Museums - Lisa Burke Simon

Yep, there’s no way I can go to New York and NOT go to a museum!

This trip, I returned to The Whitney and explored, for the first time, two new museums.

After reading the book, The Personal Librarian about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white, I knew I wanted to visit The Morgan Library.

Around the corner from where I stay when visiting New York is the New York Historical Society Museum and Library, which I decided to happily explore this trip.

The Whitney

Untitled (PF.1016, Eucalyptus Grove), 1961, ink on coated paper on board

Untitled (FF.1211, Paul Lanier on Patterned Blanket), 1961, felt-tipped pen on paper on board

Untitled by Malcolm Bailey, 1969, acrylic on composition board. Malcolm Bailey based this painting on diagrams of a ship carrying abducted Africans to the Americas that were published in 1780 by an English abolitionist group.

Early Sunday Morning by Edward Hopper, 1930, oil on canvas

Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918, oil on canvas

Hart Island Crew by Kambui Olujimi, 2020, watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper. Hart Island, off the Bronx coast, is a potter’s field that was run by the city’s department of correction until 2021. It has served as a burial ground for the city during numerous epidemics. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 deaths overwhelmed the city’s morgues, incarcerated people were brought in to dig trenches as long as football fields, where coffins would be stack three deep.