers, fathers, wives and husbands, make spectacles of ourselves at fashionable parties, fall into debt and poverty, dress in rags, be mocked and jeered at by children, wind up arrested, in court, in prison and insane, commit murder and/or suicide, and be visited by devils while sleeping in our beds at night. Shall I go on? Of course not – you can see the end results for yourself.

Related: The Picture Collection's images of New York City Saloons

One recent rainy day in the Picture Collection of Mid-Manhattan Library, just shuffling through a fistful of photos, we happened upon this–uh, SIGNED photo of Henry James.

Now we are loathe to confess it, but Mr. James is one of those rare writers of whom we have developed a pronounced preference for the Big Screen versions of his works over the textual alternatives. Who could forget Helena Bonham Carter distractedly roaming the dark streets of Venice in Wings of the Dove? Or Christopher Reeve tripping over the love that dare not speak its name in The Bostonians? Or Cherry Jones’ tour de force as The Heiress? (Okay, it was on the stage, but still…) Despite our lowbrow taste for Mr. James served up as entertainment (well, Colm Toibin’s masterful fiction about James wasn’t exactly an endorsement of Mr. James’ personal character), we were pleased to think we might turn the Berg Collection green with envy–until we examined the signature a little more closely and found ourselves terrified. The pen that signed the portrait scrawled the date: Jan. 3, 1918. Yet the hand that penned the novels last moved in this world on Feb. 28, 1916. So who IS this Miss Jordan, who prompted Mr. James to journey so far from that undiscovered country merely to send her his regards? We also express our admiration for the skill of the photographer, H. Walter Barnett, who has caught perfectly that otherworldly look about the eyes.

(Perhaps the stroke of Mr. James' pen was cramped and the date was actually Jan. 3, 1908? Mind you, I only conjecture....)