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Boston Globe
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Koyo Kouoh, prominent art world figure, is dead at 57
The Venice Biennale is arguably the art world's most important event. Staged every two years since 1895, it always includes a large-scale group show, organized by the curator, alongside dozens of national pavilions, organized independently. Advertisement Next year's exhibition is scheduled to run from May 9 through Nov. 22. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up As the curator and executive director of Zeitz MOCAA, one of Africa's largest contemporary art museums, Ms. Kouoh built a global reputation as a torchbearer for artists of color from Africa and elsewhere, although her interests were global in reach. 'I'm an international curator,' she said in December in an interview with the The New York Times. When she arrived at Zeitz MOCAA in 2019, the museum was struggling, run by an interim director, Azu Nwagbogu. Its founding director, Mark Coetzee, had resigned amid allegations that he harassed members of his staff. 'The museum was in crisis when Koyo came on, subsequently compounded by the pandemic' Storm Janse van Renseburg, who was then a senior curator at Zeitz MOCAA, said in a 2023 interview. 'She brought it back to life.' Advertisement Artist Igshaan Adams, who held a residency position at the museum for eight months during Ms. Kouoh's tenure, said she had changed the way the local community felt about Zeitz MOCAA. 'She made me, us, care again about the museum,' he said. It was the first time, Adams said, that he had experienced a real public engagement 'with people who look like me and speak like me.' Ms. Kouoh staged several acclaimed shows, including a Tracey Rose retrospective that last year transferred to the Queens Museum in New York and 'When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,' a retrospective of work by some 120 Black artists that in February opened at Brussels' Center for Fine Arts, known as Bozar. It will be on view there until Aug. 10. Emily LaBarge, in a review of 'When We See Us' for the Times, wrote that Ms. Kouoh's curatorial approach had a 'sophisticated breadth' that was 'both aesthetic and art historical, painterly and political.' Ms. Kouoh said frequently in interviews that she never expected to become an art world figure. She was born in Cameroon on Dec. 24, 1967, and grew up in Douala, the country's largest city and economic capital, before moving at age 13 to Switzerland, where she eventually studied business administration and banking and worked with migrant women as a social worker. The turning point in her career came in her mid-20s, when she became a mother. 'I couldn't imagine raising a Black boy in Europe,' Ms. Kouoh said in the 2023 interview. In 1995, she moved to Dakar, Senegal, 'to explore new frontiers and spaces,' and after working as an independent curator for several years, she founded Raw Material, an artist residency program that later expanded to include an exhibition space, a library, and an academy that offered a mentoring program for young art professionals. Advertisement 'I thought it was amazing that she was not just a curator but an institution builder,' Oluremi C. Onabanjo, an associate curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, said in a 2023 interview. 'A global thinker, rooted in Africa.' She added that Ms. Kouoh 'enlivened and expanded a sense of possibility for a generation of African curators across the globe.' While based in Dakar, Ms. Kouoh expanded her reputation as a forceful, visionary voice on the contemporary art scene. She worked on the curatorial teams for Documenta 12 and 13 and curated the educational and artistic program of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the Irish Contemporary Art Biennale in 2016, and other international exhibitions. Touria El Glaoui, the founding director of 1-54, said in an interview that Ms. Kouoh was 'the most important curator of artists from the African continent,' adding, 'She gave voice to so many talents.' In the 2023 interview, Ms. Kouoh said that she had initially rejected the idea of taking on the directorship of Zeitz MOCAA. But after conversations with Black colleagues, she said, there was 'a feeling that we cannot let this fail. We don't have anything else like this on the continent.' Throughout her career, she pushed to bring African artists to a world that had long either ignored them or typecast them. 'I am part of that generation of African art professionals who have pride and knowledge about the beauty of African culture, which has often been defined by others in so many wrong ways,' she said in the same interview. Advertisement 'I don't believe we need to spend time correcting those narratives,' she added. 