Museum and Gallery Listings for May 18-24

Posted on 17th May 2012 in The monuments of world
Published: May 17, 2012

Art

Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art. A searchable guide to these and many other art shows is at nytimes.com/events.

Museums

★ American Folk Art Museum: ‘Jubilation | Rumination: Life, Real and Imagined’ (through Sept. 2) Having escaped the ugly, West 53rd Street tomb of a building it inhabited from 2001 to 2011, the American Folk Art Museum has reoccupied its old space on Lincoln Square. This wonderful show of about 100 works from the permanent collection samples all the varieties of artistic expression under the museum’s purview, from portraits and quilts by anonymous craftspeople to otherworldly fantasies envisioned by so-called Outsiders like Henry Darger and Martin Ramírez. The revival of this irreplaceable institution is cause for rejoicing. 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue, at 66th Street, (212) 595-9533, folkartmuseum.org. (Ken Johnson)

Bronx Museum of the Arts: ‘Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect’ (through June 10) In the wilder moments of his career, Mr. Downey, who died of cancer in 1993 at 53 and is getting his first United States museum retrospective here, reversed the traditional dynamic of sculpture, examining how humans could affect objects rather than the other way around; administered oxygen to pedestrians on the street in New York in “Fresh Air” (1972); and cohabitated as a kind of gonzo anthropologist — or early implementer of art as social practice — with the Yanomami Indians in Venezuela. Central to his vision, which drew on Frederick Kubler, critical theory and hallucinogenic states of mind, Mr. Downey also developed a concept of “invisible architecture,” which he described in 1973 as “an attitude of total communication within which ultra-developed minds will be telepathically cellular to an electromagnetic whole.” 1040 Grand Concourse, at 165th Street, Morrisania, the Bronx, (718) 681-6000, bronxmuseum.org. (Martha Schwendener)

Brooklyn Museum: ‘Keith Haring: 1978-1982’ (through July 8) Heavy on the party photographs and punk-to-New Wave soundtrack, this show repackages the mythic Haring — club kid, Warhol protégé and maker of friendly street art — for a younger generation. But other Harings emerge in rarely seen early drawings, collages, journals and, especially, in short performative videos like “Painting Myself Into a Corner” and “Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt.” 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Karen Rosenberg)

Brooklyn Museum: ‘Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin’ (through Aug. 12) Ms. Kneebone, a British artist, has been invited by the Brooklyn Museum to riff on Rodin and chose 15 works from the museum’s permanent collection to show with her own porcelain sculptures. She is drawn to Rodin’s maquettes, or the smaller models on which larger sculptures were based. Some works recall wedding cakes and Baroque or Rococo fountains. Chef d’oeuvre of the show, “The Descent” (2008), recalls Rodin’s “Gates of Hell” and is comprised of dozens of little figures descending into a cauldron-shaped pit. That Ms. Kneebone’s project is installed in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art might suggest that you’re going to get a feminist flogging of Rodin, but Ms. Kneebone does not head down that path. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Schwendener)

★ Brooklyn Museum: ‘Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn’ (continuing) This eclectic, imaginatively thought-out one-gallery immersion experience in world art, all from Brooklyn’s collection and installed in the museum’s revamped Great Hall, serves as a teaser to the fabulous collections in the galleries beyond. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Holland Cotter)

★ Guggenheim Museum: ‘Francesca Woodman’ (through June 13) Francesca Woodman, the photographer who at 22 took her own life in 1981, is as close to a true saint as the putatively secular world of contemporary art can claim. The dreamy, formally playful and disarmingly erotic pictures she made — mostly of herself partly unclothed or naked — project a self surrendering unreservedly to the spirit of art. Viewing this riveting survey of her sadly abbreviated career, it is hard to shake off the admittedly absurd notion that she was too pure an artist for this muddy world. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Johnson)

★ International Center of Photography: ‘Weegee: Murder Is My Business’ (through Sept. 2) From the home of Weegee’s voluminous archive, the latest exhibition about this great documentary photographer (1899-1968) revisits his frenetic, formative first decade of work, starting in 1935, when his often sensational images of murder and mayhem appeared in New York’s daily newspapers. His penchant for self-promotion, the work of his competitors and peers, the evolution of tabloid journalism and the great city that was both his subject and his audience are emphasized, with fresh curatorial precision and deftly used touch screens. 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000, icp.org. (Roberta Smith)

★ Japan Society: ‘Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945’ (through June 10) This beautiful, surprising and sociologically intriguing exhibition reveals how Japanese artists, designers and craftsmen cultivated their own version of Art Deco, that excruciatingly suave style of art, design and décor that prevailed in Europe and America during the 1920s and ’30s. The 200 paintings, sculptures, ceramics, glassware, jewelry, fashion and printed ephemera on display seamlessly blend East and West and old and new. You could almost believe it was the Japanese who invented Art Deco. 333 East 47th Street, (212) 832-1155, japansociety.org. (Johnson)

Jewish Museum: ‘Édouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940’ (through Sept. 23) In the 1890s, Vuillard made some of the most beguiling paintings of fin de siècle Paris: intimate, compact, brushy pictures of his mother and sister in the apartment he shared with them and the dressmaking shop they worked in. Then he reverted to a more traditionally realistic style and produced many portraits of his wealthy friends and benefactors until he died in 1940. This incisive show, sampling works from his more than four-decade career, invites reassessment of the later, heretofore less appreciated paintings. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org. (Johnson)

Jewish Museum: ‘Kehinde Wiley / The World Stage: Israel’ (through July 29) After earning a master of fine arts at Yale in 2001, Kehinde Wiley began exhibiting his large, figurative oil-on-canvas portraits of young black men in hip-hop apparel. With their emphasis on bright, acid colors and ghetto-fabulous outfits, the paintings borrowed heavily from the work of Barkley Hendricks, although Mr. Wiley’s contribution was to push things in a more bombastic direction, hijacking the format of old master portraits. Mr. Wiley’s work hasn’t changed much over the last decade, although his scope has gone global. This exhibition, which focuses on Ethiopian Israeli Jews, is shown alongside historic paper cuts and textile works he selected from the museum’s collection. The result is a fusion of Pattern and Decoration painting with figuration, a mash-up or sampling of historical styles and references. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3337, thejewishmuseum.org. (Schwendener)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition’ (through July 8) Concluding the Met’s series of Byzantine art blockbusters, this show tells the story of the Byzantine Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean, from Syria through Egypt and across North Africa, as it made contact with (and lost ground to) the emerging Islamic world between the seventh and ninth centuries. Loans from Egypt could not be secured, because of the continuing turmoil of the Arab Spring, but important pieces from Jordan, Greece and Georgia are among the show’s highlights. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Dawn of Egyptian Art’ (through Aug. 5) The predynastic roots of the grand dynastic Egyptian art that we all know and sometimes love are exposed in this sublime, view-changing show. The most riveting and least familiar offerings are a selection of small objects, painted pottery and figures in clay or ivory that date from 3900 to 3100 B.C., quite a few of which are usually on view in the Met’s Egyptian galleries. Here they are supplemented by extraordinary outside loans and elegantly displayed in the Robert Lehman Wing. Sometimes it takes an exhibition. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Naked Before the Camera’ (through Sept. 9) This resonant, illuminating if sometimes fraught exhibition traces the progress of the naked, mostly female body through photography from its early years nearly to the present with some 90 images, all owned by the Met. In works variously artistic, erotic, scientific, ethnographic, forensic and experimental, we see a medium stretched by human use and imagination. The male gaze is often relentless, but as time passes, individual faces, personalities and relationships come into focus on all sides; consciousness rises and oppressiveness decreases, which is a relief. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video’ (through Aug. 26) This exhibition of 17 contemporary works inspired by museums doesn’t mention Theodor Adorno by name, but it nods toward his ideas in a wall text, which jokes that artists often see museums as “mausoleums, places where art goes to die.” Andrea Fraser’s video “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk” (1989) leans toward the anti-museum view, while a 16-millimeter film by Nashashibi/Skaer, the duo of British artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, made by gliding through the Met in the dark with a camera and a flash strobe, treats the museum like a darkened crypt. Lutz Bacher’s video offers another museum tour, while the museum appears in poetically distorted form in photographs by John Pilson, Tim Davis and Lothar Baumgarten. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Schwendener)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde’ (through June 3) Like the family it chronicles, this exhibition is fragmented and contentious with flashes of brilliance. It explores the closely intertwined collections of the siblings Leo, Gertrude and Michael Stein (and Michael’s wife, Sarah), casting these wealthy American expatriates as ahead-of-the-curve art patrons whose tastes and social networks shaped Modernism as we know it. And it shows Matisse and Picasso vying for the Steins’ attention. Highlights include Matisse’s Fauvist “Woman With a Hat” and, naturally, Picasso’s proto-cubist portrait of Gertrude. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations’ (through Aug. 19) This year’s Costume Institute extravaganza is on the modest side, and has a narrow thesis: comparing and contrasting work by two designers of different generations. Whether a this-looks-like-that approach to history is valid is the question; it seems dubious here. But the installation — with fictional chats on film between the fashion titans — is fun, and some of the Schiaparelli clothes look great. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Dürer and Beyond: Central European Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400-1700’ (through Sept. 3) How do we get beyond Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the ne plus ultra draftsman and all-around Northern Renaissance master, an artist so secure in his greatness that he painted himself as Jesus? We don’t, at least not often in this show, which surveys the Met’s holdings of drawings made before 1700 by artists working in the Holy Roman Empire. But the offerings should nevertheless entice viewers to look more closely at the art of Central Europe, which absorbed diverse religious and stylistic influences from Italian, Dutch and Flemish art. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)

