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Alison Stewart: Today is WNYC's 100th birthday. Tonight, you can see the Empire State Building lit up red to commemorate it. You might hear Brian or Brooke or Michael on your subway ride. You can walk by the station and see the amazing murals that Katie Merz drew on the windows of The Greene Space. You can check them out on our Instagram story @AllOfItWNYC.

To get in on the WNYC centennial action, we here at All Of It are devoting time every month to the 100 pieces of art you should see in New York City. A completely unscientific but from-the-heart segment. We live in a city where you can take the train to see extraordinary works or maybe enjoy the art in the subways or a park or a building. Art is everywhere around you in New York. Each month, we're going to talk to an expert in the field who will give us their 10 picks. My first guest is Will Heinrich, art critic and journalist from The New York Times. Nice to see you, Will.

Will Heinrich: Hi, Alison. It's great to be here.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, get in on this action. What is a piece of art in the city that moves you? Call us or text us, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can reach out via social media. That's @AllOfItWNYC. We are looking for that piece of art that just moves you. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Call us or text us or you can reach out on social media @AllOfItWNYC. Will, my dad worked in midtown. When things got tough in the office and he needed just peace, he would go around the corner and sit at Monet's Water Lilies.

Will Heinrich: That's perfect.

Alison Stewart: That was where he would go. That was his special place. Why do you think art can provide that special feeling or that special place when we look at it?

Will Heinrich: That's a great question. I would say, in the first place, because it takes you out of yourself. It takes you out of yourself. In some cases, if you're looking at a drawing, something I find amazing about looking at some old master drawings or more recent drawings when you can see the actual gesture of someone's hand from 500 years ago or something, it's like traveling in time and also traveling into a different psyche.

Then with something like the Water Lilies, I don't know if your dad was sitting close enough to examine the gestures of the brushstrokes, but it's something timeless, I think, more than taking you to a different time. It takes you out of time. It takes you into a mode of thinking that isn't connected to the moment-by-moment anxieties or experience that you're having. It's somewhere that's always the same, even though, of course, it's not the same. You're going to discover different things every time you look at a piece of art if you're attending to in that way. It's like a key to some emotional state or memory that you have. It's like a little pocket outside time that you can step into whenever you want.

Alison Stewart: You gave us this great list. It's so great. It's diverse. It's exciting. Let's dive into it.

Will Heinrich: Great.

Alison Stewart: Your choice is number 10. Your choice is Dutch-born abstract painter Piet Mondrian, who painted several styles, but is best known for his neo-plasticism. That black line and the primary colors. You can find them all around town. She chose a piece at MoMA. What did you pick?

Will Heinrich: Well, I picked Broadway Boogie-Woogie, which is the last painting that Mondrian completed in his lifetime. He came to New York, I think, in 1940, I should say. I'm not an art historian, Alison, so I'm going to try to get my facts right. This is a very subjective process for me. He came to New York in 1940 to find refuge from the Second World War and he was a big jazz fan.

He went to see a lot of jazz music. He was excited about boogie-woogie music. Presumably, the traffic of the city. The lights were also exciting to him. Broadway Boogie-Woogie is one of my favorite paintings. One of the things I like about it. There's lots of things I love about it. Obviously, I picked it. [chuckles] Also, Mondrian is what turned me into an art critic, so I'm invested in him.

I picked it for a number of reasons. One of which is that it teaches you about the way painting works if you look at this painting because Mondrian is famous for-- you can call it his neo-plasticism. He's famous for the primary colors, the straight black lines. It's a very simple and elegant system. When you look at these paintings, it makes a very distinct, a very pure effect on your eye, I think.

You look at these colors and it's like it's not just red. It's like the essence of red. It's a pure and perfect, heavenly kind of reduced. If you go up close to Broadway Boogie-Woogie, Broadway Boogie-Woogie is more yellow. Yellow is kind of the dominant thing on a white background. If you go up close, you discover that it's not a pure and perfect yellow. It's a lot of different yellows.

