This post is probably waaaaaay to long, so a simple guide with links to hotels, Airbnbs, driving directions and tips, restaurants and the museums we visited is at the end of this post. If you want to skip the scenic route, scroll down to the bottom.

Included here are my recommendations for an art week binge complete with pictures of art hightlights, lodgings, food, shopping, biking, and more. If this is an adventure you’d also like to make, dear reader, this post is a somewhat cost-effective art, design, and culinary excursion that will take the guesswork (and marital or relationship tension) out of the equation.

I suggest leaving on a Thursday and returning the next Friday.

After a year of hunkering down in our house terrified that we would contract the Covid19 virus, we were finally able to venture out into the world thanks to Pfizer Pharma and Moderna’s vaccine. We wanted to do something big, airy, and adventurous. We like art! We like food! We like cities! We like nature! And, if the weather permits, we like biking! But most of all, we HATE the frustration that occurs when trying to figure out what to do in unfamiliar places.

Thursday— Saturday:

Driving to the Berkshires to see Mass MoCA

Car Rental: Fly into the Albany airport (fly out of LGA or, preferably JFK if you plan on ending your trip at the TWA Hotel like I did) and rent a car that can be returned to a place near your lodgings in New York City. You will also want to decide if you should purchase a transponder for tolls along the highway. I think that was too expensive an option, like $21/day. Or, ask at the rental counter about how to pay your tolls online.

Driving Directions from Albany to North Adams, MA (45 miles, 1 hour 8 mins)

Lodging in North Adams (the Berkshires):

I had a hard time finding a good, economical place to stay in North Adams, MA after a search on Airbnb. We stayed at place called “Berkshire Hideaway” that cost $360 for two nights which was was more than it was worth. It also had an unclean, mousy feeling that made it hard to sleep (mind you, I did not see any rodents, but there was a skeevy scurrying sound in the windows at night). I wish I had stayed at one of the options I describe below.

Lodging in North Adams, Mass

Option One: If I had done it right, I would not have looked at Airbnb at all and stayed at The Porches Inn, (about $150/night) which is right across the street from Mass MoCA. It has a high rating at 4 1/2 stars and the rooms look like they are up to my rather high standards. There is an outdoor common area where guests gathered nightly in front of a fire, plus it’s across the street from AOK Barbeque and Bright Ideas Brewery. Great food and beer combo.

Option Two: For your trip to Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, my top pick for lodgings is not cheap, around $400/night. If you can splurge, stay at Tourists hotel. It will certainly be a singular experience. The architect is Ben Svenson of Broder and the interior design was overseen by Julie Pearson, formerly of Spartan Shop. Here is an article with great photos in Dezeen. It’s impossibly gorgeous, and you’ll have to make your reservations well in advance if you want to get a room. Two-night minimum.

For the cool kids, the Tourists hotel has its own radio station and the website even quotes Dostoevsky: “”I know that you don’t believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!”” The hotel is on the grounds of a large wooded area with walking trails. It also has it’s own line of merch and even sells sweatshirts, scarves, ‘deerstalker berets’, and $400 sneakers from Kapital, the ultra-hip Tokyo-based department store. Yes, it’s pretentious as hell, but I love it. If I had my way, I would’ve quoted from the legendary gay icon Quentin Crisp: “Style is being yourself, but on purpose.”

Art: Clark Art Institute. I never knew about this place until we drove past it on our way out of the Berkshires. Next time I go back, I definitely want to check this place out.

Art: Mass MoCA

The James Turrell exhibition “Into the Light” is on until 2025. Photos of the Turrell exhibits were not allowed. The immersive rooms only allowed five people at a time. You’ll have to get reservations well in advance.

Eating in North Adams:

We recommend The Public Restaurant in downtown North Adams. We had the hangar steak which was done to medium rare perfection. Paired with grilled fiddlehead ferns and fingerling potatoes.

Also, AOK Barbeque at Mass MoCA and also the beer at Bright Ideas Brewing

Saturday — Monday:

Dia: Beacon and Storm King Art Center

Driving Directions to Dia:Beacon (2 1/2 hours or 119 miles) from North Adams, MA

Lodgings in Beacon, NY:

Tiny House Airbnb in Marlboro, NY $240/night

Art: Dia: Beacon

In May 2003, Dia Art Foundation opened Dia Beacon on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon, New York, in a former Nabisco box printing factory. The museum presents Dia’s collection of art from the 1960s to the present as well as special exhibitions and public programs.

