What City College got for its money is an uneven body of work, which does, however, help to warm up the library's cavernous interior. These and others in the group were purchased under the city's "percent for art" law, which mandates that 1 percent of the cost of a new public building be spent on art. Among the worthier examples are "North and South" (1983), a majestic mountain-and-cloudscape by April Gornik, and Gregory Amenoff's "Rito Canyon" (1983), a powerful composition of organic forms.
Its Downtown New York Collection, begun in 1994 to document the downtown art scene, includes the archives and art of the painter David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), among other artists and performers.Īt the Morris Raphael Cohen Library at the City College of New York, housed in a huge and spectacularly ugly building put up in the 1980's, a number of works by contemporary artists hang high on the walls of the library's public spaces. Devoted to the English and American novel and New York writing, the Fales owns more than 200,000 volumes and a huge collection of archival material, housed in its own quarters on the third floor of the Elmer Bobst Library.
More open to the general public is the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University. Still, the Avery has lent a wonderful group of four of them, done by Stettheimer at her peak, to the current show at the Jewish Museum, "The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons," where any viewer (who pays the museum's admission fee) can enjoy them. The paintings were bequeathed by the estate of her sister, Ettie, to Columbia and other institutions around the country.Īt Columbia, the works are hung in an area restricted to scholars and researchers. At her best, Stettheimer, a sophisticated primitive, produced playfully fanciful versions of her own life and the doings of avant-garde friends who frequented her salons. In some institutions, notably the public libraries, the art is freely available for viewing by the general public in others, access is more limited.Ĭolumbia University's Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, for example, has a large number of paintings by the New York artist Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). But the pending sale does direct attention to the fact that there is, on a lesser scale, highly viewable art of one sort or another in other local libraries and branches, including ones in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, as well as in university and private libraries. Let's hope that the treasures go to another institution, preferably local, where they will still be available to the general public. But maintaining that it is not a museum, the library has from time to time put works up for sale, and recently announced that it would dispose of the cream of its art collection to raise money to buy books and manuscripts and to pep up its endowment. Nevertheless, significant works of art have found their way into many libraries, some acquired by purchase but most by donation.Ī large case in point is the main building of the New York Public Library, which over the years has received an impressive array of art from important donors. Libraries are, as conventional wisdom suggests, about books rather than art objects. Could you borrow a painting or sculpture from your local library? It's not very likely.
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