Day in the city with Gary Kuehn

This past week as a studio excersise, I traveled to NYC first thing in the morning with my Advanced Sculpture class of seven. Upon our arrival our professor Gary Kuehns gave us a tour of his beautiful studio apartment right in the heart of Chealsea. We spent time eating breakfast and looking at various sculptures, drawings and images of his work over the past 40 years.

Copper Drawing, 1977
copper and graphite on paper
24" x 61.5" (cm. 61 x 156)

After breakfast, we all loaded onto the N train uptown to Queens to visit the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park, right around the corner, Neither had I visited prior to this trip. 

Noguchi Museum was great! He works particularly consists of abstract minimalist forms in stone, marbles, ect. I enjoyed the archaic value of the material he worked with since man has been sculpting form these for thousands of years. I found Noguchis work to be particularly inspiring. His meditative message of tranquility was a some what unique visual experience for me, since I see a lot of conceptual art that provokes though, rather than clearing the mind of any though at all. I also was drawn to his respect for the materials in which he was working. He showed much integrety to the stones he carved, and i absolotly loved the treatment of the stones that were left unpolished and raw. Also his use of bases/pedestals was highly inspiring to me. They were as important of a part of the piece as the entire work its self. They relied on each others presence strongly. This is something that i will need to consider for my thesis since i plan on doing some sort of sculptural installation. 

After Nogochi, We all traveled a few blocks up the river to the Socrates Sculpture Park. Although a beautiful little spot, i found the work here far less inspiring. Most of the installations contained an irking tacky element that kind of blew the whole piece for me and a lot of my classmates. Among the highlights how ever were some beautiful resin casts of old doors. Chips of the original door paint remained in the casts, evoking thoughts of nostalgia and memory. Also there was a living sculpture constructed from a dirt structure that had some beautiful little succulents growing all over it! This idea about living art and plants as art has always been one of curiously with me. 

From Socrates we continued our marathon with an afternoon stop at the Met, to check out some Brancusi's and Rodin's. I found their work to be impressive to say the least, as well as highly important historically, what caught my attention most at the Met was the Oceanic and African Art section. Also we caught the show "Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptors". This show consisted of inspiring figures of leaders carved of wood by Africans in the 19th and early 20th century. The proportions and simple abstractions of these figures were particularly interesting to me. 

After the engorging our selves to the brim with visual information, we were invited back to Gary's for dinner and drinks to unwind from a whirlwind day in town. 

This trip proved highly valuable in terms of inspiring my up and coming projects, which will be detailed on here very soon!