★ Morgan Library & Museum: ‘Dan Flavin: Drawing’ (through July 1) The artist Dan Flavin (1933-96) is so closely identified with his signature medium, the fluorescent light sculpture, that a show of his drawings is bound to surprise. And it’s particularly exciting to find that Flavin was not only a devoted draftsman but also a freewheeling polymath on paper. The Morgan’s show includes drawings from Flavin’s personal collection, which encompasses Hokusai, Mondrian and the Hudson River School and will completely change the way you see his art. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, Ext. 560, themorgan.org. (Rosenberg)

Museum of Arts and Design: ‘Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design’ (through Aug. 12) From the department of unsolicited advice for aspiring artists: avoid dust, dirt, ashes, soot, smoke, sand, mud and lint, especially if you want to make a statement about life, death, history and the ephemerality of it all. The dangers are well-illustrated in this 25-artist show. While formally various, almost every piece trades on stereotypical associations with the entropic end to which we all are destined. 2 Columbus Circle, (212) 299-7777, madmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Born Out of Necessity’ (through Jan. 28) The title may or may not have an extra preposition, but the show itself is a fascinating array of recent acquisitions that have a fairly direct bearing on quality of life or actual survival. They range from classic (the 1908 Dixie cup) to cutting edge; cover both analog and digital; and include the tiny (the latest in ear plugs) and the quite large (the 1952 United States Army Jeep). Whether born ‘of’ or ‘out of’ necessity, the displays attest to human ingenuity responding to human need. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language’ (through Aug. 27) In a drawing from 1966, “Heaps of Language,” Robert Smithson assembled a pyramid of words about words: “Language” at the apex, supported by “phraseology speech,” “tongue lingo vernacular,” and on down through a base of synonyms. This playful exhibition borrows Smithson’s title and runs wild with his vision of words as materials. It includes a timeline of Dada wordplay and concrete poetry, and works by contemporary artists and artist’s groups including Paul Elliman, Sharon Hayes and Dexter Sinister. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration’ (through July 9) This entertaining little show includes five products of the Surrealist parlor game “exquisite corpse” and rustles up other examples of distorted or disjointed figuration from MoMA’s permanent collection. There’s much here to amuse, provoke and titillate, though the curators don’t include more performance-based forms of collaboration. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)

Museum of Modern Art: ‘Cindy Sherman’ (through June 11) Aided by ever-shifting arrays of costumes, wigs, makeup, props, masks and prosthetic body parts, the leading light of postmodern photo-based art spent nearly four decades turning photography against itself, laying waste to a lexicon of mostly female stereotypes and exposing both the tyranny and the inner lives of the images of women that bombard and shape us all at every turn. This retrospective could have been larger, more clearly organized and less familiar, but its strengths, like the achievement it honors, are undeniable. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Whitney Biennial 2012’ (through May 27) With remarkable clarity of vision, striking spatial intelligence and a generous stylistic inclusiveness, one of the best Whitney Biennials in recent memory confidently weaves together art objects and time-based art — dance, theater and performance as well as film and video — on a scale unprecedented in New York. So doing, this especially poetic incarnation also reinvents the museum’s signature show and places future biennial curators in its debt, while offering the out-of-control, money-saturated art world a bit of redemption. Visit early and often. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Smith)

Galleries: Uptown

Frank Stella: ‘Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings’ (through June 2) This magisterial, museum-quality blast from the past revisits the earliest, most innovative years of Mr. Stella’s development with 13 adamant, quietly pulsing, exceedingly frontal works. Painted in parallel stripes of black, then aluminum and then copper on canvases that start out rectangular and end up emphatically shaped, they bid a moody farewell to Abstract Expressionism and forge a new, nothing-but-the-facts reciprocity between painting as object and image. Forerunners of Minimalism, they also remain powerfully evocative in a time of renewed interest in abstraction among younger artists. L&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan, (212) 861-0020, lmgallery.com. (Smith)

Édouard Vuillard: ‘Paintings and Works on Paper’ (through May 25) This show focuses on some remarkable, large, late paintings on which Vuillard labored for extended periods of time. An eerily gloomy portrait of two women in a cavernous room, one a former lover, took two years to complete, from 1923 to 1925. “Madame Jean Bloch and Her Children” (1927-29) took so long that a fourth child was born before it was done, so he had to make another version, which can be seen in the Vuillard retrospective now at the Jewish Museum. Jill Newhouse, 4 East 81st Street, (212) 249-9216, jillnewhouse.com. (Johnson)

★ ‘Lucian Freud Drawings’ (through June 9) This quietly ravishing show gives a new prominence to Lucian Freud’s works on paper, which aren’t appreciated as much as his paintings. Beginning with a childhood crayon sketch, it includes some small oil portraits and powerful examples of Freud’s late work in etching. And it shows Freud moving from the tightly controlled pen-and-ink drawings that defined his early painting style to looser works that, in the words of curator William Feaver, are “both in the paintings and a reaction or counterpoint to them.” Acquavella Galleries, 18 East 79th Street, Manhattan; (212) 734-6300, acquavellagalleries.com. (Rosenberg)

Galleries: 57th Street

Anne Arnold: ‘Sculpture From Four Decades’ (through June 8) When Abstract Expressionism was casting its triumphal shadow over American art and David Smith was making monuments out of industrial steel, Anne Arnold (born in 1925) created smart and humorous sculptures of dogs, people and other domestic creatures. This delightful show presents 27 pieces from the 1950s to the late ’80s in which the seeming liveliness of the animals and the obviously nonliving materials they are made of, including wood, clay and bronze, are in finely tuned tension. Alexandre Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, (212) 755-2828, alexandregallery.com. (Ken Johnson)

Galleries: Chelsea

Katherine Bradford: ‘New Work’ (through May 26) “Transform, transport and transcend” could be a motto for this veteran New York artist. Painting loosely with infectious joie de vivre, Ms. Bradford creates luminous and sumptuously tactile, sometimes goofy visions of Superman and oceangoing ships. If Superman represents the visionary individual, Ms. Bradford’s ships suggest utopian collectivity, promising voyages of kindred spirits to unknown shores. Edward Thorp, 210 11th Avenue, at 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 691-6565, edwardthorpgallery.com. (Johnson)

★ Rotimi Fani-Kayode: ‘Nothing to Lose’ (through July 28) “Black, African, homosexual photography” was how the Nigerian-born artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode described his work. And although little seen at the time of his death from AIDS in London in 1989, at age 34, his pictures have become classic examples of the kind of rethinking and re-experiencing of identity that was transforming new art three decades ago, and continues to have power. The Walther Collection Project Space, 526 West 26th Street, Suite 718, (212) 352-0683, walthercollection.com. (Cotter)

★ Lucio Fontana: ‘Ambienti Spaziali’ (through June 30) The most comprehensive survey in this country devoted to the Italian modernist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) is a delirious revelation. His innovative slashed and punctured paintings show him pushing quite literally through the canvas into real space, where his experiments included four “ambiente spaziale” (“spatial environments”) never before exhibited in this country. Alternately daffy and dazzling, the assembled works focus on the purist side of Fontana’s polymorphous sensibility, but nonetheless reveal a wide-ranging permissiveness, and an inspiring dedication to art as a quest, not a finished product. Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, (212) 741-1111, gagosian.com. (Smith)

‘Cindy Sherman’ (through June 9) This innovative photo-based artist’s latest fusions of painting, cinema and fashion are grandly dour, mural-size images that depict somewhat worn, subtly disturbed, luxuriously garbed (vintage Chanel) older women set incongruously into largely barren landscapes textured with ersatz brushwork from Photoshop. The results lampoon painting while their unsettling lack of cohesion stymies the kind of reflexive narrative that Ms. Sherman’s work has typically provoked. The Nordic mood is matched by a kind of visual brain freeze. Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 206-7100, metropicturesgallery.com. (Smith)

