A Forum for Diary Entries, Essays, Observations, Poetry, News, and Reviews
September 29th, 2023
The term “art in the park” has many connotations and, depending upon your definition, it can take a number of different forms. Following the thematic thread of my last four journal posts, which embrace the notion of Central Park as a naturalistic and architecturally embellished landscape that is a great work art in and of itself, is the story of the park conceived as being a ready-made outdoor art gallery with a congenial circulation system. To walk through it, enter here with me and read about the artist Christo’s consideration of the current surface of Central Park as a gallery floor upon which to erect an all-encompassing extraneous work of land art. READ MORE >
September 8th, 2023
Although Central Park’s beauty is innate to its site, it is fundamentally a work of nature and art fused into a single imaginative design. Contributing to this outcome was an often-overlooked collaborator with Olmsted and Vaux, the architect, Jacob Wrey Mould, as can be seen by my journalistic tour of some of his most beautiful design contributions to Central Park, including Bethesda Terrace. READ MORE >
July 31st, 2023
Because Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux used the existing schist bedrock foundations and outcrops as well as hundreds of thousands of cartloads of soil imported from New Jersey and Long Island to build Central Park according to their Greensward plan with its bedrock-based and bedrock-strewn glaciated topography, this 830-acre landscape can be considered to be a work of land art, a stylistic precursor of the 1960s and ‘70s movement to use on-site natural elements and related open spaces to build large landscapes of a conceptual nature. READ MORE >
July 14th, 2023
We live in an ever-changing world in which intention, necessity, warfare, and time are the great transformational agents of places. The result is a historically layered palimpsest of appearance, both hidden and visible. Think of Central Park as a prime example of how stasis combined with alteration constitutes the landscapes of the world. A fine perspective from which to sample this is atop Summit Rock on the western edge of the park between 83rd and 85th Streets. Join me here for a below- and above-ground view that includes the recent celebration on Summit Rock of Juneteenth, the recently declared national holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States. READ MORE >
July 10th, 2023
Central Park’s bold rock outctops of Manhattan Mica schist have a smoothness and sheen caused by their scouring by passage of glacial ice over 20,000 years ago. The prominence these rock outcrops in Frederick Law Olmsted’s and Calvert Vaux’s 1857 design for Central Park is an incomparable feat of nature-based landscape architecture for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation, physical enjoyment, and structural support for constructions dedicated to recreation, events, and in one case, long-term occupation. READ MORE >
February 15th, 2023
For arm-chair travelers in a time of restricted opportunities to foreign countries, a travel diary can provide a great vicarious vacation. Here you may relive with me a day-by-day account of my wedding trip to Venice in 1984 with my new husband Ted, and subsequent return on our first anniversary one year later. This was something more than a trip of a lifetime since Venice is not only a place of the heart for newly espoused lovers but also a great treasure house for art- and architecture-lovers that beckons you to visit again and again. Please climb now into my memory-laden gondola and follow my recaptured itinerary for an unforgettable experience of the glories of La Serenissima. READ MORE >
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