None of it is flat. You go up close, you see the brushstrokes. You see that he painted every little square and dash separately. It's very kind of crusty and organic. It's like it's exposing the mechanism of painting generally to you. You see, "Oh, this is how it works." It's an illusion. He knew where to put the colors to make you see them in a certain way from across the room. That is really not the way they actually are.

Alison Stewart: Our next piece, we go uptown to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's a piece that has moved you since your teenage years.

Will Heinrich: [chuckles] That's right.

Alison Stewart: What does the North Italian wooden crossfix mean to you?

Will Heinrich: This crucifix.

Alison Stewart: Crucifix.

Will Heinrich: Yes, the crucifix. I started wandering around The Met after school when I was in high school. There's a lot of great shows at The Met right now in general obviously, but what I especially love about it myself is that it's an encyclopedic museum. It's gigantic and it has a little bit of everything. If you wander around, you find these things that you make a personal connection to.

In this case, I love this crucifix. I'll say why in a second. What I'm really recommending to people is that you just wander around this museum and discover some old byzantine coin or a piece of Moorish pottery or who knows what that you have a personal reaction to and a relationship to. Then it'll be there when you go back if it's in the permanent collection. This crucifix, [chuckles] I was saying about art, it takes you out of time.

You can inhabit the mindset of a different time, but you can also look at things the way they strike you now. This crucifix, it's a wooden figure of Jesus on the cross. What struck me about it when I was in high school is I thought it looked ridiculous because his arms are as long as the arms of the cross. They're perfectly straight and his eyes are open. He has this mopey expression on his face. Not like he's suffering, but just like he's just hanging out.

Presumably, at the time, it had an eerie, majestic effect on people in Italy in the 1200s. To me, he always kind of looked like a figure out of Wallace and Gromit, like a weird claymation Jesus, which is odd. It's hanging above the door to the Italian Renaissance section, I think, right in the medieval wing, straight back behind the stairs. I always like to go and find him and say hello when I'm in The Met.

Alison Stewart: I read somewhere on The Met's website, actually, that it talked about the grain of wood is from the tree trunk.

Will Heinrich: Oh yes, that's a great detail. It is a really beautiful sculpture. Also, the arms are separate pieces. You can see the wood grain on his torso. Now, it's carved in the shape of a tunic also. It was painted and some of the paint has been lost. I don't know if you would have seen the wood grain originally. Now, you can see some of the wood grain. Because his body is so narrow and with his arms outstretched like that, he has the form of a tree. It's like he's carved to look like a tree.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about 100 pieces of art you must see in New York. Will Heinrich, the art critic from The New York Times, is joining us. You're joining us as well. I've got great texts here, "The New York panorama at the Queens Museum. It's epic. Simultaneous macro and micro appreciation of our great city."

Will Heinrich: Oh, man, I'm so glad somebody texted that because I meant to put that on my list and I completely forgot.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] We've got the Louise Nevelson park in FiDi. We've got the Rothko's at MoMA, glowing windows to the soul. "I'm with Alison's dad. Monet's Water Lilies is my happy place. Fave piece of art, Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters museum."

Will Heinrich: Totally, and then you get that beautiful park while you're up there.

Alison Stewart: "The work that moves me are by unsung New Yorkers on the street. The surviving mosaics at the bases of streetlights throughout the West Village and East Village still thrill me."

Will Heinrich: Oh, that's fantastic. Yes, that's a great tip. We are going to have a mosaic by a not totally sung New Yorker, I think, later in the list.

Alison Stewart: Coming up, we'd love for you to join our conversation. What piece of art moves you? Call us or text us at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can reach out via social media @AllOfItWNYC. We're going to be doing this all year long. 100 pieces of art that we should take notice of because we live in New York City. Will Heinrich from The New York Times, he's giving us his 10 choices. Okay, we've come to The Morgan Library & Museum. This has an interesting piece of history to it. What is it and what was it used for?

