Dr. Susan McCrory: NYC Art Immersion Trek

Art Immersion in New York: A Packed, Two-Day Trek in an Encyclopedic City Last summer, Dr. Sue McCrory—teacher of AP Art History— traveled to New York City for a sort of scouting mission. For several years she had been interested in taking her students on a field trip to the City so that they might study directly many of the works they are required to know for the annual AP exam. The Metropolitan Museum (Met), for instance, is an encyclopedic museum, holding in its permanent collections an impressively broad range of objects of exceptionally high quality, many of which comprise the AP canon. New York City is itself, in fact, an encyclopedic city of art, home to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Guggenheim and Frick Museums to name but a few, not to mention the City’s extraordinary examples of architecture. Even the Seagram Building—“that relatively unassuming but historically-charged skyscraper in Midtown designed by Mies van der Rohe in the 1950s,” describes Dr. McCrory—is an important architectural monument the boys study each year.

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The scouting trip was a great success, and the result of that effort was an overnight art trek to New York City that brought into stark relief for RL’s AP Art History students so many of the works that, prior to the trip, they had only experienced in books and online. The trip, which included five students, Dr. McCrory, and Mr. Alessandro Ferzoco ’14, took place over two jampacked, but thankfully snow-free, days. The group left Boston the morning of Sunday, January 26, and returned the evening of Monday, January 27.

While in New York the group made two separate visits to the Met. Alighting there early afternoon on Sunday, they sought out several non-Western galleries to view works from the museum’s African and Pacific collections. There the boys encountered numerous masks, cast brass plaques from Benin, a Kongo power figure, and a stunning rebbelib, or navigational chart, from the Marshall Islands made of shells and fiber. The boys also spent time with Dr. McCrory and Mr. Ferzoco in the ancient

“One of the highlights of the trip was seeing those galleries under construction at the Met. Led by Dr. Burchard, who was so generous with his time, we walked into an area that read Do Not Enter, and behind this door was a just a den of activity.”

Roman art galleries, where they viewed a series of 1st century B.C.E. frescoes before translating the Latin on commemorative sculpture and identifying motifs on carved marble sarcophagi.

The group’s second visit to the Met proved entirely different.

On Monday afternoon Associate Curator Wolf Burchard led them on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Met’s British Galleries, which were then undergoing the final touches of a many-year renovation for which Dr. Burchard had assumed responsibility.

(The British Galleries formally opened to the public in early March.) As a result of this special appointment, RL’s art history students not only came face-to-face with extraordinary objects of the period, but they also got a rare view onto the inner workings of a museum and the professionals who make it hum.

“Meeting with a curator was a highly privileged opportunity,” Dr. McCrory acknowledges, “and it was an eye-opening, exciting, and different experience for all of us.”

She further recalled, “One of the highlights of the trip was seeing those galleries under construction at the Met. Led by Dr. Burchard, who was so generous with his time, we walked into an area that read Do Not Enter, and behind this door was a just a den of activity. There were people on ladders installing the lighting, and there were glass cases—finished products—with figurines and items already in them. There were items hanging on the wall covered in cardboard with the words Art Underneath written across. That was an incredible experience, because it’s one that no member of the public has at a museum—to see how an exhibit actually comes to exist.

It also gave the boys insight into the many different kinds of people who work in museums. You could be an ace carpenter, for instance. Do you know how valuable a skilled carpenter is to the exhibition crew and curators? These are people who create stands and podiums and fasteners, and all the ways in which works of art need to be secured in place for proper viewing.

There are painters, masons, carpenters, lighting experts, and the curatorial staff. We saw multi-room galleries in various states of finished and unfinished. It was very exciting.”

In between those two fruitful visits to the Met, the group took a brisk walk over to the Guggenheim Museum, whose organic forms and relatively smaller scale offered a welcome respite from the Met's traditional and sprawling spaces. Observing the modern art museum from the outside and ground floor lobby, the boys gained first-hand experience of the design elements of Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated structure later co-opted

by Frank Gehry for his design of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (another AP object!). But there were more immediate comparisons to be made. “Having also viewed the Seagram Building from below and within its spare portico,” Dr. McCrory said, “the curved, enveloping spaces of the Guggenheim provided the boys with an excellent contrast in form and function to that sober office building, even though relatively few decades separate their high-profile designs and construction.”

Albeit brief, visits to those two 20th-century sites prepared the students for their Monday morning visit to the MoMA, where they were generously led on a private tour by the museum’s Deputy Director, Peter Reed. Dr. Reed recounted the founding of the museum in the 1920s by three visionary women and then guided the group to the upper galleries. While there they discussed Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and

N e w s l e t t e r o f Th e R o x b u r y L at i n S c h o o l

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Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series in terms of their (sizable) significance to history. But Dr. Reed further connected those works to other works of art hung nearby, in this way encouraging the boys to consider curatorial decisions and the telling of history. By all accounts, it was a fantastic encounter with modern and contemporary art.

Punctuating this first-ever art-focused trip was dinner on Sunday evening, for which the group was joined by Myles Garbarini, Class of 2013. Myles, who lives in New York City, studied art history as an undergraduate at Yale and now works in the forensic department at Sotheby's.

Looking back on RL’s New York art trek, Dr. McCrory explained, “The trip actually changed from a more academic approach—here's what we've studied together, let's talk about it—to a more experiential focus: ‘We’re going to New York to

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see as much as we can by way of rich, deep collections of art.

And you'll get to talk to museum professionals. What do they do? How do they approach their work? What do they see in a day? How did they get here?’ The mission of the trip became much more expansive and life enriching than I had initially envisioned. It was an instance of ‘Don’t let school get in the way of your education, right?’

“My time in New York proved again—to this veteran of the discipline and unapologetic museum-goer,” concluded Dr. McCrory, “that there is nothing like seeing a work of art in person. It still gives me goose-bumps.”

Special thanks to RL alumnus Paul Provost ’83 who, having spent many years in the commercial art sector in New York City, generously connected Dr. McCrory to both Dr. Reed and Dr. Burchard at the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, respectively. //