Excuse me for the lack of updating. New York can be an incredibly busy place. Between the day camp tours, working on my gallery talk, visiting with friends, working on my gallery talk, taking a weekend trip up to Middlebury, and oh yeah working on my gallery talk, I’ve been super busy/just too lazy to want to write a post.

So the main update: my gallery talk is next week! My talk is entitled “Going Forth: Medieval Processions” and it is what I have been researching all summer. It’s all written out now and all I have to do is memorize it! (I mean it’s only like 15 pages…nbd). I’m thinking that sometime this weekend I might put together a nifty audio slideshow of the talk to post on here. Partially so everyone who can’t make it can enjoy the fun that was medieval processions and their depictions as seen at The Cloisters, and also so I can practice talking about the objects/hear what I actually sound like when I describe these things.

All in all some good fun. I’ll be working on the talk most of the weekend but hopefully I can take some time to do some other quintessentially NYC things before I leave next weekend! (I can’t believe I’m almost done with the internship)

In case you’ve really been missing my updates on life at the Cloisters, check out our twitter feed. It has some nice quotes from the campers from the last few weeks.

From New York with love,

Audrey

Today marked our first two tours of the Cloisters for day camps! Woohoo! The title of this post was one of my favorite quotes from a little boy. He also thought that Thom, who was giving the tour, lived and spent the night at the museum. There have been some other good quotes too as we’ve started to interact more with kids; we’re going to have to start writing them down. But moving on to a recap of my week, starting with Sunday:

Rainbow balloons!

Sunday I went to watch the Pride Parade with some other MiddKids. Wow. It was interesting to say the least. I guess it was mainly what I had expected, a lot of guys in speedo, rainbow flags everywhere, big floats, and a lot of fun. What was really great about the parade was the fact that it was being held two days after the NY senate passed an act to legalize same-sex marriage in the state. This definitely added an emotional undertone to the whole parade. Tons of people with signs saying “Thank you Governor Cuomo!” and “Promise Kept!” It was really moving. I can’t imagine not having the right to marry the person you love, so I’m certainly happy and proud that New York, especially being a large state, has taken this big step towards equality for all people. Now for Maryland to get their act together…

Monday = Met day. We were down at the main building again all day meeting with all kinds of people who work in different departments of the Met. We also had almost two hours of free time which provided a great opportunity to go check out the Guitar Heroes exhibit (which I had yet to check out) and Richard Serra’s drawing exhibit. Both were great, and it’s so amazing to be able to explore the museum with no one else there

After work the interns headed downtown to grab a bite to eat and then go to a show. Thom’s brother, a recent Yale graduate, wrote a play called “The Private Sector” for his senior work that is now being produced at the Theater for the New City in the East Village. A dark comedy about the competitive and vicious side of hedge fund businesses, the play was amazing! We were all so impressed and kept quoting it all day Tuesday. Hanging out with the interns is always such a blast.

Then yesterday after work I went to see Jim Gaffigan (who happens to be my favorite comedian), for free, as part of Central Park SummerStage. It was fantastic! The two openers were pretty good, but Jim Gaffigan was just really great. My dad and I love listening/watching him, so I really wish he could have been there too. The main stage in Central Park was also just a really great venue and last night was so beautiful; I don’t think the weather could have been more perfect.

As I said in the beginning of the post, today we had our first tours. I didn’t actually lead one (there were only two), but the two interns who did lead them did an awesome job! We were really excited to get through the inaugural ones! Then this afternoon we went on the most awesome behind-the-scenes tour of the Cloisters. We got to see where they keep all of the art that’s not currently on view, go through the crawl space above the tapestry rooms and just learn about the underbelly of the museum. It was so neat to think that we were seeing parts of the building that most people will never see.

So in short, that’s been my week! Tomorrow we’re headed down to the Rubins Museum to see what should be an awesome exhibit on pilgrimages. Then I’m headed down to DC for the 4th of July weekend! Woohoo! I’ll surely have lots of adventures to report on from there!

From New York with love,

Audrey

It’s been another pretty busy couple of days in New York but I’ll try to recount all my adventures! Starting with Cape Cod:

Wow. Cape Cod is gorgeous. It’s like someone decided to wrap Vermont, the Shore, and the Bay (coincidentally three of my favorite places in the world) into one place! In all honesty, there’s not really much for me to say about my trip to Cape Cod. Not because it was boring in the least, we just didn’t do much. Which is PERFECT. It’s exactly what you’re suppose to do in Cape Cod (from what I gather). Nothing. Just a whole lot of staring at the beautiful scenery around you and breathing in the fresh air. We did exert some energy and get out of the hammock to go mini golfing, play around with the Barzilai’s new boat, drive to get ice cream, and go get pedicures (#rough). But in all honesty it was a wonderful weekend and I was so thankful to the Barzilai family for being so hospitable! (You can see all of our tweets from the weekend by searching the hashtag #dingdongcapecod)

