Cool Course: Introduction to Galleries and Museums of NYC

The popular class offered by NYU Steinhardt encourages students to explore one of the visual art capitals of the world.

Students stand on a sidewalk next to a graffiti-covered wall — On their tour of Chelsea, Darts and his class stop outside Comme des Garçons, a Japanese designer clothing boutique, which has a brushed aluminum tunnel entrance and an evolving gallery of street art. Photo by Tracey Friedman/NYU.

Broken pieces of personal computers are piled into a corner of one gallery. Others display an old electrical junction box, a city street sign, and a pre-digital billboard—all a part of a discarded urban environment.

These items and a host of other recycled and reclaimed objects are featured in The Gatherers, an exhibition of sculpture, assemblage, painting, and video on view at PS1 in Queens. On a recent Thursday afternoon, NYU students in Associate Professor of Art David Darts’s Introduction to Galleries and Museums of NYC course had spent about an hour exploring the former public school building that is now affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Stopping in front an upside down junkyard claw, Darts waited as the bud-shaped hunk of metal clunked open petal by petal, resembling a flower.

“Try to look at it as an aesthetic object,” he said. “It’s cool to find beauty in what is otherwise used for demolition.”

Students gather in a museum hallway — Students and Prof. Darts gather at the entrance of the Kurimanzutto Gallery. Photo by Tracey Friedman/NYU.

Darts paired PS1 and the Sculpture Center, also in Queens, for the fourth meeting of the course that is offered in the Department of Art and Art Professions in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

“We focus on contemporary art, which is something that New York really showcases,” Darts said. “The course provides a language to discuss art, so they can stand in front of a work and talk about it, ask questions about it, and form an opinion about it.”

The course explores the different types of institutions that make up the city’s arts ecosystem. At the Brooklyn Museum, they visited The Dinner Party, an iconic installation by Judy Chicago. Another session met in Chelsea, where they powered through 10 commercial galleries, viewing new work by Sophie Calle at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Romanian artist Andra Ursuta at David Zwirner, and a group show curated by Gabriel Orozco at Kurimanzutto. They also visited Dia: Chelsea, a nonprofit art museum that was showing Duane Linklater: 12 + 2, an exhibition of sculpture, music, and dance.

Students stand in a large open gallery space with sculptures. — Students explore an exhibition at Dia: Chelsea. Photo by Tracey Friedman/NYU.

While at the galleries, Darts asked each student to pick one work they would like to buy and to photograph it. Afterward, they had to answer a few questions about living with their choice, including where and how they would display it and how their relationship to it might change as it becomes part of their daily routine.

Upcoming sessions will meet at flagship institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Darts begins each session with a short discussion about the institution’s history and mission and noteworthy pieces in the exhibitions, giving students crucial context for what they will see. They move through the galleries together, with Darts sometimes pointing out themes or asking questions. During each session, he sends a questionnaire that is tailored to the exhibition on view. For The Gatherers, a show of 14 artists who reuse and reimagine objects that have been discarded, Darts asked them to consider how the artists transformed familiar material into something new, how the works comment on patterns of consumption, and how the artists evoke ideas about waste and excess.

A student stands in front of a pink glass sculpture. — A student looks at a work in the David Zwirner Gallery. Photo by Tracey Friedman/NYU.

Nicoleta Jantoan, an art history student from NYU Abu Dhabi who is studying in New York this semester, responded strongly to the exhibition’s themes.

“I saw The Gatherings as a reflection of our society, of the waste we unconsciously produce and the ways we try to dispose of it. We simply cannot. And funny enough, the waste never stops chasing us. It follows us even in the museum,” Nicoleta said. “It might seem challenging and not ‘beautiful’ to see ‘garbage’ in a museum, but I think it is necessary.”

Throughout the semester, students will learn about how curation and exhibition design shape their encounters with art, and they are encouraged to expand their definition of art. While some have studied art and or art history, many are novices, Darts says.

“They won’t necessarily like all the work but they may develop a taste for it, or they may hate it and that’s okay,” he said. “Questions about why you don’t like it, or what about it upsets you—those can be very interesting, too.”

The course’s midterm evaluates students’ knowledge of the art they have seen and their skills at close observation and analysis, and the final exam covers the second group of sites as well as course readings and visual art vocabulary.

Two students stand in front of wall-mounted art pieces — Students interacting with work on view in the Paula Cooper Gallery, one of a dozen stops they made in Chelsea. Photo by Tracey Friedman/NYU.

An elective for Steinhardt studio art majors, the course is also popular with students from other schools and programs, who enjoy its nonclassroom structure. Each week, students are expected to get themselves to the assigned institution, which can be educational, too.

“It gives them a rich understanding of the cultural landscape of New York City, the effects of gentrification, the changing nature of the city, and the role of artists in it,” Darts said.

Nicoleta pointed to this as one of the reasons she enrolled.

“I am beyond grateful that I got the chance to become more familiar with the arts scene in the Big Apple,” she said, adding that this is her first time in New York. “While I am trying to make the most out of my time here, such as going to performances, musicals, and exploring other states, this course represents a hands-on experience of what I have been studying in my art history classes.”

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