'We need to inscribe other perspectives.' According to the Guardian, she leaves her husband, Philippe Mall, her son, Djibril, and by her mother, Agnes, and stepfather, Anton. Ms. Kouoh was a mentor to artists and curators all over the world, 'championing people and ideas that she knew to be important,' said Kate Fowle, the director of the Arts Program for the Hearthland Foundation, an organization supporting democracy and collaboration that was founded by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg in 2019. Her appointment as the curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale was welcomed by the art community. 'She was remarkably deserving,' said Adrienne Edward, the senior curator and associate director of curatorial programs at the Museum of American Art in New York. She added that it was Ms. Kouoh's 'unique ability to be grounded in a place, in herself, in artists -- her ethical rootedness -- which profoundly and specifically contoured her exhibition making.' Speaking to the Times after the announcement of her appointment, Ms. Kouoh said she wanted to create a show that 'really speaks to our times,' adding that she was an artist-centered curator. 'The artists will define where we go,' she said. This article originally appeared in
New York Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Century On, the Tiffany Lamp Still Shines Bright
The pieces couples acquire when decorating their first home are often significant. Few purchases, though, prove as influential as the one made by the Neustadts in 1935. The newlyweds were browsing tchotchkes in a secondhand store in Manhattan when Hildegard Steininger Neustadt discovered what her husband, Egon Neustadt, an orthodontist, later described in a poem as a 'strange, old-fashioned lamp.' Made from hundreds of pieces of oddly shaped glass in a kaleidoscope of greens and yellows, it illuminated a scene straight from spring, when daffodils herald the end of winter — a scene of hope. According to Neustadt's memoirs, he and his wife asked the shopkeeper about the lamp and were told that it was the work of an American artist, Louis Comfort Tiffany. Though they did not recognize the name, they eventually handed over $12.50 (somewhere around $290, in today's dollars) and took the lamp — with its Tiffany 'Daffodil' lampshade — home, where Neustadt placed it on his desk. While unfamiliar to the Neustadts in 1935, Tiffany's prismatic creations have since become widely known, and beloved by many. Today, the lamps are on view in venues across New York, including at the upcoming TEFAF New York art fair, running May 9-13 at the Park Avenue Armory. The decades have brought discovery, as well, as scholars have uncovered the importance of women to Tiffany's success, and consumers who have encountered the lamps in museums and stores have brought them into their homes. Even younger generations have succumbed to the charm of Tiffany lamps, with some who cannot afford the real deal committing Tiffany's designs to ink as tattoos. According to Neustadt's handwritten memoirs, which recall the purchase of that first lamp in 1935, his 'friends didn't like it.' But their opinions were of little consequence. 'Tiffany blended perfectly with the Jacobean furnishings in our Long Island home,' Neustadt told The New York Times in an interview in 1971. 'Our home was large and needed many lamps,' he said, 'and the prices were low.' And so the Neustadts bought more, over 200 of them, making theirs 'one of the largest private collections of Tiffany lamps in the world,' according to Neustadt's obituary that was published in The Times in 1984. Much of that collection remains in New York City, on display on both sides of the East River: at the Queens Museum, less than two miles from where some of the pieces would have been made at Tiffany Studios in Queens; and at the New York Historical in Manhattan. The remainder is kept at the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, a private archive in Long Island City containing over 100 lamps, 40 windows and nearly half a million examples of flat glass. The collection is accessible by appointment, and pieces from it occasionally travel the country in temporary exhibitions. The Tiffany lamps at the Queens Museum are displayed thanks to a partnership with the Neustadt Collection, which is also home to Neustadt's memoirs. Lindsy R. Parrott, the executive director and curator of the collection, said in an email interview that she first 'fell in love with the beauty and the history' of Tiffany in the late 1990s. 