Monday saw a complete change in pace from the Cape as the interns spent the morning downtown at the Met and then the afternoon at the Morgan Library. We started with a tour of Watson Library, as we will be spending some days doing research there in the main building. Then we met with senior exhibition designer Dan Kershaw and he was amazing! I would say I want his job but my only training in the design field comes from watching copious amounts of the tv show “Trading Spaces” as a little girl. He talked to us about one of the temporary exhibits he designed and then three of the more permanent galleries that he has worked on. His job requires an enormous amount of flexibility, compromise, cooperation, and dedication. I felt that we learned so many fun facts about the museum. It was like a behind the scenes tour. For example, I can now tell you that the Met opens more exhibitions than any other museum in the world and that there used to be a reflecting pool in the main Oceanic gallery. Most people visit the Met and just focus on the art they see, never thinking of the time and energy that went into to arranging that art. Definitely an under-appreciated position.

During lunch most of us went upstairs to see the Met’s latest hit exhibit “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty”. McQueen was a very famous designer who recently passed away and the Costume Institute of the Met is now putting on this show in his honor. It was truly brilliant. It’s hard to understand fashion sometimes when you think about it as just clothes but this exhibit really put it in its perfect context. The collections he created could be described by a range of adjectives. From beautiful, to grotesque, to futuristic, he was really able to capture it all. We all left speechless. The collection definitely isn’t for everyone though. Although the museum is closed on Mondays to the general public, people can pay to solely see this exhibit (a hefty $50) since it has been such a big hit and is usually incredibly crowded. So there was a woman there with a young girl (probably around the age of 6) who thought the exhibit was too scary and started crying. Yea, I’d definitely rate it at least PG-13.

After lunch we got to meet with another amazing Met employee, the Jaharis Curator of Byzantine Art, Helen Evans. She gave us such a great tour of the Byzantine galleries and was really entertaining. All of us left wanting to study Byzantine art. It’s such an amazing fusion of all kinds of different influences. We learned the interesting back story behind a repaired sarcophagus as well as the funny story behind the acquisition of a large stone cross from Armenia.

As if our day hadn’t been fascinating enough, we headed further downtown by bus to the Morgan Library to get a private tour of the exhibit “Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands” from the curator himself, Roger Wieck. The exhibit is great. Not only does it feature more medieval manuscripts in one room than I have ever seen, they have also created four life-size replicas of some of the outfits in the manuscripts. You can really see the dress evolve over time. Roger was also able to show us a replica “chaperon” or hood and how it was worn at different times in the Middle Ages. Fun linguistics fact: in the later Middle Ages, women adapted the practice of wearing these chaperons (or hoods) and would often wear them while accompanying little girls around the town. The little girls then began to refer to the women (who were essentially their babysitters) as “chaperons” and this is where the modern use of our word “chaperone” derives from. Yay linguistics. Tagging along on our tour was also a woman from Christie’s in London. Yea, nbd. At the end of the day, my feet had never hurt more.

Tuesday was a little more low key, spent at the Cloisters. We met with the director of the gardens who gave us some tips about showing the gardens to children. Then we spent the rest of the day researching, practicing our tours, and preparing the kids crafts (we need to cut out at least 500 cardboard falcons, we have maybe 200).

This brings us to today, which saw yet another field trip! We started the day of at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine with a vertical tour. A vertical tour is exactly what it sounds like. You literally tour the church from the ground up stopping at the triforium, clerestory, flying buttresses, and then eventually the roof. It was amazing to see a cathedral from all of those different angles, and truly something I may never get to do again. St. John’s is really unique in that they have gone to great pains to construct the building in the same way it would have been made in the Middle Ages. This means no cheating and using steel. The cathedral is a weird mix of Romanesque and Gothic architecture (due to two different architecture firms working on the building) and it is actually still unfinished. Certainly not the same as the gothic or romanesque churches of Europe, but it’s not bad for Manhattan. And it was great to get a bird’s eye view of the city from the roof. There was also a choir practicing while we were walking around the ground level. Maybe I can get the Mountain Ayres to sing there someday too (I’m already working on us singing at The Cloisters). Then we walked behind the cathedral to a stone mason workshop to watch a demonstration and hear a little bit about stone carving. Chris Pellettieri is an Arthur Ross award-winning stone carver who got his start in the trade by participating in a stone carver’s apprenticeship program at the cathedral when he was a boy. He talked to us a bit about the art behind stone carving and then we got to try it ourselves. Wow, hard. And incredibly time consuming. You earn such a new appreciation for these things once you actually try it. Incredible.

Once again, I apologize for such a long post. I promise to start posting more frequently so I don’t have to play catch-up so often. I also promise to post more pictures!

Till next time from New York (and Cape Cod) with love,

Audrey