Galleries: Other

Charles Atlas: ‘The Illusion of Democracy’ (through July 15) Since the early 1970s, Charles Atlas has usually made people — artists, dancers, singers — the main images in his work, making us see familiar figures in a way we never quite had before. For his solo debut with Luhring Augustine, he fills the gallery’s new Bushwick space with three big, immersive, pulsating video projections of constantly changing numbers. Luhring Augustine Gallery, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, Bushwick, Brookyn, (718) 386-2746, luhringaugustine.com. (Cotter)

Bill Bollinger: ‘Aluminum channel, cast iron, paper: 1966-1977’ (through June 9) In the early 1970s, Bollinger (1939-88) created sculptures at an iron foundry by pouring molten metal into lake-shaped excavations in sand. The three craggy and rusty pieces on view have a shocking vitality. Two that stand vertically — the biggest is nearly seven feet tall — resemble Chinese scholar rocks. One lying on the floor with its flat side up bespeaks the sculptor’s preoccupations with gravity, fluidity and raw materiality. Algus Greenspon, 71 Morton Street, (212) 255-7872, algusgreenspon.com. (Johnson)

Bill Bollinger: ‘The Retrospective’ (through July 30) From 1965 to 1970, Bollinger (1939-88) was at the center of avant-gardist action in New York and Europe. Major exhibitions included his elegant, stripped-down configurations of hardware-store materials like chain-link fencing, pipes, ropes, hoses, lumber, saw horses, oil barrels, and nuts and bolts. Then he left New York and became a forgotten man. This selection of his work from the second half of the ’60s tells a fascinating story of ambition, success and failure. SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 361-1750, sculpture-center.org. (Johnson)

★ ‘Picasso and Françoise Gilot: Paris-Vallauris, 1943-1953’ (through June 30) Life was sweet for Picasso during the years of romance and cohabitation with Françoise Gilot judging by this wonderful exhibition. Looking at his regal Cubist portraits of Ms. Gilot and tumultuous paintings of his young children at play you can imagine yourself seeing through the eyes of a worshipful husband and loving, benevolent father. Fictional or not, the paintings of this period are, mostly, infectiously playful and sometimes comically zany. Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, near 77th Street, (212) 744-2313, gagosian.com. (Johnson)

★ Hans Schabus: ‘Let’s Call It Heimat’ (through June 15) “Atelier,” the centerpiece here, is a brilliant nearly 10-minute video loop that recreates — cut by cut and camera angle by angle — the extended final shootout of Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 revisionist western “The Wild Bunch” by joining the original soundtrack with views of Mr. Schabus’s deserted, serenely ordered Viennese studio and its surroundings. As the gunfire and the cuts accelerate, a seemingly extra-brainy, nostalgic and very male deconstruction gives way to a haunted formalism grim with future implications of terrorism, urban violence and paranoid xenophobia. Simon Preston Gallery, 301 Broome Street, Lower East Side, (212) 431-1105, simonprestongallery.com. (Smith)

‘Storied Past: Four Centuries of French Drawings From the Blanton Museum of Art’ / ‘French Art From N.Y.U.’s Collection’ (through July 14) At first glance this show looks like a dreary affair: a gathering of little-known draftsmen, almost all of them beholden to the Academy. Give it time, though, and like a dull professorial type after a few gin and tonics it may surprise you with sudden flights of vivacity. Shaped by the Suida-Manning Collection (a group of European drawings initially amassed by the Austrian art historian William Suida in the early 20th century), it includes many works by 17th- and 18th-century French artists who studied in Italy or worked in an Italianate style. Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart. (Rosenberg)

‘Terracotta Warriors: Defenders of China’s First Emperor’ (through Aug. 26) Since being exhumed from an imperial cemetery in the 1970s, China’s terra-cotta army has been on a global Long March, moving from one sell-out museum appearance to the next and serving as emblems of China’s neo-imperial clout in the here and now. That army, or a small piece of it, has arrived in New York City. Only nine of an estimated 8,000 soldiers made the trip. But they’re in great shape and, fitted out with weapons, armor, cash and a portable kitchen, they’re a sight to see. Discovery Times Square, 226 West 44th Street, Manhattan, (866) 987-9692, discoverytsx.com. (Cotter)

Last Chance

★ ‘Every Exit Is an Entrance: 30 Years of Exit Art’ (closes on Saturday) This big retrospective archival show documents the history of Exit Art, one of Manhattan’s premier nonprofit spaces, founded 30 years ago by Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo. After Ms. Ingberman’s death last year, Mr. Colo decided to close the gallery, and this exhibition will be its last. On Saturday Mr. Colo will perform “Sweeping Memories,” a ritual cleansing of, and farewell to, the Exit Art premises. Exit Art, 475 Tenth Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 966-7745, exitart.org. (Cotter)

Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (closes on Sunday) This lovely small show, focused on self-portrait paintings and prints, proposes that Rembrandt was a greater influence on Degas than has generally been recognized. Degas as a young man studied Rembrandt prints, copied at least one and made others imitating Rembrandt-type effects. But a group of four captivating self-portraits at the heart of the show — two by each artist painted at age 23 — suggests that the men were temperamentally about as alike as a cat and a dog. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Rembrandt at Work: The Great Self-Portrait From Kenwood House’ (closes on Sunday) This late, magnificently plain-spoken self-portrait finds the artist in his studio, brush and palette in hand, contemplating his homely visage. Surrounded by, and generally overshadowing, several of the Met’s own Rembrandts, it is among the high points of European painting, not the least for the pale background wall where two drawn circles echo, abstractly and much enlarged, the painter’s intent gaze. Its emotional gravity and psychic complexity underscore why Rembrandt is often likened to Shakespeare in his epoch-changing grasp of human interiority. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

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Under the spell of Istanbul

Posted on 17th May 2012 in The monuments of world


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View of Istanbul from the Golden Horn

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Topkapi Palace symbolises the eternal vigilance of the Ottoman Sultan against injustice

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Dolmabache Palace was an administrative centre for Ottoman Empire replacing the Topkapi Palace until 1922

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Enderun Library within the Topkapi Palace compound

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The Blue Mosque in its grandeur under the bright sunlight as seen from Sultan Ahmad Garden, at the northern side Pictures by Rizauddin Ibrahim

AHH… historic Istanbul! This crosses my mind the moment I lay my eyes on classic Ottoman buildings and the architecturally European-flavoured ones set along the shores of the Golden Horn.

I am on a boat cruise along the waters of the Golden Horn, a natural estuary of the Bosphorus Strait that divides this capital of Turkey into two continents — Asia in the east and Europe in the west.

That boat cruise is a surreal yet amazing voyage between the two continents.

The Golden Horn is a 7.5km- long, narrow estuary that forms a protected natural harbour.

For thousands of years, it has been a port of call for ships from the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman.

Here was where the city once began and here is where I begin my journey in historic Istanbul.

ANCIENT DOMES AND TOWERS

Looking at the city skyline from where I am on the boat, I can already feel the historic aura. First, I clearly see the domes and towers of Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace and Blue Mosque which date from the year 530 to 1600.

As the boat cruises along the coast, one cannot help feeling impressed at the sight of Dolmabahce Palace, (1856), and Beylerbeyi Palace, a summer palace completed in 1865.

And there are many hundreds of years-old wooden villas and mansions along the shores that will make anyone envious of their owners.

Then comes the Rumeli Hasari or Rumeli Fortress that will leave you awestruck by its sheer supreme look. It was the largest fortress built by Sultan Mehmed Istanbul II in 1451 to control the sea routes of the Bosphorus to prevent aid from the Black Sea reaching the Turkish Siege of Constantinople in 1453.

Constantinople is the Byzantine name for Istanbul. It was under siege many times before Mehmet The Conqueror took the city in 1453 and made it the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Before that, it was the capital of powerful Roman and Byzantine Empire.

These ancient empires left these symbols of their past glories and best of all, these remnants are not scattered ruins of dull grey stones but large buildings which have defied the ravages of time. All these can now still be seen in the Sultan Ahmed District.

ROYAL DISTRICT

The Sultan Ahmed District is the heart of historic Old Istanbul. It is located on the peninsula bounded by bodies of water to north, east and south — the Golden Horn, Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, respectively. The area was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1985.

This is where Constantinople was located at the southern bank of the Golden Horn and parts of the defence wall of the old city still remain at the coast. Located on the European side of Istanbul, the old city is the best base for sightseeing in Istanbul.

As the most historic part of Istanbul, Sultan Ahmet District is where all the city’s significant landmarks like Hippodrome, Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia and Topkapi Palace are located. Making it a complete tourist destination, the area has a number of good restaurants and hotels too.

HIPPODROME OF CONSTANTINOPLE

Though public transport is easily accessible, going on foot is the best choice to explore the old city. You should not miss going to Sultan Ahmed Square, actually the Hippodrome of Constantinople, the sporting and social centre of the city during the Byzantium era where horse or chariot racings were held.

Today, several fragments of the original structure that adorned the square during its glorious time are still standing. They are the monuments of the Spiral Column, Thutmosis Obelisk and Walled Obelisk.