'I was especially transfixed by how much remained unknown about this celebrated and internationally recognized artist — there was so much detective work that still needed to be done, which I found tantalizing,' Parrott said. The son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, who co-founded the store that became Tiffany & Company, Louis Comfort Tiffany was an artist and designer who believed in translating the beauty of nature into the decorative arts. He ran various art- and design-focused companies from the 1880s until the 1930s, the most famous of which was Tiffany Studios, which produced, among other things, the leaded-glass lamps and windows that became synonymous with his name and that, for a time, captivated a populace enchanted with Art Nouveau. At least, they fascinated the public until styles shifted toward the more minimal appeal of modernism, which took root after World War I. As Parrott noted, 'Tiffany's work had fallen deeply out of favor by the mid-1930s,' which explained why Neustadt was able to begin his collection for $12.50. A Tiffany 'Wisteria' table lamp, made around 1905 from more than 2,000 pieces of cascading glass, will be exhibited by the DeLorenzo Gallery at TEFAF New York. Such items today can carry a price in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and have been known to sell for well over $1 million at auction. In 2018, a 'Pond Lily' table lamp brought $3.37 million at Christie's. How much people are willing to pay for a piece of Tiffany's history is not the only thing that has changed over the decades. A 2007 exhibition at the New York Historical, to which Neustadt had donated 132 of his lamps before his death, revealed something that had previously gone uncelebrated: the role of women in Tiffany's company. This centrality of female employees, known as Tiffany girls, was discovered when two scholars — Nina Gray and Martin Eidelberg — separately yet almost simultaneously unearthed letters written by Clara Driscoll to her family. 'The correspondence describes her work as a designer and department supervisor as well as the goings-on at Tiffany Studios,' Rebecca Klassen, the curator of material culture at the New York Historical, said in an email interview. Driscoll ran the Women's Glass Cutting Department, which was formed in 1892 in response to a strike by the Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters Union, which allowed only men to be members. Tiffany had needed workers to complete windows and mosaics for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, officially known as the World's Columbian Exposition, Klassen said. 'But it was also his belief that women had better color sensitivity and feel for naturalistic design than men,' she added. 'Women had an undeniable impact on the output of Tiffany Studios.' In an email interview, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, a curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, called herself 'somewhat of a crusader' for Agnes Northrop, whom Frelinghuysen described as one of Tiffany's most important female employees and 'an extraordinary designer.' Where Driscoll was behind many of Tiffany's lamps, Northrop's visions came to life in the studios' large-scale landscape windows, including one installed last November at the Met. The three-panel window that was commissioned by Sarah Cochran, a philanthropist and leader in the coal industry, and conceived by Northrop, offers a glimpse into the craftsmanship that is at the heart of Tiffany's glasswork, and the skilled women behind it. 'In our window alone, I have estimated over 10,000 individual pieces of glass,' Frelinghuysen said. Ninety years after the Neustadts acquired their first piece of Tiffany's history, the lamps are back in favor. 'Once again, 'Tiffany' lamps are everywhere, from tattoos to culture,' notes the prospectus of a new traveling exhibition from the Neustadt Collection, 'Tiffany or Ti-phony? A Story of Desire,' which will be on view at Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wis., from January to May 2026. Beth Mintzer, a tattoo artist who is based in Los Angeles, did her first Tiffany-style ink on a friend when she was learning how to tattoo in 2021. Since then, she has done so many that she has called her business Lamp Lady Tattoo. 'I love them as a tattoo subject because I can't imagine it being something that you grow out of with age,' Mintzer said by email. 'Younger generations have grown to seek out more unique, one-of-a-kind home décor pieces that have their own character and charm, and Tiffany lamps definitely fit that description,' she added. Parrott said she thought that recent enthusiasm for Tiffany stemmed from nostalgia, 'a nostalgia for what is perceived to be simpler, less complicated times.' Klassen also suggested that younger generations' fondness for Tiffany lamps was linked to nostalgia. 'However, that era is not the turn of the 20th century,' she said. Instead they were referencing, in their tattoos and décor choices, the Tiffanyesque lamps of 1980s restaurants, and the lamps their parents decorated with. 'Authentic Tiffany lamps command prices that are out of reach for many, so it makes sense to me that these more accessible iterations are a base of inspiration,' Klassen said. While Frelinghuysen said she found the Tiffany-inspired ink 'fascinating,' she could not explain it. 'I would like to think that the more the public is aware and learns about the subject, the more they appreciate it,' Frelinghuysen said, adding that Northrop's recently installed window had been incredibly well received. 'Perhaps during these ever more challenging times we are living in right now, it provides some joy and solace.'