Will Heinrich: Okay, so cylinder seals. I don't know if you know what a cylinder seal is.

Alison Stewart: I do now.

Will Heinrich: You do now.

[laughter]

Will Heinrich: Right. Okay, maybe someone listening does not know, so I'll explain. In ancient Mesopotamia, for thousands of years when they were writing on clay tablets in cuneiform, so making patterns with the end of a reed, characters like ideograms that became characters. Fancy people, I think, would sign their names on the bottom of a tablet by impressing a little relief carved into stone to make a figurative scene like a god standing in front of a temple or people dancing or sometimes an abstract design or writing.

If you're doing that, it occurred to somebody 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, you might as well carve the figures into a cylinder. Then you can roll it across the bottom of the tablet and make a scene that continues and repeats. They're really incredible. JP Morgan collected a lot of these. The Morgan has one of the best collections in the world from what I understand and a permanent display of them. You can go in at any time and see these incredible things.

They're usually about an inch high, I want to say. I'm not great at estimating distances. I think about an inch carved in some kind of precious stone. The one I picked is gray marble and it's called, "Winged hero brandishing a sword while grasping an ostrich." I picked it because, again, I'm into the anachronism a little bit. In New York in 2024, you don't see men trying to kill ostriches very often, so it's fun. It's kind of magical to be reminded that this was on someone's mind at some time, but it's also the cunning of the execution.

The curator of the seals, who recently retired, Sidney Babcock, came up with a wonderful way to display them. You see the seal itself and then a clay impression made from the seal, which apparently takes some talent. It's not as easy as you'd think it would be, and then an enlarged photograph of the scene. If you go in, it's a little dimly lit, but you see the photograph.

Then you think, "My God, how is that all in that little space?" You look at where it's made the impression, which is the size of a part of your finger. Then you look at the seal itself and it's very hard to see any of the shapes in the seal. It just looks like a kind of mottled piece of gray rock. It's astonishing to think that it made this very detailed and precise picture and clay that has lasted for thousands of years.

Alison Stewart: That's, "Winged hero brandishing sword grasping ostrich," at The Morgan Library & Museum. Next on your list, something that will delight children of all ages. We should note that it's not available now, but it will be back in the fall.

Will Heinrich: Yes, I want people to commit this to memory and go see it when it comes back onto view.

Alison Stewart: It's a dollhouse.

Will Heinrich: It's an incredible dollhouse.

Alison Stewart: Okay, explain to us where it is and what we'll see.

Will Heinrich: Okay, it's at the Museum of the City of New York and it has been in their collection since 1945, but it was only a couple of years ago or I think three years ago that they built a new kind of freestanding display for it, surrounding it with glass in its own room. It was commissioned in 1916 by a society girl named Carrie Stettheimer. It's inspired by her family's country mansion in Tarrytown. It has, what was it, 12 rooms, two floors. It's a little more than 2 feet high, an elevator.

The incredible part about it, it's a great dollhouse if you like dollhouses. The incredible part to me is that she and her sisters were friends with all the artists at the time. She asked them to make pieces of art for the dollhouse. She didn't get around to hanging a show. After she died, her sister Ettie picked some of these tiny pieces of art and essentially curated an exhibition in the salon of the dollhouse.

It's like a breadbox-sized exhibition of artworks made by significant artists of the time. There's an alabaster statue by Gaston Lachaise and a bronze statue by William Zorak. Then there's 13 little paintings and drawings, including a 3-inch-high version of Nude Descending a Staircase. The Man Ray. I'm sorry, not Man Ray. The Marcel Duchamp painting that scandalized the Armory Show in 1913.

If you look in the window, you hunch over and peer in the window, you forget how big it is very quickly, or at least I did. What's amazing is that it works. Carrie made little mahjong tiles for the dollhouse. There's little fake bacon and Louis XV furniture, but it always looks small. You don't forget you're looking at a dollhouse. When you look into the salon at this art and think about it as art, you forget how big it is.

