CVA Students Study in New York City

July 6, 2011

In June, ten students traveled to New York for a week-long art immersion program with Ann Ledy and Christina Schmid. From MOMA and the Met to Broadway and Chelsea galleries, the week’s program provided a whirlwind of experiences: after a look at the sheer expanse of New York from the “Top of the Rock”—a.k.a. the seventieth floor of the Rockefeller Center—students were treated to a behind-the-scenes conversation with members of MOMA’s curatorial staff, a private lecture by public artist Brian Tolle, who joined the class at the Irish Hunger Memorial he created in Battery Park, and went on field trips to print studios and book publishing companies.

At the Metropolitan Museum, the students experienced the crowd-pleasing conceptual theater of Alexander McQueen’s fashion in Savage Beauty and encountered a retrospective of Richard Serra’s drawings, alongside rooms devoted to French Impressionism and Asian art.

A trip up the Hudson River valley took the group to Dia: Beacon, a haven for large-scale minimalist and conceptual art, which houses sculptures by Richard Serra and Louise Bourgeois, and galleries filled with Robert Ryman’s white paintings and Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. For even more contemporary art, the class navigated the subway to PS1 in Queens, where Francis Alÿs’s Story of Deception was on view along with Nancy Grossman’s leather-wrapped Heads and Laurel Nakadate’s Only the Lonely.

From Chinatown to Chelsea galleries, the students explored the city, saw Billy Elliott on Broadway, circled the Statue of Liberty by boat, and wrote secret wishes on Yoko Ono’s Wishing Tree: to return to the city that never sleeps, perhaps..?