Storm King Art Center

Storm King Art Center is a 500-acre outdoor museum located in New York’s Hudson Valley, where visitors experience large-scale sculpture and site-specific commissions under open sky. Since 1960, Storm King has been dedicated to stewarding the hills, meadows, and forests of its site and surrounding landscape. Building on the visionary thinking of its founders, Storm King supports artists and some of their most ambitious works. Changing exhibitions, programming, and seasons offer discoveries with every visit.

Tickets to Storm King

Driving Directions from Dia: Beacon to Storming — 26 minute drive

Eating in Beacon

About a mile away from our TinyHouse Airbnb in Marlboro was a neighborhood restaurant, Brix Gastropub, where we had an amazing hamburger.

The Roundhouse, located in Beacon, was right on the river overlooking a small waterfall. Surroundings were lovely, but the food was a just nice.

For gluten-free fare, we had a deconstructed Bahn Mi sandwich at Kitchen and Coffee.

Monday — Thursday: New York City

Lodgings

Serene Studio in Brooklyn, Cobble Hill Airbnb $145/night
This was a lovely place in the quiet Cobble Hill neighborhood. Great decor, near to restaurants and subway.

New York Botanic Garden:

Yayoi Kusama “Cosmic Nature” Exhibition

(from website) “Exclusively at NYBG, contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama reveals her lifelong fascination with the natural world, beginning with her childhood spent in the greenhouses and fields of her family’s seed nursery. Her artistic concepts of obliteration, infinity, and eternity are inspired by her intimate engagement with the colors, patterns, and life cycles of plants and flowers.” (Tickets sell out quickly. I would suggest getting tickets at the same time you get your plane tickets)

Museum of Modern Art: Amanda Williams, Embodied Sensations

Amanda Williams: Embodied Sensations

I feel so privileged and honored to have worked with Amanda Williams on shaping messages for her interactions with the media. We had some deep conversations during our sessions at her studio in Pilsen. Really, the gift was mine. She gave me more in wisdom and insight than I could ever have given her as the consultant. And here she is!!! At the Museum of Modern Art being a total art rock star. She has definitely made Chicago proud.

Amanda trained as an architect and this was the journey she took to find her way to becoming an artist. Architecture is space. Art is space. Painting is space. Ideas are space. Her installation at MOMA, Embodied Sensations, filled the museum’s atrium. Upon first viewing it I asked myself — What am I looking at? And, is Amanda’s piece still in the process of being set up? Or, is MOMA getting ready for an event in the area where Amanda’s piece is supposed to be? The stacks of piled chairs appeard to be either preparation for an event that is about to happen or one that had already taken place. This was either a preparation or an exodus. A humming in-between place where nothing can be known except by those who placed these objects here. Was I allowed to be here in this space that was neither finished or in the aftermath of being finished?

For Amanda, interpretation of her work is the responsibility of the viewer and is separate from intent. She asks us to sleuth the mystery of these objects in this time, in this place, and in this context. Ambiguity is where we find personal meaning. The concept of belonging and of places we are allowed to traverse and those that occupy a limbo of unknowing. Where are we going and what will happen when we get there? If considered through the lens of race and identity, these questions become even more poignant. The black chairs that line and face the wall do not welcome rest, but are merely housed for later use — both a warehouse and a purgatory for useful things left to linger. Who decides if and when these tables and chairs will be used for human interaction, rest, study, public speaking, a gathering?

The only area where you are invited to sit are two institutional-looking chairs facing each other with a table in-between. Above is a slide projection with drawn sketches and notes that appear to be process drafts. The context of this arrangement in one of the most elite institutions in the world — the Museum of Modern Art — asks us to ponder and, perhaps, to reckon. Of course, this was my take-away, and everyone will have their own. Thanks Amanda for the opportunity to reflect!!!!!

(from the MOMA website) “This installation draws on the urgency of the moment in which we all find ourselves, which has forced everyone to make really major life changes to our daily routines, rituals, and experiences. In the museum, this has meant removing the furniture throughout the public spaces that could potentially present surfaces for the Coronavirus, and moving those chairs and tables and benches to the basement. So I’ve worked to move the furniture into the atrium space, into the center of the museum, and am asking participants who are already navigating so many foreign movements to also navigate the furniture, which now has a completely different meaning in relation to the viewers in the audience.”