New York Times
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Eunice Golden, Artist Who Mapped the Male Nude, Dies at 98
Eunice Golden, whose bold paintings of male nudes challenged ideas about feminism, art and sexuality — although, like many of her peers, she was not recognized as a pioneer until her later years — died on April 3 at her home in East Hampton, N.Y., a week before a retrospective of her early work opened at the Duane Thomas gallery in TriBeCa. She was 98. Her death was announced by her longtime partner, Walter Weissman. When Ms. Golden started painting in the 1960s, she was a suburban housewife and mother of two, and she chose the male nude as her subject. There was tension in her marriage, she was frustrated with the political system, and, as she wrote years later in an essay for the feminist journal Heresies, she took her concerns into the studio. She wanted imagery, she said, that would allow her to explore what she was feeling as a woman and as an artist. At the time, many feminist artists were focusing on the body, but mostly on their own bodies, in an effort to reclaim the female nude after centuries of interpretation by male artists. Ms. Golden's early work was singular, even among artists exploring the male anatomy. Alice Neel had been painting male nudes for decades — her 1933 portrait of Joe Gould, the eccentric Greenwich Village character and author made famous by Joseph Mitchell, depicted him as a manic devil with three penises. Sylvia Sleigh, a contemporary of Ms. Golden's, was getting noticed for her nude portraits of her friends, notably her painting of a group of amiable-looking hipsters very much of their 1970s moment. But Ms. Golden's nudes were not portraits. She focused on genitals and limbs, rendering them as landscapes — as male topographies — using strong, gestural brushwork in her paintings or firm charcoal lines in her drawings. Her penises were almost always erect. When the critic Harold Rosenberg of The New Yorker asked her why, she told him, 'I don't tell my models how to pose.' But instinct often took over, and Ms. Golden recalled drawing 'fast and furious to capture the moment.' The work was multithemed. Ms. Golden was investigating her own sexual experiences and fantasies. She was protesting the age-old bias against women being allowed to depict male nudes. And she was using the idea of a literal male landscape as a proxy for what she felt was a barrage of phallic imagery in everything from architecture to advertising. Her penises were often enormous. 'Study for a Flag' (1974) is six feet tall and fills the canvas, though it tilts, like the Tower of Pisa, hinting at its fall. (To show its scale, Mr. Weissman, a photographer, took a photo of Ms. Golden, who was 5-foot-3, standing next to it.) When that work was not chosen for 'Sons and Others: How Women See Men,' a 1975 show at the Queens Museum of work by female artists whose subjects were men, Ms. Golden was furious. She was told, 'It doesn't fit the theme.' Male museum curators and gallerists frequently turned her away, typically with lewd comments. Some felt personally cowed by the subject. 'How could I measure up to that?' was a typical response. Male critics were also dismissive. In 1971, Ms. Golden was one of 10 artists living at Westbeth, the new artists' housing in Manhattan's West Village, who put on a show of their work. Hilton Kramer of The New York Times singled out Ms. Golden in his review. 'There is nothing at all quiet about the paintings and drawings of Eunice Golden, the only woman in the show,' he wrote. 