The most recent addition to the square is the German Fountain, which is an octagonal domed fountain in neo-Byzantine style, constructed by the German government in 1900 to mark the German Emperor Wilhelm II’s visit to Istanbul in 1898.

THE BLUE MOSQUE

Adjacent to the Hippodrome is the Blue Mosque, or its official name, Sultan Ahmed Mosque. Built from 1609 to 1617, it is called the Blue Mosque for the blue tiles that adorn the walls of its interior. However, the tiles are mostly on the upper level, which is difficult to see.

Coming from the Hippodrome, I walk through a grand doorway on the western side to go to its inner courtyard.

Its architecture is better appreciated from the outside, especially under the bright sunlight from the Sultan Ahmed Garden at the northern side.

This grand building of Ottoman architecture with six minarets and cascading layers of domes is a sight to behold.

HAGIA SOPHIA

As you admire the Blue Mosque and praise its architect, Sadefkar Mehmet Aga, tribute should also be given to Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, the architects of neighbouring Hagia Sophia.

They designed Hagia Sophia 1,000 years before Mehmet Aga was born. History goes that Sultan Ahmed 1, the Sultan of Ottoman ordered the Blue Mosque to be built to rival Hagia Sophia. And the result is two great architectural achievements standing next to each other in Istanbul’s main square.

Hagia Sofia or Aya Sofia in Turkish which means Church Of Holy Wisdom, was built from year 532 to 537.

At that time, its wide, flat dome was considered a daring engineering feat and became the world’s most impressive building and made it the greatest church in Christendom.

It then was turned into a mosque when Ottoman conquered the city in 1453 and continued to serve as Istanbul’s most revered mosque until 1935 when Kamal Ataturk turned it into a museum as we see it today.

Unlike the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia is best admired from the inside, especially from the mezzanine level. From this floor, the view of the prayer hall is the most impressive. The natural light is slightly dimmed under its massive dome but gloriously lit by the glittering gold from the 30 million pieces of tiny golden tiles.

These tiny pieces of tiles are mosaic images of the Virgin Mother, Jesus, saints, emperors and empresses, as well as geometric patterns.

As it was once a mosque, the wall has Islamic calligraphy arts that inscribe religious names including that of the first four caliphs Abu Bakar, Umar, Uthman and Ali.

It is under this great dome of Hagia Sophia that I find a perfect mix of both Ottoman and Byzantium, or Islamic and Christian.

These are the characteristics of two different cultures from two great empires that have affected present Istanbul.
 

TOPKAPI PALACE

Next to Hagia Sophia is Topkapi Palace, home of Ottoman Sultan for 400 years and the heart of Ottoman Empire.

The initial construction began in 1459 but after that, over centuries,  the Palace Complex expanded to cover 80 hectares! This centuries-long construction included the major renovation after the 1509 earthquake and 1665 fire.

At its peak, the palace is home to 4,000 people but it is now the Topkapi Palace Museum housing many collections of historic objects from all over the Ottoman Empire and precious heirlooms that once belonged to Ottoman Sultans themselves.

A short visit to this palace will not do justice to it for it is a huge complex, made of four main courtyards and many smaller buildings.

The assortment of small buildings is fine architecture on its own. They are a result of the directives by many previous Ottoman Sultans who individually added and changed various structures and elements in the palace.

But the finest of all is the Fourth Courtyard or Imperial Sofa, the innermost private sanctuary of the Sultan and his family and has a number of pavilions, kiosks, gardens and terraces.

Here also is the special chamber called Chamber of the Sacred Relic, which includes the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle.

The pavilion houses what are considered the most sacred relics of the Muslim world, including the cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, two swords, a bow, one tooth, hairs of his beard, his battle sabres, autographed letters and other relics.

Several other sacred objects are also on display, such as the swords of the first four Caliphs, the staff of Moses, the turban of Joseph and a carpet belonging to Muhammad’s daughter.

The upper terrace has the Iftar Kiosk and Baghdad Kiosk where the Sultan customarily breaks fast during Ramadan with the view of the Golden Horn in the background. This is the best place to end the tour in Topkapi Palace.
 

GRAND BAZAAR

For a city that is proud of its heritage and culture inherited from two major empires, there is life in this city that stubbornly clings on to its old world ambience. That is the Grand Bazaar.

The oldest and one of the world’s largest covered bazaars, the bazaar spreads over 61 covered streets with more than 3,000 shops. Record has it that the bazaar attracts between 250,000 and 400,000 visitors daily.

It offers an excellent shopping experience especially for souvenir hunting, from Turkish carpets, glazed tiles and pottery, copper and brassware, apparel made of leather, cotton and wool, music instrument to all sorts of other things.

Thanks to the ambience, I can’t help but feel like entering Aladdin’s cave in some shops selling antiques.

This is the place to hone bargaining skills, which usually involves prospective clients having tea with the traders while bargaining for the right price.

Shopping in the Grand Bazaar is what many visitors list as among the things to do when visiting Istanbul. But for a more sizzling time, have a fine dinner with a belly dancing show thrown in.
 

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Column: Banning crosses erases history

Posted on 13th May 2012 in The monuments of world

By Michael Medved

Updated

A simmering controversy surrounding the “Ground Zero Cross” exposes the intolerance and absolutism behind ongoing battles over religious symbols on public property. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not Christian conservatives who normally start these bitter disputes. It’s more often atheist activists who seek to alter the long-standing status quo by scrubbing the landscape of the most visible signs of the nation’s religious heritage.

  • World Trade Center site: The steel remnant in the shape of a cross is left as a memorial for the 9/11 service in 2006.

    File photo by Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

    World Trade Center site: The steel remnant in the shape of a cross is left as a memorial for the 9/11 service in 2006.

File photo by Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

World Trade Center site: The steel remnant in the shape of a cross is left as a memorial for the 9/11 service in 2006.

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American Atheists, an organization representing the civil liberties of agnostics, filed suit in 2011 to block display of the Ground Zero Cross anywhere on the grounds of the new memorial museum planned for the World Trade Center site. The artifact in question became the best known piece of debris recovered from the terrorist attacks, when workmen spotted it on Sept. 13, 2001. The huge cross beam, presumably detached from the collapse of the North Tower and hurled down with many tons of rubble onto the stricken eight-story structure to its northeast, somehow survived intact and almost immediately became an informal shrine for the tireless crews who labored to clear Ground Zero.

A Franciscan friar blessed the welded girders as a sign that “God had not abandoned Ground Zero.” Later, with the cross installed on a city-approved pedestal, millions of tourists came to pray or leave flowers, but as construction proceeded at the World Trade Center, a crane helped to move the giant welded girders to nearby St. Peter’s Church in 2006.

9/11 family support

The lawsuit insists the relic must remain where it is, but planners for the new museum, supported by many 9/11 families, want the cross returned to Ground Zero as part of the permanent memorial. The lawsuit cites “mental pain and anguish” suffered by the plaintiffs due to “the knowledge that they are made to feel officially excluded from the ranks of citizens who were directly injured by the 9/11 attack.”

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League, which often takes a dim view of religious symbols in government-owned locations, declared that it “fully supports” the inclusion of the cross in the museum.

On my radio show, Edwin Kagin, national legal director for American Atheists, denounced the potential placement of the cross as unfair because there would be no comparable display of atheist or Muslim symbols. But no one happened to recover atheist symbols (whatever they might be) from the rubble. The cross deserves its unique place of honor because of its powerful historic connection to the first dark days after the terrorist attack.

Moreover, America’s leading government-funded art museums all boast collections of sacred objects, including icons, crucifixes and altar pieces exhibited for their historical and artistic significance.

Only religious objections

Had fate shaped the steel beams into any form other than a Christian cross, American Atheists would never think to object to its museum display. The group’s visceral hostility to the cross plays a role in a number of continuing controversies:

•In Woonsocket, R.I., the Freedom From Religion Foundation seeks to remove a World War I memorial topped by a cross that has stood without controversy on city property since 1921.

•In the Mojave National Preserve in California, officials are hoping to settle an 11-year dispute over a “desert cross” first erected on Sunrise Rock in 1934, also to commemorate the sacrifices of those who served in the Great War. In a complicated agreement, private parties have pledged to donate 5 new acres to the 1.6 million-acre federal reserve in return for title to the single acre on which the cross formerly stood before vandals destroyed it. Veterans groups hope to restore the monument, but they must first enclose the area in a chain-link fence with signs explaining that the cross stands on now private property.

In each of these fights, it’s the opponents of long-standing religious displays who seek to impose their narrow views on the rest of us. It hardly amounts to an effort to impose theocracy when people of faith defend monuments that have inspired passersby for generations. In the case of the Ground Zero Cross, for religious believers, the artifact they honor played a prominent role in the haunting imagery after the terror attacks.