Alison Stewart: It's extraordinary.

Will Heinrich: It's really exciting.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Les is calling on Line 2. Hi, Les. Thanks for calling.

Les: Hi, how are you?

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Les: I was out in the yard doing some work and I heard your station. I said, "There's a piece of art that I hope it's still there." The Three Musicians by Picasso in the Museum of Modern Art. It always intrigued me as a child because it's very child-looking. Picasso's work as a kid, you look at that and think, "Oh, it's blocky and it's funny. I think I could do something kind of like that."

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Les: I've got a copy here on my wall. I went to the MoMA one day and I ran into it and I said, "My Lord." I said, "It's so big. It's huge." I don't know what it is, 10 x 12 or something. It just struck me even more so when I saw it in person, but lovely piece. Thanks for the conversation.

Alison Stewart: All right. Thanks for coming in from outside. We appreciate it. Let's talk to Shelly in Westport. Hi, Shelly. Thank you so much for calling.

Shelly: You're welcome. Thanks for taking my call. My favorite is the constellation ceiling at Grand Central Station. It's such a great way to be reminded that there's a universe out there. Don't worry about going underground. The stars will await you. I think it's just a great location for a great work for great people coming in and out of the city. Yay.

Alison Stewart: Yay. Shelley, thanks for calling in. We are discussing 100 pieces of art you must see in New York. It's part of All Of It's coverage of WNYC's 100th anniversary. It is unscientific, but from a good place. Will Heinrich, the art critic from The New York Times, is joining us, giving us his 10 best estimates. We'd love for you to join us as well. Give us a call. Tell us what piece of art moves you. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We'll have more with Will and we'll take more of your calls after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Will Heinrich, art critic for The New York Times. He's helping us out with our 100 best pieces of art to see in New York City. This is a text, "Important and wonderful New York City work of art. Robert Graham's Duke Ellington monument at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street." Let's get back to your list. We're going to get a couple of more calls lined up here. Your choice. It needs a description. It's a series of statues. They're made of marble. There's sort of no real faces exactly. They're standing with their arms crossed in front of them. I just described somebody on the subway. [laughs]

Will Heinrich: It's a very mysterious description. We're talking about the Cycladic art at The Met. Now, this is a relatively new display, also at The Met Museum. It's two or three years old and it's art from the Cyclades islands in Greece from-- Let's see. I wrote it down. Several thousand years ago, Bronze Age pieces are the best. I think everyone should see it because, as I said, it's relatively new at The Met. It's an important exhibition.

They worked out a deal with the Greek government and the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens to keep them on long-term loans. They've technically been repatriated, I think. They're fascinating, though, because they're right next to the hallway in which, if you go to The Met, you've walked down this hallway full of classical sculptures many times, the Greeks, the Romans. You see the precision of their anatomy, which is what that stuff is famous for, one thing it's famous for.

It's just so exciting to see this earlier work that has this very stylized abstract kind of appearance and be reminded that the precision of the later classical stuff, that was a stylistic choice. It was also an accomplishment. It's hard to be that precise in anatomy, but it's not that other cultures couldn't do that. It's that other cultures chose to do something different. You see these guitar-shaped bodies with their long necks and the big flat faces and the triangular noses that make you think of a Brancusi almost. They're really amazing.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Let's go to Lynn from Norwalk, Connecticut, who's on Line 5. Hi, Lynn. Thanks for calling.

Lynn: Hi. Welcome back, Alison. I missed you.

Alison Stewart: Oh, thank you.