'Her principal image is the phallus, which is depicted with an obsessive insistence. Unfortunately, the level of draftsmanship is art‐school academic, and the painting is simply inept.' Even Ms. Neel once challenged her, saying, as Mr. Weissman recalled, ''Eunice, why are you doing these kinds of paintings?' And Eunice replied, 'Someone has to.'' Eunice Wiener was born on Feb. 18, 1927, in Brooklyn to Jean (Gurtov) Wiener and Samuel Wiener, who owned a metal machine company in Lower Manhattan. She grew up in the Manhattan Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, studied psychology for a year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and married Jack Goldenberg, an auctioneer and sculptor, when she was 19. Years later, she returned to college, earning a bachelor's degree from Empire State University in Manhattan in 1978 and a master's degree in fine arts from Brooklyn College in 1980. She and Mr. Goldenberg settled in Scarsdale, N.Y., where they had two children. She began painting, shortening her name to Golden because Goldenberg, she said, was too long a signature to fit on a canvas. Theirs was a bohemian household in a sea of suburban sameness, said Robin Golden, Ms. Golden's daughter (who also shortened her surname). In 1969, Ms. Golden divorced her husband and headed to New York City, eventually moving into Westbeth. Besides her paintings and drawings, she made photographs of male and female nudes that she had painted with geometric shapes or wrapped in cellophane. She spoofed motion-studies photos with a depiction of a penis in various stages of arousal. And in 1973, she made a short film, 'Blue Bananas and Other Meats,' which shows a woman's hands decorating a penis with a cornucopia of food, including chocolate syrup and bananas — something of a homage to a Meret Oppenheim performance piece from 1959, except that Oppenheim served her feast on a woman. It would take a women's cooperative to regularly show her work. Ms. Golden was an original member of Soho20, which opened on Spring Street in 1973. Other members included Ms. Sleigh as well as Joan Glueckman and Mary Ann Gillies, who jointly founded the gallery. 'She spoke of feeling censored at all moments of her life,' said Aliza Edelman, who curated a show of Ms. Golden's recent work, richly colored paintings that look like giant and otherworldly plant life, at the Sapar gallery in TriBeCa in 2020. 'She really did consider censorship as a rape of the mind and the soul, and she fought an uphill battle for most of her life and career. Yet she was confident and fearless, and felt like she deserved to have a place in history.' In addition to Mr. Weissman and her daughter, Ms. Golden is survived by her granddaughter. Her son, Carl Goldenberg, died in 1995. In 2003, the Mitchell Algus Gallery in Chelsea organized a retrospective of Ms. Golden's work, one of a series of exhibitions Mr. Algus presented that year of overlooked and unsung feminist artists working in the late 1960s and 1970s. Holland Cotter, in his review for The Times, noted that the show conveyed 'a sense of the political anger, antic humor and conceptual experimentation that characterized the tangy first wave of the women's movement.' 'Ms. Golden's 1970s paintings are of particular interest,' he added. 'Some prefigure the work by younger artists now, as in the case of a tall, scroll-like biomorphic piece that suggests a proto-Carroll Dunham. Others perform exploratory surgery on artists from Courbet to Magritte. Still others, like the three-panel 'Triptych for the Bicentennial' (1975), with its half-abstract merging of bodies and maps, prove how quiet and beautiful political art can be.'