Faith-based pluralism

Meanwhile, secular extremists seek to erase such imagery from the collective consciousness and to purge public places of religious reminders. For skeptics, prominently displayed crosses convey the uncomfortable message that the great majority of Americans still honor a faith that self-proclaimed free-thinkers hold in undisguised contempt.

Beneath all the hypocrisy over constitutional restraints and traditional walls of separation, secular activists and self-styled defenders of “civil liberties” seek to transform American society in a way that our Founders and most subsequent generations would never recognize. They seem eager to defend flag-burning, obscenity and every other form of radical expression, while seeking to suppress emblems of the Christian faith that helped shape the nation since the arrival of earliest colonists.

An experiment in enforced secularism might count as a bold departure from the nation’s God-haunted past, but it’s hard to believe it would produce a better country than the beloved, multifarious and clashing religious symbols that have always characterized our faith-based pluralism.

Nationally syndicated talk radio host Michael Medved, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is author of The 5 Big Lies About American Business and The Shadow Presidents.

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‘Maya 2012: Lords of Time,’ at the Penn Museum

Posted on 11th May 2012 in The monuments of world
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: May 11, 2012

PHILADELPHIA — And it shall come to pass that when the 13th baktun comes to an end, so will the world. Everything, even the entombed red-cinnabar-coated kings, shall be destroyed in an apocalypse. So it has been foretold — and so many believe — by the ancient Maya calendar; even Maya deities like the jade-haired maize god and the goggle-eyed storm god must submit. In Arabic numerals the final date would be represented this way: 13.0.0.0.0.

Talk about bad luck. According to the Penn Museum here, which has mounted a major exhibition that manages to be at once tantalizing, illuminating and frustrating, that day is close at hand. Though many experts calculate it to be Dec. 21, 2012, the museum curators believe it is Dec. 23, 2012. And this show, “Maya 2012: Lords of Time,” opens with a teasing potpourri of tabloid headlines, movie disasters and television news reports invoking the imminent catastrophe (though the exhibition is expected to remain open after the world ends, until mid-January 2013).

It’s a setup, of course, because we soon learn that the Maya civilization (which once extended over modern-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador; built major cities by 500 B.C.; and reached its peak before A.D. 900) had no such idea.

In fact, the Maya Long Count Calendar, the focus of the show’s first part, has no end (and no real beginning). Maya kings erected monuments to themselves using that eternal calendar, combining an immense sense of centrality with an immense sense of immensity.

In the exhibition the apocalyptic premise is so easily overturned that it seems like a straw man, a pretext to draw crowds. The theme is also resurrected at the end: The Maya didn’t believe that the world would end in 2012, we are reminded. And we are asked to vote: “Do you?”

I had other questions. And they had nothing to do with the end of the world but with a civilization that left behind ruins of pyramids, sculptured monuments called stelae and populations scattered over Central America whose languages and cultures can be traced back a millennium to when the Maya reigned supreme.

The overall sensation created here, though, is of mystery. Given the length of time that the Maya thrived — their classic period was A.D. 250 to 900, predating the Aztec and Inca empires — it is astonishing how little is known about them. It is also surprising how much has been pieced together only in the last 50 years, with University of Pennsylvania scholars and the Penn Museum playing central roles, excavating Copán, Honduras (with the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History).

That involvement is the reason that the exhibition is mounted here, though many of its objects are copies, the originals being too heavy or fragile to travel. The show’s main curator, Loa P. Traxler, is co-author, with Robert Sharer, of an essential history, “The Ancient Maya.” One of her co-curators, Kate Quinn, the museum’s director of exhibitions, has introduced clever interactive displays. One touch screen translates familiar dates into the exotic Maya calendar; another lets you explore the extraordinary Copán ruins.

As for artifacts, one jade carving almost tenderly shows the maize god nestled in a seashell, as water and earth join to yield fertile promise. A mysteriously etched pig’s skull from the seventh century shows two lords engaged in an unexplained “calendar ritual.” Most powerful are the hieroglyphic carvings, in which human faces, weapons and ornaments seem manically compressed to fill rectangular molds, saturating available space with bulbous images.

Some of the figures are fearsome. Others seem almost comic: When we see a seventh-century image of the Copán dynasty founder wearing a mask of goggles and a set of fake teeth, we are told that this is meant to invoke Tlaloc, the storm god of central Mexico, but we suspect some whimsy at work. Did the Maya have a sense of humor?

If so, it’s not apparent elsewhere. Stingray spines here, found in fifth-century tombs, were used for bloodletting ceremonies. Blood-colored cinnabar was used to coat the dead and is found throughout the royal tombs. And perhaps because of the hieroglyphs, the sense here is of taut compression and not a little ruthlessness.

One altar (a reproduction) pictures an entire dynasty of kings, created for Copán’s last ruler. A dead jaguar was interred to represent each ruler. The kings used that creature’s fearsome persona as well, perhaps to command the human chattel who created the pyramids that archaeologists have been excavating in the Honduran jungles.

Partly because of the show’s theme, the emphasis here tends to be on Maya culture’s rational aspect. We learn that the Maya are best known for their calendar. But nothing revealed here about it is particularly astounding, and an astronomer interviewed in a video kiosk, Anthony F. Aveni, points out that the Maya did not even have a telescope.

Yet the result is intriguing. The Maya typically used a base of 20 for counting (as we use a base of 10). Their numerals have a systematic simplicity: a vertical bar was a sign for 5 and dots adjacent to it added 1 each — the bar representing, perhaps, a flat outstretched hand, and the dots extended digits for counting. And just as we use days, weeks, months, years, the Maya used cyclical calendar categories (like baktun, kin, winal, tun).

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“Maya 2012: Lords of Time” is on view through Jan. 13, 2013, at the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia; (215) 898-4000, pennmuseum.org.

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Maps and monuments define Gregor Turk solo show

Posted on 10th May 2012 in The monuments of world

By Felicia Feaster

For the AJC

You could say that artist Gregor Turk has two fixations: monuments and mapping. Over a long career working in the city’s art scene, the Atlanta native has often focused on the kind of historical markers that identify Civil War sites or landmark Atlanta buildings. Other work has focused on the kinds of strange icons that dot maps and provide reference points to roads or water features.

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But in his solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, “Terminal Velocity,” Turk has brought those two strains of his work together into a far more satisfying whole. Call it the advantage of time, space and an infusion of cash. Turk is the third recipient of this year’s Working Artist Project award, which affords local artists an exhibition at MOCA GA, a studio assistant and a stipend.

Part of the immediate appeal of Turk’s show are his materials of choice: rubber inner tubes and the metal car plaques that identify a car as a Cherokee or Mercury. Those materials conjure up a very specific modern reality, one defined by passive visions of exploration, historical touchstones, cars and the Atlanta highway system that reappears many times as a visual motif in “Terminal Velocity.”

In three works in his “Metronesia Series,” Turk has created maps of the Perimeter and its intersecting roadways. The first map is composed of those metal car plaques arranged to form the Perimeter; the second Perimeter is composed of inner tubes and the third of fall leaves. What remains overwhelming in those pieces is a sense of everything, nature, progress, even the rhythms of life defined by that highway grid. In a driving city like Atlanta, “Terminal Velocity” will hit many of us very close to home.

Turk has boiled down the fast-paced, modern world into something elemental and stark, akin to hieroglyphics or cave drawings.

The strangest, and also the funniest, pieces in the show are the monuments — also constructed of tire rubber — that Turk has placed in the gallery’s four corners. Like the Washington Monument, Turk’s obelisks sport that familiar spire-form but have all been rendered in black rubber. “The Aggrandizer” is a sad, partly deflated rubber obelisk attached to a bicycle pump for a quick infusion of air. The piece offers a funny riposte to the proud, unassailable obelisk form. Turk takes a similarly humorous road in a series of four works on paper formed from rubbings of those metal car plaques. “Cosmos” for instance, forms its perimeter shape from Pioneer, Aries and Mercury car plaques. “Menagerie” is formed from metal signs for Pinto, Lynx, Bronco and Colt.

Turk’s point is that for all that talk of animals, exploration and wild, open vistas in those aspirational car names, we are contained and cosseted explorers, locked within perimeters, stuck on our asphalt tracks.

While all parts of the show don’t always gel perfectly, there is an ambition and a grappling with big ideas that marks this as a significant step in Turk’s career.

Bottom line: A clever, visually appealing expansion of the artist’s fixations.

Art review

“Gregor Turk: Terminal Velocity”

Through July 14. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. $5 nonmembers; $1 students with ID; free to members. The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, 75 Bennett St., Suite A-2, Atlanta. 404-367-8700, www.mocaga.org.

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More than Mt Rushmore in the Dakotas

Posted on 9th May 2012 in The monuments of world

When Don “Nick” Clifford was 17 years old he longed to work on the huge sculpture being carved out of Mount Rushmore.

But it was his prowess as a baseball player that swung him the job building what has been described as one of the most famous sculptures in the world.

