The Matrix Is Everywhere:

I go for the tactical photo op in Neon Box Head, a 2008 piece made of neon and mirrors by trippy installation duo Assume Vivid Astro Focus that’s in “Never Ever Ever Land,” a group show at Anna Kustera gallery. It’s one of a number of immersive, participatory installations in New York right now, including Ernesto Neto at Bonakdar, Hélio Oiticica at Lelong, Lucio Fontana at Gagosian, and, most spectacularly, Cloud City, Tomás Saraceno’s constellation of large, interconnected modules, opening this week on the roof of the Met.

This proves that it’s more important than ever to wear flat, comfortable shoes when you’re looking at art (unless you’re actually working in gallery, in which case black pumps are OK). The Met offers even stricter guidelines for potential climbers of Cloud City: besides warning that no one with leather soles will be admitted, it advises women to consider wearing pants, given the transparent nature of the artist’s massive modules.

Accidental Tour Guide:

30 years (!) after my internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I returned to lecture to our Gallery Club. The theme: Using the collections for inspiration. Before we set off on a day of looking and sketching everywhere from Egypt to Oceania, I talked about what an encyclopedic museum really is. Then I gave our members tips for navigating the galleries when they come back on their own. Read more—and see the slide show—at niborama.com, the art blog of Mista Oh!’s youth development collective, Cre8tive YouTH*ink. 

Shop til you Drop: 

Someone’s in a fowl mood in Young Husband: First Marketing, a 1854 painting by Lilly Martin Spencer. A well-known genre painter in her day, Spencer is one of a few women artists represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly installed American-art galleries. 

Although men did the grocery shopping in Western states, as Met curator Carrie Rebora Barratt has noted, the scenario would have been unheard of in the East, and some press outlets denounced the picture for its demeaning representation of its clumsy male antihero.  

While it might be overdoing it to read a pre-feminist message in the comical scenario—about who is the weaker sex, and so on—it certainly provides a different image of men than most of the paintings in these rooms, whose protagonists tend toward cowboys and Revolutionary War heroes.

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art/Promised Gift of Max N. Berry.

Everything is Illuminated:

A dog chases a hare amidst a profusion of fantastical creatures and Gothic forms in the grammatical treatise that accompanies the Cervera Bible, a masterpiece of illumination made in Spain from 1299-1300.

The Bible is on loan from Lisbon’s National Library to the Metropolitan of Art, joining two other medieval Hebrew Bibles also on loan—one from Germany in the medieval department, and another from Spain in the newly inaugurated space for Art of the Arab Lands. This apparently unprecedented circumstance reflects, in part, the museum’s increasing effort to include Jewish objects in the narrative of art history its permanent-collection galleries tell.

Scholars are divided over whether animals in hunt scenes like this one had a symbolic meaning for Jews in Spain—of persecution or escape, for example—or whether they were purely decorative. “Sometimes a crossbow is just a crossbow,” one curator told me. So what about the dragons? 

Read more in my new article in Tablet.

Armed and multifarious:

Devi, the omnipresent embodiment of power and wisdom who is perhaps the most worshipped goddess in India, is about to hit the spotlight in New York. Next week the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens ”Mother India: The Goddess in Indian Painting,” a selection of paintings and sculptures of the deity, made over the last two thousand years, that depict her in various incarnations, from benign and maternal to empowering and fearsome. In this image, created around 1725 in the Bikaner district of Rajasthan, she’s a little bit of both: brandishing cosmic weapons, she takes the form of a Durga perched on a Lotus flower. 

Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Let My People Show: 

Ha Lachma Anya: Seders are later this month, but the invitation just went out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—via the fabulous medieval illuminations of the Washington Haggadah, dated 1478 by the scribe and illustrator Joel ben Simeon. (His horseradish references tell scholars he made it in his native Germany.) The book, owned by the Library of Congress, is part of a series of loans bringing Hebrew manuscripts to the medieval galleries. Also on view are German glass vessels, Italian ceramics, and other objects that look like the ones in the pictures.

Reproduced by permission of the publisher from The Washington Haggadah, by Joel ben Simeon, Cambridge, Mass.: Library of Congress and Harvard University Press, Copyright (c) 2011.