As part of her Embodied Sensations exhibition, take a moment to fill out her survey and your responses could be a part of the exhibition. See below.

This survey is part of the project Embodied Sensations, by artist Amanda Williams, and is anonymous and open to all. Your responses will generate instructions for physical gestures and movements, which will be performed by visitors at MoMA.

Visit moma.org/amandawilliams to learn more about Embodied Sensations.

Find the survey here.

CALDER: And let’s not forget that the Calder exhibition is also going on at MOMA

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Alice Neel’s “People Come First” exhibition — until August 1, 2021

(from the website) “Alice Neel: People Come First is the first museum retrospective in New York of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) in twenty years. This ambitious survey positions Neel as one of the century’s most radical painters, a champion of social justice whose longstanding commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art, as demonstrated in the approximately one hundred paintings, drawings, and watercolors that will appear in The Met’s survey.”

“One of the reasons I like to paint,” said Alice Neel, “is that I like to capture life as it goes by hot off the griddle”.

The Whitney Museum of American Art

The Julie Mehretu painting exhibition is open until August and it’s totally worth checking out. (From the Whitney’s website) “For more than two decades, Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) has been engaged in a deep exploration of painting. She creates new forms and finds unexpected resonances by drawing from the histories of art and human civilization — from Babylonian stelae to architectural sketches, from European history painting to the sites and symbols of African liberation movements. Some of Mehretu’s imagery and titles hint at their representational origins, but her work remains steadfastly abstract.”

Check out Whitney’s video interview with the artist.

And then, you definitely have to check out Liza Lou’s beaded kitchen. Check out the video about the five years it took her to create this. Seeing this in person was like a religious experience. Everything was beaded, even the bottle of Joy dish detergent.

Brooklyn Specialty: New DS&Durga shop in Williamsburg!

Eating in New York

Via Carota at 51 Grove Street in the West Village is one of our favorite places. You can’t make reservations, so get there early to put your name on the list. They will call you when your table is ready. The pasta bolognese is crazy good, but we also go for the Insalata Verde which was featured in the New York Times as the ‘best salad in the world’ — and it is. We make it all the time at home. Recipe here.

Ivan Ramen at 25 Clinton Street is delicious. This is some of the best ramen I’ve ever had, and I’ve been to some great places in Tokyo too. Anyway, the Tokyo Shio with sea salts, dashi + chicken broth, pork belly, soft egg, roasted tomato is the bomb. The Tonkotsu with rich pork broth, shoyu-glazed chashu, woodear mushrooms, pickled mustard greens, soft egg, and mayu is also amazing. It makes me hungry just thinking about it. I can’t wait to go back.

PS1 MoMA — Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life — thru Sept 6

I was so psyched to see this show. It was great to celebrate an artist who was largely ignored by the upper echelons of the art world, until now. It’s too bad that she was not able to enjoy this attention while she was alive. She died in 2002. I don’t know if any of my Chicago friends saw her sculpture show “Niki in the Garden,” but it was beautiful. Unfortunately, it was dismissed as “whimsical” in the Chicago Tribune where no images of the show are posted.

In her first major US exhibition, Structures for Life features over 200 works that highlight Saint Phalle’s interdisciplinary approach and engagement with pressing social issues. Innovation was key to Saint Phalle’s process: from beginning to end, she envisioned new ways of inhabiting the world. Saint Phalle produced fantastical and figurative houses, parks, and playgrounds. These structures were charged spaces of imagination from which she envisioned experimental societies emerging, places “where you could have a new kind of life, to just be free.”

Thursday — Friday

The TWA Hotel

Staying here was the highlight of the trip. After an art whirlwind, but rainy and chilly week, we needed a break and a 95 degree pool-cuzzi.

(from the website) “MCR and MORSE Development have reignited the magic of Eero Saarinen’s landmark 1962 TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport, restoring and reimagining it as a first-class hotel. At the center of the hotel is Eero Saarinen’s iconic TWA Flight Center, where restaurants, bars and retail outlets have taken flight. Two hotel wings, designed to reflect and defer to the landmark TWA Flight Center, sit behind the historic building and contain 512 guestrooms with views of JFK’s runways and the TWA Flight Center.”