Lynn: I just wanted to add Noguchi Museum. Actually, the entire gallery is an art piece in itself, having been designed and built by Noguchi for his sculptures. To walk inside, it's Noguchi's design to have both natural light from the outside and cuts through the roof to the interior space and the beautiful stone, which shows how he related to the environment and the quality of rock and its life. Before leaving, go outside to the patio and absorb the space and the beauty of what Noguchi saw for his work.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Julie calling in from Hastings. Hi, Julie. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Julie: Oh, thanks for doing this. Oh, my gosh. Of course, it's such a challenge. We all have so many works of art that we love so much, even just in The Met, right? There are just so many we love. One of my very favorites is tucked away upstairs in a corner. It's the room of Tibetan art. It's like this jewel box with red velvet and gold setting off these amazing works of art that were often spiritually infused. Of course, you're usually there all alone. Oh, except maybe now, not.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Julie, thank you so much-

Will Heinrich: You ruined it.

Alison Stewart: -for calling in.

Will Heinrich: It used to be all alone.

Alison Stewart: Let's go to your next choice.

Will Heinrich: Sure.

Alison Stewart: The dazzling artistry of Hirosh--

Will Heinrich: Hiroshige.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Will Heinrich: Hiroshige, yes. This I just wrote about for The Times. I reviewed the show at the Brooklyn Museum. 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints had a huge influence on western modernism. What I said in the review I wrote was something like if you want to understand how the visual language of Instagram, movies, Tintin comics, or something else, whatever I said, you should go to the Brooklyn Museum and see this show of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1858-1859, thereabouts.

Actually, 118 views of Tokyo, it used to be called Edo. They're a very complicated process. Some of the prints had 20 or more separate woodblocks to print them in different colors. The kind of speed and economy of the imagery is astonishing. The close-up views of points of interest, it really is like watching a movie. He's acting as the director and guiding your attention to the most significant parts of what he's looking at. The Brooklyn Museum has one of the best sets of these prints in the world.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Allison, who is on Line 4. Hi, Allison. Thanks for calling in.

Allison Rodman: Hi, Will. This is Allison Rodman.

Will Heinrich: [laughs] Hey, what's up? Thanks for calling.

Allison Rodman: Of course, I wanted to call and talk about the Dream House by La Monte and Zazeela Young.

Will Heinrich: Oh, good call.

Allison Rodman: La Monte and Marian Zazeela. Excuse me. It's an installation in SoHo that was conceptualized in 1969 but has been around since the '90s. Basically, you walk into this house in an old brown stony structure in SoHo. You go into this purple, psychedelically lit room. There are different sound currents that clash together in such a way that every time you turn your head, you have a different sonic experience no matter where you stand through some kind of continuous sine wave. I don't really know the science of it. When you go, it's wild. You can go and sit there as long as you like. There's carpets and you can lay down. There's pillows and there's incense burning. It's very groovy.

Alison Stewart: Love your call. Thanks for calling in. Love your shout-out too.

[laughter]

Will Heinrich: Thank you for calling in. I got at least one person I know is listening.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Charlie on Line 6 calling from Manhattan. Hi, Charlie. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Charlie: Hi, and welcome back. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Charlie: There's a painting at The Met. It's in the American collection somewhere. I saw it when I was in my 20s. I'm now in my 50s. It is of a Chinese restaurant in the 19th century. The view is from the restaurant looking out in the street. I think it's raining or snowing. I can't even pull it. I haven't seen it since. I guess it's a challenge to everyone out there. If anybody knows who this painter was and who the artist was and what year it was and where it is right now, it might have been pulled for all I know.

It shocked me because at that age, I just moved from Ohio. I'm like, "Of course, I knew Chinese restaurants," but it was 19th century. There was Chinese restaurants in the 19th century? Which just shocked me and I can never forget it. It's a beautiful painting too. It's at night. I think there's a candle on the table. Anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there. It just shocked me because I'm a painter.

Alison Stewart: Oh, there we go.

Charlie: I paint very contemporary. Contemporary abstract paintings, nothing like that at all. Here was an Ashcan School maybe. It was amazing. I just want to put that out there.

Will Heinrich: It's just lingered in your mind. I wish I could help.

Alison Stewart: Our audience, somebody will know.

Will Heinrich: Someone will know.