CNN
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
The world's largest architectural model captures New York City in the '90s
The Empire State building stands approximately 15 inches tall, whereas the Statue of Liberty measures at just under two inches without its base. At this scale, even ants would be too big to represent people in the streets below. These lifelike miniatures of iconic landmarks can be found on the Panorama — which, at 9,335 square feet, is the largest model of New York City, meticulously hand-built at a scale of 1:1,200. The sprawling model sits in its own room at the Queens Museum, where it was first installed in the 1960s, softly rotating between day and night lighting as visitors on glass walkways are given a bird's eye view of all five boroughs of the city. To mark the model's 60th anniversary, which was celebrated last year, the museum has published a new book offering a behind-the-scenes look at how the Panorama was made. Original footage of the last major update to the model, completed in 1992, has also gone on show at the museum as part of a 12-minute video that features interviews with some of the renovators. The Queens Museum's assistant director of archives and collections, Lynn Maliszewski, who took CNN on a visit of the Panorama in early March, said she hopes the book and video will help to draw more visitors and attention to the copious amount of labor — over 100 full-time workers, from July 1961 to April 1964 — that went into building the model. 'Sometimes when I walk in here, I get goosebumps, because this is so representative of dreams and hopes and family and struggle and despair and excitement… every piece of the spectrum of human emotion is here (in New York) happening at the same time,' said Maliszewski. 'It shows us things that you can't get when you're on the ground.' The Panorama was originally built for the 1964 New York World's Fair, then the largest international exhibition in the US, aimed at spotlighting the city's innovation. The fair was overseen by Robert Moses, the influential and notorious urban planner whose highway projects displaced hundreds of thousands New Yorkers. When Moses commissioned the Panorama, which had parts that could be removed and redesigned to determine new traffic patterns and neighborhood designs, he saw an opportunity to use it as a city planning tool. Originally built and revised with a margin of error under 1%, the model was updated multiple times before the 1990s, though it is now frozen in time. According to Maliszewski, it cost over $672,000 to make in 1964 ($6.8 million in today's money) and nearly $2 million (about $4.5 million today) was spent when it was last revised in 1992. As to why the Panorama hasn't had another update since, Maliszewski believes that the labor and financial resources required to capture three decades of new buildings would be 'unparalleled.' Additionally, the unique nature of modelmaking requires specialists that are hard to come by. While the craft was once utilized by many architects, city planners and designers, it has largely been replaced by digital modeling, Maliszewski explained. Nonetheless, the model's historical accuracy adds to its charm. 'What we're looking at is January 1, 1992, which is bonkers, as far as thinking about how much has changed (and) how many whole neighborhoods would not even be recognizable if you shrunk yourself down and were on this model,' Maliszewski said. 'The world continues to evolve so quickly, right? But in (New York) city, infrastructurally, it's at an even faster clip.' The Panorama is supported by 497 steel legs, with layers of wood and foam that were sculpted to resemble the topography of New York City, according to the book. Tiny bridges made of brass and several acrylic cars, buses, trains and subway cars adorn the model, which was originally designed to be walked across by visitors — at least for the areas with flatter and smaller buildings and large waterways and parks. The model contains around 895,000 replica buildings, including brownstones and private homes, made through acrylic injection molding, and distinctive structures, such as skyscrapers, museums and churches, made from hand-painted wood and paper. From the five updates that took place between its original construction and the last renovation, the most prominent additions include the gigantic World Trade Center complex — the twin towers are still represented on the model — as well as Battery Park City, a former landfill that was redeveloped in the 1970s, and the Lincoln Center, the city's cornerstone for arts and culture. Among the notably missing new landmarks, however, is the Hudson Yards neighborhood (also home to one of CNN's headquarters), the High Line, a 1.45-mile-long walkway converted from a freight railroad in the late 2000s, and the numerous 'super-skinny' skyscrapers now dominating parts of the city's skyline. One of the crew members involved in the 1992 revision, Tom Jarrow, remembers seeing the model during the 1964-1965 World Fair, when he was about seven years old. At the time, there was a plastic tracked car 'helicopter' ride that circled around its perimeter, allowing riders to view the model city at a simulated 20,000 foot elevation. 