Guide to the trip

Day One — Day Three

Flight into Albany
Rent a car
Driving Directions to North Adams, MA
Stay at the chic Tourists Hotel, eat in their restaurant or, if that’s too pricey, stay at…
The Porches Inn (across from Mass MoCA)
Eat at Public Restaurant
AOK Barbeque at Mass MoCA (I recommend the veggie Yamwich, but the brisket sandwich is great). Pair your bbq with the beer at Bright Ideas Brewing
Mass MoCA: MASS MoCA’s James Turrell Exhibition is on view until 2025, but they only let 6 people in at a time. Be sure to make a reservation here.
Clark Art Museum

Day Three— Day Five

Driving Directions to Dia: Beacon and Hudson River Valley (two hours)
Airbnb: Tiny House in, Marlboro
Dinner at Brix Gastropub — best hamburger and very close to tinyhouse.

DIA Beacon:

(open Friday-Monday)

StormKing Art Center:

(Closed Tuesdays)
Woodbury Commons Outlet mall: brands like Celine, Fendi, Scotch & Soda, Balenciaga and more.

Dining at Roundhouse in Beacon

Onto Brooklyn — Day Six — Day Eight

On the way to Brooklyn, stop in Saugerties Saugerties, NY

Driving Directions: Drive to Saugerties from Beacon

for lunch at Violet’s Bakery

Lodgings in Brooklyn

Airbnb: Brooklyn, Cobble Hill ($153/night)

New York Botanic Garden to see the Yayoi Kusama exhibition

Dinner at Via Carota(doesn’t take reservations, so show up early and get your name on the list)

ART In New York (links to museums below)

ART In New York

Museum of Modern Art

The Met

The Whitney Museum of American Art

Day Seven

MOMA PS1(Niki de Ste Phalle) open until September 2021

TWA Hotel

Eat at the Paris Café or Lisbon Lounge

Or get drinks at the Rooftop pool-cuzzi

Day Eight

Fly out of JFK — if you can. Or out of LaGuardia

Spend a relaxing weekend at home before returning to the grind.

A “sound walk”, according to the Oak Park-based contemporary art and cultural presenter Compound Yellow, is “a guided exploration of a site using listening-focused skills.” Norman W. Long has been taking people on silent walks for a while now.

“I believe that through listening we have a tool to define communities and ourselves,” says Long, a sound artist/designer/composer. “We can use those tools to shape who we are and where we live.”

We walked through two very different communities: the wealthy and arguably progressive liberal bastion of Oak Park, and the Austin neighborhood, as west as you can get on the west side, a mostly African American but thriving community. Our group was a patchwork of young, middle-aged, Asian, Black, and white. The eight of us agreed to show up and discover what the walk could accomplish — or not. However, the very nature of the activity itself was designed to defy ‘accomplishment”. Surrendering to present moment awareness, like many meditative practices, focuses the mind and the body. As a group we moved together, aware of each other as one corpus, as one living, breathing thing with the constraint of silence guiding us.

Sound walkers are asked to listen for all of the factors that make up the sound map of the place or community where they are walking. Long suggests that walkers start by listening in their own silence and being mindful of their own consciousness.

“Then we focus on how we sound as we move throughout the site,” Long continues. “We then expand our listening to what is near to us, what just passed us and then what is ahead.”

At the end of the walk participants are asked to ponder the following questions:

How do these sounds define where you are on the site? What sounds are constant? What sounds change the site? What moves through it? What are the durations? What do you expect to hear? What did you remember hearing? What sounds do you like? What sounds don’t you like?

On Sunday, April 29, it was one of the first truly warm days of this year. The sun on my face healed me; its warmth a salve after so many months of cold. The last thing I really wanted to do that day was make small talk with a group of strangers, and I was grateful that we could be in a group and not have to say a word to one another. I was happy to adhere to the objective of walking and listening in silence.

I heard the exposed hobnails on the worn-through heels of my boots scrape the pavement with each step. I heard the contents of the pockets of my fellow sound travelers shift as they moved. Car radios, wheels on asphalt, birds, children being called inside, the near silent mixed with the more audible steps of the different shoes meeting the pavement. The creak of gates swinging open, airplanes in the sky, a tablecloth being shook from an upper floor window.