Alison Stewart: Someone will know. All right. Will Heinrich from The New York Times, art critic. Your next one is from the subway.

Will Heinrich: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Edith Kramer. She used artist therapy. Tell us about this and it doesn't depict the station it's in?

Will Heinrich: No, it doesn't depict the station it's in, which is fascinating to me. I looked up a little bit about this in preparation for this show, but I chose it knowing nothing about it, except that I saw it very often. I'm often in this neighborhood near the studio getting on the E Train to go Uptown or to Queens at Spring Street. As you enter the station at Spring Street just off Sixth Avenue on the east side, you go down the steps. You're met by this very large, very beautiful mosaic that depicts a subway station. I believe it's the Union Square station of the Sixth and the L for some reason. Not just a different station, but a different line.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Will Heinrich: An IRT station and the IND station. That's the kind of double consciousness you get in art sometimes. One thing referring to another thing. It uses the form so beautifully. It's all these little squares of stone and glass and it really captures the kind of kaleidoscopic intricacy of life in a big, complicated city, I think. It's beautiful.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Bella on Line 10. Hi, Bella. Thank you for calling in.

Bella: Hi, Alison. Welcome back. I wanted to mention a piece from the Whitney Museum called Day's End by David Hammons. It commemorates the old Pier 52. I think it's a really beautiful visual object to look at and walk around over by the pier. It's not really common we see stuff out on the pier these days for public art. I also think NY, NY by Hedda Sterne at the Whitney is also a really iconic, beautiful New York piece.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for your call.

Will Heinrich: I love your callers, Alison. They're mentioning everything. I almost put Day's End on my list also, but then I ran out of space.

[laughter]

Will Heinrich: I don't know if people know. It's not in the Whitney Museum. It's an installation in the river or a giant sort of the outline of a pier in memory of Gordon Matta-Clark's piece cutting a hole in the structure that was there back in the day.

Alison Stewart: It's pretty cool.

Will Heinrich: It's pretty cool.

Alison Stewart: All right. Number eight is a building right near us. 32 Avenue of the Americas, a landmark interior. What do we see at this building?

Will Heinrich: Yes, this is my favorite building in the city of New York. Not for the interiors, which are great, but I'm not sure you're allowed into the lobby anymore, I think, after September 11. The rules about that sort of thing changed. In any case, what I like is the exterior, which I grew up looking at all my life. It's a brick building. It's a complicated brick building. The footprint is five sides because it fills the whole block.

One of the corners is cut off to make it a kind of irregular, five-sided figure. It goes up in brick, about 15 stories, I think, and then suddenly shifts. There's this series of patios. The building changes orientation to match the street grid. Whereas before, it was angled to match Sixth Avenue. It's so complicated, Alison. There's brass and then there's the pattern of the bricks. There's all these insets and protrusions and triangular things.

Then there's at least five or six different colors of brick. It's all red brick, but some of them are almost black. Some of them are almost pink. It's this range. It makes such a complicated, buzzing sensation if you look at it closely. If you look at it from a distance, and I was meaning to mention, it's like the Mondrian painting in this way. It's like Broadway Boogie-Woogie.

If you look at it from a distance, all that complication just reads as a kind of vividness or life that you wouldn't get if it were all the same color. You can't make out all those different bricks from across the street, but you can make out that there's a kind of lifelike quality to it because of that complication. Then the way it catches the light at certain times of day, it turns golden. It's like an abstract sculpture of a mountain.

Alison Stewart: It's on your list.

Will Heinrich: That's on my list. That's all I got to say about that.

Alison Stewart: We got a text, "The ancient fragment of a queen's face at The Met is one of the most mysteriously alluring mouths in the world. An amazing rendering of flesh. An almost glowing yellow jasper."

Will Heinrich: Oh, is that in the Africa, the cradle of civilization room?

Alison Stewart: Maybe.

Will Heinrich: I think that's a great exhibition also.