'Looking at (the model), it's daunting to think that any set of human beings could create something so massive and large (with) so much detail,' Jarrow told CNN on a phone call. Jarrow, who had worked for Lester & Associates, the origin architectural modelmakers of the Panorama, for 15 years before starting his own exhibit specialist company, S-Tech Associates, recalled some of the meticulous tasks carried out during the renovation, which marked the only time the model, weighing about 45,000 pounds, had ever been removed from the room it currently sits in. Some of the labor included acid etching the finer details of the windows and doorways, casting hundreds of new shapes for additional buildings, and producing tiny trees and shrubbery from painted sponges. 'If we had 3D printers back then, it would have been fantastic — we could have 3D printed everything, but everything was done by hand,' Jarrow said. Jarrow's main work was electrical — the Panorama used to be lit up by over 3,000 tiny colored light bulbs that needed to be manually unscrewed each time one needed to be replaced. As part of the renovation, Jarrow updated the model with brighter lights, although he had to use technology that even at the time was considered outdated because of price restrictions, he recalled. 'There's miles and miles of wires underneath that model, and it's all low voltage lighting,' he said. Most of the bulbs, which originally served to color code different municipal facilities around the city, are no longer functioning today. Both Jarrow and Maliszewski agree that the current model would benefit from a more modernized lighting system that would be easier to manage, and also be more interactive for guests, which the museum is working to achieve by 2027 through a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Additionally, the museum would like to digitally add subway lines, which do not currently feature on the model but plays a key role in the average New Yorker's experience, said Maliszewski. To maintain the model's appearance, it is cleaned by the museum in its entirety at least twice a year. From dusting its intricate features with brushes of different sizes to using a low intensity vacuum to carefully suck up the dust, it's a process that can take up to two weeks, Maliszewski said. To finance the museum's efforts, a long-running program allows visitors to 'adopt' a piece of the model, whether that is their apartment building, a restaurant, a park or any other feature that speaks to them. By paying a yearly 'rent' or donation to the museum, they can receive a deed to owning a property on the model. 'This model brings out so much for people, as far as their history and nostalgia and memory,' Maliszewski said, adding it shows that 'we're really not that far apart from each other, even if you never leave your neighborhood, or if you never leave your borough… there's still millions of people just a few miles away from you.'
CNN
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
The world's largest architectural model captures New York City in the '90s
The Empire State building stands approximately 15 inches tall, whereas the Statue of Liberty measures at just under two inches without its base. At this scale, even ants would be too big to represent people in the streets below. These lifelike miniatures of iconic landmarks can be found on the Panorama — which, at 9,335 square feet, is the largest model of New York City, meticulously hand-built at a scale of 1:1,200. The sprawling model sits in its own room at the Queens Museum, where it was first installed in the 1960s, softly rotating between day and night lighting as visitors on glass walkways are given a bird's eye view of all five boroughs of the city. To mark the model's 60th anniversary, which was celebrated last year, the museum has published a new book offering a behind-the-scenes look at how the Panorama was made. Original footage of the last major update to the model, completed in 1992, has also gone on show at the museum as part of a 12-minute video that features interviews with some of the renovators. The Queens Museum's assistant director of archives and collections, Lynn Maliszewski, who took CNN on a visit of the Panorama in early March, said she hopes the book and video will help to draw more visitors and attention to the copious amount of labor — over 100 full-time workers, from July 1961 to April 1964 — that went into building the model. 'Sometimes when I walk in here, I get goosebumps, because this is so representative of dreams and hopes and family and struggle and despair and excitement… every piece of the spectrum of human emotion is here (in New York) happening at the same time,' said Maliszewski. 'It shows us things that you can't get when you're on the ground.' The Panorama was originally built for the 1964 New York World's Fair, then the largest international exhibition in the US, aimed at spotlighting the city's innovation. The fair was overseen by Robert Moses, the influential and notorious urban planner whose highway projects displaced hundreds of thousands New Yorkers. When Moses commissioned the Panorama, which had parts that could be removed and redesigned to determine new traffic patterns and neighborhood designs, he saw an opportunity to use it as a city planning tool. Originally built and revised with a margin of error under 1%, the model was updated multiple times before the 1990s, though it is now frozen in time. According to Maliszewski, it cost over $672,000 to make in 1964 ($6.8 million in today's money) and nearly $2 million (about $4.5 million today) was spent when it was last revised in 1992. As to why the Panorama hasn't had another update since, Maliszewski believes that the labor and financial resources required to capture three decades of new buildings would be 'unparalleled.' Additionally, the unique nature of modelmaking requires specialists that are hard to come by. While the craft was once utilized by many architects, city planners and designers, it has largely been replaced by digital modeling, Maliszewski explained. Nonetheless, the model's historical accuracy adds to its charm. 