THE URBAN EXPERIENCE

April 14 through May 31, 2014 

The center of civility in our society is not the small town but the big city, where you learn to thread your way through heavy traffic and subdue your aggressiveness and extend kindness to strangers.

Garrison Keillor
A Prairie Home Companion Jan. 12, 2010

According to a recent article in The New York Times, for the first time in recorded history most people on our planet live in cities.  THE URBAN EXPERIENCE is a glimpse into the range and variety that city life offers both residents and visitors.  This exhibition is but a small sample of city life in the first half of the twentieth century. 

Cities are home to rich people and poor people and everyone in between.  The contrast in subject matter and mood could not be more conspicuous than considering the Park scene on a spring day by Harriette Bowdoin with the misery in Reginald Marsh’s Bowery scene.  Bernece Berkman gives us an industrial scene rendered in bright happy colors while Herman Menzel displays nothing but grime and gloom in his picture of Cal-Sag harbor. 

The serene gentility visible in Colin Campbell Cooper’s depiction of Hunter College is in sharp contrast to Jerome Myers Houston Street with a single woman walking to market on the lower East Side.   A wide range of styles are evident during this period.  Consider that Louis Lozowick’s modernist 57th Street (Rubber Center) and Harry Sternberg’s Elevated Platform were created at the same time. 

There are about thirty works in this exhibition which will be on display until May 31st.  A thumbnail catalog is attached and will be available during the show.