Alison Stewart: It's an obvious one, but the Temple of Dendur at The Met is one of the most transporting places and especially wonderful during a thunderstorm. I like it.

Will Heinrich: Yes, that's a good idea.

Alison Stewart: Got a one that says, "Does the Brooklyn carousel count as art?"

Will Heinrich: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Will Heinrich: Anything counts as art. If you want to take it that way, it's art. If someone wants it to be art, it's art. You can always say it's bad art if you don't think it's good. It can all be art as far as I'm concerned.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Ron from Hamilton Heights. Hi, Ron. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Ron: Hi. I'm just calling in about a fabulous piece of public sculpture on Riverside Park, 150th Street, in front of the home of Ralph Ellison. It depicts so beautifully, in concept and execution, his whole life, his famous book of Invisible Man. It's a bronze, rectangular piece that has the cutout of a man. In terms of 20th-century art, it takes it to a different level. It's by Elizabeth Catlett.

Alison Stewart: Oh, Elizabeth Catlett.

Will Heinrich: Yes, she's great.

Alison Stewart: Love Elizabeth Catlett. Thank you so much for calling in, Ron. All right. You have something that doesn't cost anybody anything, just a gallery visit.

Will Heinrich: Yes. Well, also, the building doesn't cost you anything just to be complete.

Alison Stewart: That's true.

Will Heinrich: A gallery visit. New York City has, I think, probably the highest concentration of commercial art galleries in the world. The thing about them is they obviously exist to sell art, but they send PDF previews to their collectors. They make private appointments. They don't need to be open to the public really to sell art. They're open to the public because they want to exhibit art. They want people to come look at it.

That's the whole point of a gallery is for people to come in off the street and look at the art. I picked a particular gallery show that's up right now that I think is really nice. It's called Patterns at Luhring Augustine Gallery on 24th Street. It's a group show of mostly abstract, colorful kind of art that's both pleasurable and substantial, which is hard to do. It includes a couple of Gee's Bend quilts and a giant Frank Stella and then some other contemporary paintings and things.

What I recommend is you just go to Chelsea or Tribeca and wander around. If you're going to Chelsea, just walk west on, say, 19th or 20th Street. Just before you hit the river, start going in the gallery. Say hello. Write your name in the guestbook if you feel inclined. That's kind of my favorite part of the whole thing like taking a walk and writing my name somewhere. Take a look at what's on the wall and then go to the next one.

Alison Stewart: Then your last thing on the list is check out just something you like.

Will Heinrich: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You chose Pat Oleszko.

Will Heinrich: Yes, Pat Oleszko. This is another gallery show that's up right now. It's an artist I saw and it's one that I wrote about recently. I saw a piece of hers in a group show several years ago. She does performances and she makes costumes for the performances. The piece I saw in the group-- Oh no, there were two pieces in the group show. There was a video too, but there was a costume. It's kind of a creature entirely covered with breasts. If you think of the Greek mythological figure Argus covered with eyes and switch them out for breasts, you know what I'm talking about.

[laughter]

Will Heinrich: I loved it because it's so silly and ridiculous, but I like things that are silly and ridiculous but could lead you to interesting thoughts if you want to. There's some substance of emotion or thinking behind it, but you don't have to go there. You can also just enjoy that it's ridiculous. Pat has a show up right now at a Chinatown gallery called David Peter Francis. The one thing I want to say about galleries, check the hours before you go because they all have slightly different hours. The number of times I have showed up somewhere to see a show in some far-flung, random neighborhood and realized I should have checked the hours is embarrassing.

Alison Stewart: Love that you made this list for us. One last note we're going to make is someone said-- Hang on. It's about the Statue of Liberty is an important piece of art.

Will Heinrich: Oh, absolutely.

Alison Stewart: Our guest has been Will Heinrich. He's art critic for The New York Times. Thank you so much for joining us, for being our first 10 out of 100. We really appreciate it.

Will Heinrich: I'm honored. Thank you so much for having me.

 

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