'What we're looking at is January 1, 1992, which is bonkers, as far as thinking about how much has changed (and) how many whole neighborhoods would not even be recognizable if you shrunk yourself down and were on this model,' Maliszewski said. 'The world continues to evolve so quickly, right? But in (New York) city, infrastructurally, it's at an even faster clip.' The Panorama is supported by 497 steel legs, with layers of wood and foam that were sculpted to resemble the topography of New York City, according to the book. Tiny bridges made of brass and several acrylic cars, buses, trains and subway cars adorn the model, which was originally designed to be walked across by visitors — at least for the areas with flatter and smaller buildings and large waterways and parks. The model contains around 895,000 replica buildings, including brownstones and private homes, made through acrylic injection molding, and distinctive structures, such as skyscrapers, museums and churches, made from hand-painted wood and paper. From the five updates that took place between its original construction and the last renovation, the most prominent additions include the gigantic World Trade Center complex — the twin towers are still represented on the model — as well as Battery Park City, a former landfill that was redeveloped in the 1970s, and the Lincoln Center, the city's cornerstone for arts and culture. Among the notably missing new landmarks, however, is the Hudson Yards neighborhood (also home to one of CNN's headquarters), the High Line, a 1.45-mile-long walkway converted from a freight railroad in the late 2000s, and the numerous 'super-skinny' skyscrapers now dominating parts of the city's skyline. One of the crew members involved in the 1992 revision, Tom Jarrow, remembers seeing the model during the 1964-1965 World Fair, when he was about seven years old. At the time, there was a plastic tracked car 'helicopter' ride that circled around its perimeter, allowing riders to view the model city at a simulated 20,000 foot elevation. 'Looking at (the model), it's daunting to think that any set of human beings could create something so massive and large (with) so much detail,' Jarrow told CNN on a phone call. Jarrow, who had worked for Lester & Associates, the origin architectural modelmakers of the Panorama, for 15 years before starting his own exhibit specialist company, S-Tech Associates, recalled some of the meticulous tasks carried out during the renovation, which marked the only time the model, weighing about 45,000 pounds, had ever been removed from the room it currently sits in. Some of the labor included acid etching the finer details of the windows and doorways, casting hundreds of new shapes for additional buildings, and producing tiny trees and shrubbery from painted sponges. 'If we had 3D printers back then, it would have been fantastic — we could have 3D printed everything, but everything was done by hand,' Jarrow said. Jarrow's main work was electrical — the Panorama used to be lit up by over 3,000 tiny colored light bulbs that needed to be manually unscrewed each time one needed to be replaced. As part of the renovation, Jarrow updated the model with brighter lights, although he had to use technology that even at the time was considered outdated because of price restrictions, he recalled. 'There's miles and miles of wires underneath that model, and it's all low voltage lighting,' he said. Most of the bulbs, which originally served to color code different municipal facilities around the city, are no longer functioning today. Both Jarrow and Maliszewski agree that the current model would benefit from a more modernized lighting system that would be easier to manage, and also be more interactive for guests, which the museum is working to achieve by 2027 through a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Additionally, the museum would like to digitally add subway lines, which do not currently feature on the model but plays a key role in the average New Yorker's experience, said Maliszewski. To maintain the model's appearance, it is cleaned by the museum in its entirety at least twice a year. From dusting its intricate features with brushes of different sizes to using a low intensity vacuum to carefully suck up the dust, it's a process that can take up to two weeks, Maliszewski said. To finance the museum's efforts, a long-running program allows visitors to 'adopt' a piece of the model, whether that is their apartment building, a restaurant, a park or any other feature that speaks to them. By paying a yearly 'rent' or donation to the museum, they can receive a deed to owning a property on the model. 'This model brings out so much for people, as far as their history and nostalgia and memory,' Maliszewski said, adding it shows that 'we're really not that far apart from each other, even if you never leave your neighborhood, or if you never leave your borough… there's still millions of people just a few miles away from you.'