Carving a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota was the idea of Doane Robinson, South Dakota State Historian, who thought it would attract tourists. And he was right!

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum was brought in and being an avid baseball fan he wanted Mount Rushmore to sponsor the baseball team in nearby Keystone. So he hired good baseball players, including Clifford, who had played on the Junior League team in Rapid City.

Clifford, now the only surviving person of the 400 who worked on Mount Rushmore, has been asked so many questions about the experience that he wrote a book full of answers.

He worked there for three years from 1938, mainly as a winchman on top of the heads and a driller in front of the heads of the four American presidents who are depicted there.

He says the presidents were chosen by Borglum for “patriotic” reasons.

“George Washington was our first president and the Father of our country,” Clifford says.

“Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of our country with the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803. He also drafted the Declaration of Independence.

“Abraham Lincoln is credited with holding the nation together during the Civil War and he was called the Great Emancipator. Theodore Roosevelt supported the completion of the Panama Canal, which would have an effect on world trade. He also set aside some of the National Parks.”

He remembers the job as “dusty, dirty, noisy and just plain hard work”.

“When you are young you can do hard work. The hardest part was running a jackhammer. Cranking the men up and down in the winch house was an easier job.”

It’s not just white people who build huge monuments to leaders in these parts. The Native Americans did it too with Lakota Chief Standing Bear inviting sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to carve an Indian memorial in the Black Hills.

He began it in 1948 and although the 27m-tall face of Crazy Horse was completed in 1998 (after Ziolkowski’s death), they’re still working on the rest of it, including his horse.

Crazy Horse was a Native American leader of the Oglala Lakota, who fought the US government at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876.

Visitors are ushered in to see a film that explains Ziolkowski’s family’s involvement in the sculpture, while Native Americans from all over the US and Canada have donated authentic items to the museum there. It’s 64km southwest of Rapid City, which has good restaurants and beautiful Indian artefact shops.

OTHER HOT SPOTS IN SOUTH DAKOTA:

If you are heading to Deadwood from here, a stunningly beautiful drive is through the Peter Norbeck National Scenic Byway, which includes the Needles Highway, Iron Mountain Road and the Wildlife Loop Road, and encompassing Custer State Park.

The Badlands

If you’re coming from the east, you can do a loop through The Badlands National Park, 99,000 hectares of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires containing one of the richest Oligocene epoch fossil beds, dating back 37 million years. It’s like travelling across the moon and is full of wildlife including buffalo, bighorn sheep and antelope. You could spend hours studying the cute prairie dogs even if locals consider them a pest. Visit: www.nps.gov/badl

Corn Palace, Mitchell

It’s advertised as “the world’s only Corn Palace” and it would be hard to find anything else quite like it in the rest of the world. The first Corn Palace was built in 1892 to display early settlers’ agricultural bounty from local fertile soil on the building’s exterior and attract more immigrant farmers here. Each year a new decorating theme is chosen and the outside of the Corn Palace is stripped and redecorated with new corn and grain. It certainly is a “folk art wonder”. Visit: www.cornpalace.com

Minneapolis, the capital of Minnesota, wants Australian tourists to consider it a gateway to the Dakotas although it’s a long drive across the state to get there. But then it does have the Mall of America, the biggest shopping centre in the US, where we’re told people actually go to spend their holidays.

It has hotels, the largest indoor amusement park in the US with 30 different rides, an aquarium, a rope climbing course, 50 restaurants, a 14-screened theatre complex, and lots and lots (and lots) of shops.

Minneapolis has no sales tax on clothes and stores, so the mall attracts 42 million annual visitors and runs more than 400 events a year with Hollywood celebrities and performers popping in for them. Visit: www.mallofamerica.com/home

If you’d prefer to stay in downtown Minneapolis, which is a cultured and arty city, there are shuttle buses to the mall. Visit:www.minneapolis.org/

IF YOU GO:

Mount Rushmore Q&A by Don “Nick” Clifford, visit: www.mountrushmorecarver.com

Mount Rushmore National Memorial, visit: www.nps.gov/moru

Crazy Horse Memorial, visit: www.crazyhorsememorial.org

For more information on South Dakota visit: www.travelsd.com

South Dakota and rural Minnesota can be reached by flying to Minneapolis from Los Angeles and driving, or you can fly to Bismarck in North Dakota or Denver in Colorado and drive from there.

V Australia flies to Los Angeles, visit: www.vaustralia.com.au

  • The writer was a guest of South Dakota Tourism and Meet Minneapolis, flying V Australia.
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Dassault Systèmes Recreates Giza Necropolis With its 3DExperience Platform

Posted on 8th May 2012 in The monuments of world

WALTHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, world leader in 3D design, 3D Digital Mock Up and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, has announced the launch of Giza 3D, an interactive 3D recreation of the world-famous Giza plateau, home of the historic Giza Necropolis.

The free Giza 3D interactive application is available today at www.3ds.com/giza3D and is being officially unveiled at a gala event tonight at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Speakers at the event will include Lawrence Berman, the Norma Jean Calderwood Senior Curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art at the MFA and Al Bunshaft, managing director, North America, Dassault Systèmes, who will discuss how 3D technologies can help enhance the understanding of art and preserve historical data for generations to come.

In addition to a guided tour of selected monuments as a general introduction, the Giza 3D Web site allows users to roam at will throughout the Necropolis, visit carefully restored tombs, shafts, and connected burial chambers and enter four of the site’s ancient temples, including Khufu and Menkaure’s pyramids. Users can browse contemporary and ancient pictures and view thirty objects meticulously reconstructed in 3D. The site can also access photos, field journals, maps and other items from the MFA’s Giza Archives Web site to support an extended learning experience.

Giza 3D successfully addresses the needs of multiple target audiences:

  • The general public will find an easy way to access the best available source of information about the Giza plateau, revolutionizing how Egyptological knowledge is shared;
  • The academic world will find a powerful tool to teach Ancient Egypt studies and help students better retain this knowledge. Giza 3D is available on multiple devices, including the Web and 3D immersive environments;
  • Researchers will benefit from seeing 3D objects from multiple angles, such as inscriptions on the back of a statue typically not seen within museum glass displays, or from sharing 3D-based information to help test hypotheses; and
  • Museum exhibition planners can consider using a 3D immersive device to enhance exhibit viewing options. Giza 3D can also enhance the in-person visit to museums through interactive 3D displays and powerful 3D images that make the museum experience an even more memorable one.

“Giza 3D is a powerful example of how our 3DExperience platform powers applications that can change education, research and knowledge-sharing forever,” said Monica Menghini, executive vice president, Industry, Dassault Systèmes. “Today, the archaeological site of Giza is within reach of everyone. A simple home computer is sufficient to experience the wonders of Ancient Egypt and with a 3D TV it is possible to have an immersive stereoscopic experience. The use of immersive rooms permits viewers to travel in space and time with unrivaled realism.”

More than a century ago, George Reisner, renowned Egyptologist and a founding father of modern scientific archaeology, directed the work of the Harvard University—Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Expedition at the Giza Plateau. Over the last ten years, the impressive collection of photos, diaries, drawings and documents from Giza have been meticulously digitized and made available online by the MFA at Giza Archives. With this information source, Dassault Systèmes reconstructed the Giza Necropolis in the most accurate way possible.

For more information on Dassault Systèmes’ long history with Egyptian exploration, please visit: http://www.3ds.com/company/experiential-marketing/giza-3d/? for more information on the Giza Archives project and http://www.3ds.com/company/passion-for-innovation/the-projects/khufu-reborn for its work with Jean-Pierre Houdin on the Khufu pyramid.

About Dassault Systèmes

Dassault Systèmes, the 3D Experience Company, provides business and people with virtual universes to imagine sustainable innovations. Its world-leading solutions transform the way products are designed, produced, and supported. Dassault Systèmes’ collaborative solutions foster social innovation, expanding possibilities for the virtual world to improve the real world. The group brings value to over 150,000 customers of all sizes, in all industries, in more than 80 countries. For more information, visit www.3ds.com.

CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, SIMULIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, GEOVIA, EXALEAD, NETVIBES, 3DSWYM and 3D VIA are registered trademarks of Dassault Systèmes or its subsidiaries in the US and/or other countries.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50268979&lang=en

MULTIMEDIA AVAILABLE:http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50268979&lang=en

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Andersonville prison-of-war camp a reminder of brutality in Civil War

Posted on 28th April 2012 in The monuments of world

Andersonville: The site is open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (except for New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas). The museum opens at 8:30 a.m. Entrance to the cemetery, historic site and museum is free. Picnicking is allowed in designated areas.

In Georgia: Atlanta is the closest major airport, about two hours away. Other nearby airports include Macon, Columbus and Albany. Summers are typically hot and humid with daytime temperatures in the 90s, and overnight lows in the 70s. Winters are mild with daytime temperatures in the 40s and 50s.