Norman W. Long is an African-American artist who grew up on the south side of Chicago, near Calumet City, and continues to live there with his family. I knew I would see the obvious racial and cultural divides of these two very different communities, but was it possible to hear them? Would the sound of these two places reveal something to me or would there be no difference from one place to the other?

Walking through these two different communities, one a community of privilege and the other in a constant cycle of upheaval and violence, I wanted to find out how these two communities would stand the test of silent walking and sound exploration. They didn’t sound very different from each other, but Austin was a little noisier since Erie Street is a main drag through the neighborhood. With the onset of warmer weather, people played their stereos with their windows down creating that strange bent distortion of sound as they passed. Given the location of this walk, the topic of race and class was bound to become a part of our collective aural observations. After all, the “listening” that Long requested was not relegated to physical sound, but also to the sound of our inner dialog.

My thoughts turned toward our last election and how it smoked out an America that I thought had evolved, but only managed to reveal that Americans, despite Obama’s presidency, continue to be just as racist and sexist as ever. This is something that people of color already knew, but I was blindsided by it. What I didn’t know was that after eight years with a Black president, racism was not subsiding, but going mainstream and global. I actually thought a “post-racial” America was a thing. In 2018, I am no longer so naive.

Statistics showed that it was middle-class, middle-aged white women, women like myself, who benefitted most from the feminist movement, who tipped the scales toward getting a porcine, pussy-grabbing Donald Trump elected instead of a woman who looked a little too much like themselves. Many white women, as it turns out, paid a great deal of lip service to the idea of female power. Maybe it was all that misleading advertising we grew up on: “you’ve come a long way, baby”, “who can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, and let him know he’s a man?”, “you’re going to make it after all”, “I am woman hear me roar!” In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s loss, these slogans and sound bytes don’t seem to have made us respect ourselves any more, but it did make us buy a lot of shit we didn’t need.

And these days I don’t know how to talk about race without feeling that I am out of my depth, a spectator in the cheap seats. Given this last last election, my entire perspective on race is suspect, even to myself. I am steeped in a mindset that was crafted years ago that told me that I was a “progressive”, without fully realizing that my perspective was only academic. Trump’s America has revealed a dark underbelly that I did not want to acknowledge. I don’t want to give myself too hard of a time, but I feel an intense amount of shame about this. What do I really know about race relations except through my own lens of white guilt and, yes, laughable white tears?

The Austin neighborhood was a little louder, but that was because we walked along Erie Street where there was more traffic. Functionally, the sounds were the same, but my own inner dialog was quite different. Inside the cars that passed us, I imagined the passengers thinking “who the hell are those white people walking in my neighborhood?” I strongly sensed that we were an unwelcome but tolerable oddity. White people. The term freighted and weighted with my own otherness in that space. Under normal circumstances I don’t think I’d be walking in that part of town, but I was on a trippy conceptual art tour! What could be more white than that? I needed this pretext to be there to “observe”.

Long believes that through listening we have a tool to define communities and ourselves. I couldn’t help but notice that once we were nestled back into the manicured lawns of Oak Park’s residential streets, I felt more invisible and unobserved. I was immediately aware that this shift had taken place. I tried to associate this shift aurally and listened closely. It was the sound of sprinklers darting water back and forth across yards — a repeating “chu chu chu” sound.

Here is a sound clip of The Sound of Trees at Compound Yellow that Long had recorded while we were out walking. It is not of the walk itself, but of a cluster of trees on the premises of Compound Yellow. The juxtaposition of the sounds I encountered on our walk with the recorded sound of tree branches rustling in a calm wind was perhaps anointed with a message, but I couldn’t hear it. I wanted some answers and that was where I went wrong. The act of listening, the tuning of one’s ear to a place, the awareness of place through its sounds does not require a conclusion, but I wanted one. I wanted a whisper in my ear to tell me that we are all going to be okay.

BIO: Norman W. Long is a sound artist/designer/composer born and raised on the south side of Chicago. His current work focuses on sound art production within the larger context of landscape. He has exhibited and/or performed in galleries Chicago, Ithaca, New York, London, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The processes involved in his practice lie within the area of field recording, electro-acoustic composition and dub technique. His art/studio practice includes collecting, performing and recording to create objects, environments, and situations in which the audience and himself are engaged in an open-ended dialogue about memory, space, value, silence and the invisible.

I encourage you to take one of Norman Long’s walks. Check out the Compound Yellow website for upcoming opportunities.