Culture-filled Weekend
A couple of weekends ago, I had 2 meetup.com activities.
The first was with the knitting meetup group (Sit N Knit New York, in case you're interested). We went to see "Subversive Lace and Knitting" - an exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design. This is a small museum across the street from the gigantic MoMA, and was a nice change of pace. The pieces on display were all dealing with lace or knitting, but in new ways. Highlights for me included the BIG and tiny.
The BIG was a video of a performance art piece in which the artist used 2 giant machines (like cranes, but moving things side-to-side instead of up-and-down) each holding a street lamp post. He, the artist, was positioned in the middle in a cherry-picker, looping bolts of fabric and directing the large-machinery-drivers! He ended up knitting an American Flag, and it was such a fantastic deconstruction on the topology of knitting! Now I want to try it! (If you have access to large machinery, let me know!) Oddly, most other knitters didn't seem too excited about this one.
The tiny exhibit showed off a few "to scale" sweaters and a pair of gloves. The gloves were smaller than your fingernail! The artist used sharpened surgical wire as knitting needles and silk thread as her yarn to make these elaborately patterned pieces! This piece garnered lots of "wows" from the knitting public!
There were also knitted reproductions of black-and-white photographs of war-time knitting. Something else I've been thinking about trying - reproducing a photograph as a knitting piece! Guess I'll start with black-and-white first, though! Another really nifty pieces consisted of large hard objects, such as car doors and hoods, with intricate lace patterns cut into them. Another idea I was inspired to try was a crocheted chandelier made from optical fibres! So many projects to work on!
The following day, Toby and I went to the American Museum of Natural History. We were to meet up with a group of Canadians to see the "Yellowstone to Yukon" photo exhibit. Unfortuantely, we couldn't find the meetup group (the meeting place was in a large, fairly crowded room, so we might have missed everyone) but went to enjoy the fabulous photos anyways. They certainly made us miss the mountains so much more! Gorgeous photos of rock formation and wildlife does that.
We also took advantage of our already-paid admission, and explored the early evolution galleries. Made much more sense this time, as we followed the chronological order of development, rather than just looking at dinosaurs! There were specimens on the development of limbs from fins (before coming to land), and we learned that fish swim bladders are actually proto-lungs! There were exhibits on the development of vertebrae, and later on, on the development of various joints, eggs, eyes, etc. It was really neat to see and learn about all these things! So much information though, that I couldn't take it all in.
Anyway, it was a great weekend for cultural enrichment! This past weekend involved culinary enrichment, as Ed and Denise were visiting. More on this weekend another time.
The first was with the knitting meetup group (Sit N Knit New York, in case you're interested). We went to see "Subversive Lace and Knitting" - an exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design. This is a small museum across the street from the gigantic MoMA, and was a nice change of pace. The pieces on display were all dealing with lace or knitting, but in new ways. Highlights for me included the BIG and tiny.
The BIG was a video of a performance art piece in which the artist used 2 giant machines (like cranes, but moving things side-to-side instead of up-and-down) each holding a street lamp post. He, the artist, was positioned in the middle in a cherry-picker, looping bolts of fabric and directing the large-machinery-drivers! He ended up knitting an American Flag, and it was such a fantastic deconstruction on the topology of knitting! Now I want to try it! (If you have access to large machinery, let me know!) Oddly, most other knitters didn't seem too excited about this one.
The tiny exhibit showed off a few "to scale" sweaters and a pair of gloves. The gloves were smaller than your fingernail! The artist used sharpened surgical wire as knitting needles and silk thread as her yarn to make these elaborately patterned pieces! This piece garnered lots of "wows" from the knitting public!
There were also knitted reproductions of black-and-white photographs of war-time knitting. Something else I've been thinking about trying - reproducing a photograph as a knitting piece! Guess I'll start with black-and-white first, though! Another really nifty pieces consisted of large hard objects, such as car doors and hoods, with intricate lace patterns cut into them. Another idea I was inspired to try was a crocheted chandelier made from optical fibres! So many projects to work on!
The following day, Toby and I went to the American Museum of Natural History. We were to meet up with a group of Canadians to see the "Yellowstone to Yukon" photo exhibit. Unfortuantely, we couldn't find the meetup group (the meeting place was in a large, fairly crowded room, so we might have missed everyone) but went to enjoy the fabulous photos anyways. They certainly made us miss the mountains so much more! Gorgeous photos of rock formation and wildlife does that.
We also took advantage of our already-paid admission, and explored the early evolution galleries. Made much more sense this time, as we followed the chronological order of development, rather than just looking at dinosaurs! There were specimens on the development of limbs from fins (before coming to land), and we learned that fish swim bladders are actually proto-lungs! There were exhibits on the development of vertebrae, and later on, on the development of various joints, eggs, eyes, etc. It was really neat to see and learn about all these things! So much information though, that I couldn't take it all in.
Anyway, it was a great weekend for cultural enrichment! This past weekend involved culinary enrichment, as Ed and Denise were visiting. More on this weekend another time.
posted by blumaroo at
6:50 PM
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