For more information:

Andersonville National Historic Site, 496 Cemetery Road, Andersonville, GA 31711,

229-924-0343, www.nps.gov/ande.

ANDERSONVILLE, Ga. — The rain had stopped, leaving in its wake a light gray gloom. It seemed like the perfect weather for visiting one of the most infamous sites of the Civil War, the Andersonville Confederate prisoner-of-war camp.

No battles were fought in Andersonville, but during the 14 months of the camp’s existence, more than 45,000 Union soldiers were confined there and more than 13,000 of them died. Disease, overcrowding, malnutrition and exposure killed the prisoners as effectively as rifle fire.

Today, Andersonville is a national historic site that consists of a national cemetery, the prison site and the National Prisoner of War Museum. The site is unique in that it is the only National Park System area that serves as a memorial to all American prisoners of war. Andersonville is located in west-central Georgia about 10 miles northeast of Americus on State Route 49.

Most visitors start their experience at the National Prisoner of War Museum, which also doubles as the park visitor center. But I was drawn right to the cemetery. It’s the first thing you see as you approach the entrance, but you have to make about a quarter-mile detour back to it once you enter. Like many of our national cemeteries you are struck first by the ranks of headstones. Thousands of them in neat lines, following the undulations of the landscape. But at Andersonville, huge monuments rise above the headstones, like icebergs on a calm sea. The monuments were erected by various states to honor their dead.

There are 12 monuments in Andersonville National Cemetery and 11 at the prison site. Each of the monuments is unique and their massive proportions were very fashionable when they were constructed in the early 1900s. Their scale was meant to symbolize the enormous sacrifices of the prisoners who died at the camp.

The cemetery was established on July 26, 1865. The initial interments were of those who had perished in the prison camp. By 1868, another 800 graves had been added; Union soldiers who had died in hospitals, other prisoner-of-war camps, and on battlefields of central and southwest Georgia. These later graves brought the total number to 13,800. Of these, more

than 500 are unknown soldiers. Today, there are more than 18,000 interments.

Back up the road from the cemetery is the historic prison site. There is a road that circles the entire site, or the camp can be accessed from the rear of the National Prisoner of War Museum. Officially, the prison was named Camp Sumter, but most references call it Andersonville, after the small town just outside of its borders. It was one of the largest Confederate prison camps and was constructed in 1864 to receive the many Union prisoners who were being kept in smaller facilities in and around Richmond, Va.

From the rear of the museum I could see the entire prison camp site. The prison covered nearly 27 acres. The space is bucolic now, but from where I stood on the prison site road, I could see a double line of white pickets that outlined the former prison. They ran down a hill, crossed a small creek and ran up the hill on the opposite side, forming a rough parallelogram.

The outer row of pickets mark the location of the camp’s stockade wall. The inner row outlines what the prisoners called the “deadline.” Prisoners found in the space between the deadline and the stockade wall were shot by guards manning the walls.

Earthworks were constructed at several points around the perimeter of the prison to ward off a Union attack that never occurred. Then as now, cannons are placed on these grassy mounds, standing sentry over the quiet grounds.

The small stream bisecting the camp today looks totally inadequate to supply the needs of thousands of men. In fact, it was inadequate then, too. Water for drinking, cooking and sanitation was in extremely short supply, leading to the conditions that killed so many of the prisoners.

Monuments to the prisoners dot the upper part of the site, but most of the camp is now just a gently rolling, grassy hill. About halfway down the western border is the carefully reconstructed North Gate to the prison. It was built using original plans and archeological data. Prisoners would arrive by train in nearby Andersonville, march to the prison, then enter through the North Gate. Prisoners would pass through the outer door, which was then barred behind them. Then the inner door would swing open into the prison yard.

Large maps, diagrams and informational signs are placed throughout the complex, making a self-tour easy and allowing visitors to proceed at their own pace. If you begin at the visitor center, there is a short film that gives the history of the prison and the site, but that was my last stop. I had saved the National Prisoner of War Museum for last in case the rain returned.

In his famous treatise, “The Art of War,” the ancient Chinese military expert Sun Tzu wrote, “The captured soldiers should be kindly treated and kept.” It’s clear the prisoners at Andersonville weren’t. And, what’s more, the museum makes the point that most prisoners of war haven’t been kindly treated.

The museum is built around the concept that all prisoners of war, regardless of their rank, gender, ethnicity or age, experience a common set of experiences while imprisoned. As a result, the museum is not divided by U.S. conflicts. For example, there is no display dedicated to the prisoners of World War II, Vietnam, or, for that matter, Andersonville. There are just displays showing the living conditions of prisoners of war and artifacts from their imprisonment.

The museum can only be described as sobering. For those of us who have enjoyed only freedom, seeing the squalid conditions the prisoners endured, the indignities they suffered and the depravations they withstood creates feelings of sorrow, sympathy and pity. And yet, you have to marvel at the courage and strength it must take to survive such conditions. One room helps to balance out the sadness.

It is an exhibit of homecomings. There are videos, photos, newspaper headlines and celebratory letters all illustrating families welcoming home their loved ones. The joy is tempered somewhat by the recognition of the injuries, both physical and mental, that so many prisoners of war returned home with.

The cemetery, prison site and museum at Andersonville all tell a story about our history. And, at Andersonville, the stories are sad. During the Civil War our nation was divided and there was heartbreak in both the Union and the Confederacy. Like many monuments to war, Andersonville reminds us of its cost. American prisoners of war suffered greatly in places like Japan and Vietnam, just like their brother soldiers at Andersonville. As a nation, we mustn’t forget their suffering — or their triumphs of spirit — and the Andersonville National Historic Site is a fitting place to honor all of our prisoners of war.

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The Great Transition

Posted on 26th April 2012 in The monuments of world

Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th–9th Century)
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 14–July 8, 2012
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Helen C. Evans, with Brandie Ratliff
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 332 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press)                                                  

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Vladimir Trebenin/State Hermitage Museum

A silver plate from Constantinople depicting two companions of Dionysos, Silenus and a Maenad, 613–630. Images from classical mythology persisted in Byzantine art well into the Christian era, and in Middle Eastern art long after the Islamic conquest.

In the century between 630 and 730 a considerable portion of the Old World took on its modern face. Through a series of astonishing campaigns, Arab Muslim armies created a single empire that, for a time, would reach from southern Spain to northern India and the western borders of China. From the “big bang” of these conquests a new galaxy emerged. From then onward, a closely interconnected chain of Muslim regions (one part of which, from modern Morocco to the borders of Iran, came to speak Arabic) stretched across Africa and Eurasia, joining the Atlantic to western China. A new civilization came into being, one that has lasted, with many permutations, into our own days. In the words of Finbarr Flood, a major contributor to the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum’s somewhat modestly titled exhibition “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th–9th Century),” the foundation of the Arab empire was “one of the most remarkable achievements in human history.”

The exhibition takes us to the heart of this great detonation. It embraces the last century of the pre-Islamic Middle East and the first two centuries of Islam. To our surprise, we do not find ourselves in a world swept by a mighty wind. Instead, we enter a series of quiet rooms where time seems to stand still. Like a perfect late fall day, only the occasional rustle of a falling leaf startles us into realizing that the seasons are about to change. The few clear signs that Islam had, indeed, become politically dominant in the Middle East by the end of the seventh century strike us with almost ominous intensity. For there are so few of them.

In the room dedicated to commerce, we suddenly find silver coins that are like all their predecessors, except that they now bear a new religious message in a new, Arabic script. In the room before it, we notice the discreet censoring of the representation of a living creature on the floor of a Christian church, out of respect for Muslim attitudes toward art. In the last room, we come on pages of the Koran that look as ornate and magnificent as any Christian gospels of their time. They are covered with a Kufic script, whose bold, foursquare lines have an ancient grandeur, strangely unlike the fluid scripts that we now associate with medieval and modern Arabic.

In all these cases, we are brought up short by hints of purposive change in a world that, to all appearances, had not changed. Even with Islam present in it, we are looking back into a world before our own, still caught in the grip of antiquity, with its back still turned on the grand future of Islam in medieval and modern times. In retrospect, the first centuries of Islamic rule associated with the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) seem much closer to the ancient world and more open to non-Islamic influences than was the Islamic civilization that would emerge in later centuries.

This exhibition—along with the groundbreaking scholarship that has gone into its catalog—has banished the melodramatic tone with which the rise of Islam has usually been presented in standard accounts of the period. We can now say with confidence that the Arab armies did not leave a trail of desolation across the Middle East. Local populations did not sink into poverty. Far from retreating into the status of timorous minorities, vigorous Christian and Jewish communities continued to maintain their own traditions largely unmolested.

Most surprising of all, we can now suggest that the spread of Islam did not happen overnight. It was not imposed by force on the conquered peoples. Although their position as the rulers of a successful empire doubtless weighed heavily in their favor, Muslims talked their way into the Middle East quite as much as they fought their way across it. The words of Anna Ballian, author of one of the catalog essays, describing the relations between the Caliph Hisham (724–743) and the Christians at the great shrine of Saint Sergios at Rusafa in Syria, catch this strange mixture of curiosity and assertiveness. A Muslim such as Hisham (like many less powerful believers) could think of himself as

an undisputed ruler but by no means a foreign interloper, imposing himself by force…rather [as] a fellow traveler who shares the same heritage.

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Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine, Sinai, Egypt

A bird-shaped copper vessel with an Arabic inscription reading ‘In the name of God the blessing of God to the owner,’ Syria or Iraq, early ninth century

Muslims were not always welcome as fellow travelers. They could be pushy and proud. But they did not stifle debate. Their enterprise in what has been called “competitive self-definition” ensured that they remained in constant dialogue with those around them. As a result, Islamic civilization in its first centuries owed much of its richness to continued religious conversations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. These conversations slowly changed the religious texture of the Middle East to the advantage of Islam. But until the year 1000, at least, it was the Muslims, and not the Jews and Christians, who were the minority religion. What we are looking at is not the Islam of the modern imagination. It is a very new Islam that was still trying to find a place for itself in a very old world.

Altogether, the Met exhibition offers the thrill of looking at the very first stages of a new world in the making. This new world did not emerge as a result of dramatic ruptures. Rather, it occurred, silently and all the more irrevocably, like a genetic mutation, through the accumulation of small changes in an ancient continuum.

To make one’s way through the exhibition, the catalog—edited by Helen Evans with the assistance of Brandie Ratliff—is more than usually helpful. There are two reasons for this—one bad and one very good.

Let us take the bad reason first. Loans of objects from Russia and Egypt that had been promised to the exhibition were canceled. But these objects are carefully described and commented upon in the catalog. This goes a long way to redress whatever imbalances their absence has created in the overall flow of a magnificently conceived exhibition. I would recommend particularly that readers linger over the discussion of the early Christian icons and of the Christian Arabic manuscripts preserved in the monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai. For here we can listen to a Christianity of the Middle East that resolutely combined engagement with the Islamic present and loyalty to its own past. They show that Christianity found its own voice in the Arabic language, so as to contribute to the exuberant new Arabic culture. At the same time, Christians were still bound by their past. They continued to wrestle as they had for centuries under the Byzantine Empire—through the poignant art of icons quite as much as through formal writings—with the mighty paradox of a joining of God and man, a theme to which Jews and Muslims remained pointedly indifferent.

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Castello Sforzesco, Milan

An ivory carving from the ‘Grado Chair’ showing Saint Mark preaching, eastern Mediterranean or Egypt, seventh–eighth century

But the good reason could not be better. This catalog is an outstanding introduction to the transition from late antiquity to Islam. It presents the views of a new generation of scholars, who have brought significant changes of perspective to our understanding of the period as a whole. Their alert scholarship ranges widely. We have masterly essays by Finbarr Flood, on what was truly new about the art of the early Islamic world and on the production of the first Korans. We can also appreciate the novel application of radiocarbon datings (by Gudrun Bühl, Cäcilia Fluck, and others) to textiles and ivories. These redatings, made while assembling the exhibition, show, for instance, that in Egypt a classical tradition of ivory carving continued to flourish for centuries after the Arab conquest—witness the extraordinary set of ivories associated with the “Grado Chair,” which are usually tucked away in the far reaches of the Castello Sforzesco of Milan. Such expert discoveries prove that the populations of the Middle East, Christian and Jewish quite as much as Muslim, moved to rhythms that Western historians (hypnotized by the notion of the rise of Islam as marking a radical break in the history of the region) had not dreamed of until recently.

With the catalog in hand, let us visit this world. First, it is a world whose center of gravity shifted significantly toward the south. In the year 600, thirty-two years before the death of Muhammad, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and the fringes of Arabia were ruled from a considerable distance by the two great empires of the time—Byzantium and Sasanian Iran. They had languages of their own—especially Syriac and Coptic (the last version of the language of the Pharaohs). Greek was still widespread in the southern provinces of Byzantium. It could still delight (or afflict) students in unexpected places. For instance, around 600 AD, a young monk attempted to learn Greek by copying out onto a potsherd a series of maxims derived from the Greek comic writer Menander. He did this in the monastery of Epiphanios, which looked out over the ruins of ancient Luxor.

The economic heart of this region lay in Mesopotamia, to the east, and in the vast territory of Egypt, to the south. Beyond Egypt lay a yet deeper south. At the southern end of the Red Sea, Axum and what would become the Christian empire of Ethiopia faced the miraculous green of Yemen, an ancient south Arabian civilization where Christian and Jewish kingdoms fought to gain the upper hand throughout the sixth century. When the Arabs of the time of Muhammad spoke with admiration of a “great church,” it was not the far distant Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. It was the Great Church of Sana’a, built by an Ethiopian governor, with its golden mosaics covered with jewel-like images of trees.

For the inhabitants of these southern lands, the Arab conquests were not an explosion. They were an implosion. The two great empires collapsed at a touch, leaving the Middle East as a single zone, no longer divided by the military frontier between Byzantium and Sasanian Iran. For the first time since the days of Xerxes and Alexander the Great, it was possible to travel directly, within a single empire, from Alexandria to the foot of the Zagros Mountains in Iran and beyond. We can see this happen in the mosaics and products provided to the exhibition from Jordan. Regions that had lain on the dead end of a frontier now became thoroughfares. Synagogues and churches adjusted rapidly to the development of what Steven Fine calls a “new umbrella civilization.” The pottery kilns of Jerash in present-day Jordan (ancient Gerasa—a city already three millennia old by this time) briskly turned out new lamps, with a Christian inscription on one side and an Arabic, Muslim invocation on the other.

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Qasr al-Mshatta, Jordan

A limestone fragment carved with a vine scroll and a vase, Qasr al-Mshatta, Jordan, mid-eighth century

Up to the eighth century, mosaics continued to be placed in churches that contained images of the ancient cities of their region. Each city was shown, in a classical Roman manner, with colonnades, elaborate roofscapes, and ancient triumphal gates. Each was distinguished by its best-known monuments. Like images of the skyscrapers of New York, these little vignettes summed up an ideal of what a city should be. They reassured those who stepped on them that life had not changed.

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Bedford monuments honor living and deceased veterans

Posted on 24th April 2012 in The monuments of world

BEDFORD, Ohio – The City of Bedford has dedicated a Tribute Wall of Honor to residents and children of residents who are currently serving in our nation’s armed forces. This Tribute Wall of Honor is different from most monuments because it honors those who are living and serving in our armed forces. If you know of someone to be recognized, contact the Bedford City Hall at 440-232-1600.

Sadly, the City of Bedford has lost citizens in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

There are several memorials on Bedford Public Square and they are protected by four City of Bedford ordinances. There is The Civil War Memorial, The World War I Memorial and The World War II, Korean War and Vietnam Memorial. On the City of Bedford Historical Society property, between the old church and The Town Hall Museum, there is a World War II M5A tank on display.

At the southwest corner of Bedford Public Square stands the C & P Depot, which the Cleveland Pittsburgh Railroad constructed in 1852. Abraham Lincoln passed through Bedford on his way to Washington D.C., and spoke to the citizens of Bedford from this location. The Bedford men and boys deployed from this station to fight for the Union Army.

The Civil War Monument was dedicated on July 3, 1886. The monument is carved out of granite and stands over 22 feet in height. The base of the monument is inscribed, “Carabelli and Broccini Lake View Cle. O.” Engraved on the monument are the military insignias with four battles named. 208 soldiers from Bedford Township served in the Union Army, fighting in the battles of Vicksburg, Antietam, Stone River and Resaca. The initial monument contained the names of 202 soldiers, with six names inscribed at a later date.

Historically, Union statues will face North and most Confederate statues will face South. In LaGrange, Ohio, a Civil War Union Statue was turned to face South. This was to signify that Union soldiers would not turn their backs to the enemy. There are pavers in a circular path around the memorial. Four separate paths of more than 1,000 bricks extend from the circle, reaching out to the corners of the Town Square. The monument was cleaned a few years ago and is in excellent condition. 

The World War I Memorial with its mortar shell marker, was erected in the 1920s by the Bedford American Legion Post  It is a memorial to the local “doughboys” who died during the first World War.

The Bedford VFW Post 1082 will sponsor the Memorial Day Ceremonies for Bedford, Bedford Heights, Walton Hills and Oakwood Village on Monday, May 28, beginning at 10:15 a.m. The parade begins at Bedford City Hall. Ceremonies will be held at Bedford Public Square on Broadway and conclude at the Bedford Cemetery on Broadway. Any past or present veterans who would like to participate in the parade should contact Mike Guyer, Memorial Day chairman, at 440-773-2835.

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