Museum Legs Events in June

The lovely Andie Sehl hosted a Museum Legs party in her home.  I completely forgot how knowledgeable New Yorkers are about museums.  Andie happens to live a stone's throw from the Museum of Natural History.  I spoke briefly and then the first question was only answerable if you had read a particular article in the New York Times two days prior -- which miraculously I had.  Overall, it was the most spirited and informed Q&A on the Museum Legs record.  Sometimes I participated and sometimes I watched.  Someone clearly knew line items of the New York Historical Society budget.  These institutions were their neighbors over decades.  Everyone had well seasoned opinions and insights.

It was also a collection of Andie's old friends, and so there was a lot of love in the room, and really good fun.  We were under the umbrella of Andie's demonstrable hospitality:

Here's Andie, left, with her longtime neighbor and friend, Sydney:

I was lucky to have a second Museum Legs event of the month, speaking to the assembled students of the Smith College Summer Institute in Museum Studies on their fieldtrip to New York.  The event took place at the Kress Institute on the Upper East Side.  Here are their fearless leaders, Katy Kline and Marion Goethals:

I had come straight from the office on a day I had also experimented with wearing a new Uniqlo dress which, it turns out, has a really short hemline.  Here I am, sweater over lap for the panel.  I also seem to be very busy eating a sandwich:

The purpose of the talk was to educate students on paths in graduate study and career placement in the arts and museums.  The other speakers, apart from one conservator, were actual representatives of institutions of higher learning.  It went from 'here are the many programs of Sotheby's,' to 'here are the many programs of Bard,' to 'here I am to tell you about the wholly unaccredited program of a little bit of everything in a non-linear path.'  I tend to be a very private person, but the Q&A included some personal and financial questions one feels compelled to give an honest answer to, since a lot of people suffer lack of information and conversation, particularly around taking out debt for school.

I had happened to know Marion Goethals slightly from her job as a deputy head of the Williams College Art Museum and my illustrious and brief early career as a relief receptionist for someone on maternity leave there.  But I was invited by Katy Kline, mother of my friend Ethan, and former director of Bowdoin and MIT museums.  Katy is also someone to whom I am forever indebted not just for her thoughtful responses and offers of conversation as a reader of Museum Legs, but for spotting what I hope are the last two typos in the book, literally the last day before it went fully to press.  


Ethan jokes that art historians overuse the word "juxtapose."  So we were given the assignment to document out meet-up using this word as a theme:

Ethan is also coiner of my all-time favorite line about art.  If you don't like something, you simply say, "I don't have any affinity with that work."

It's shocking how often that sentence comes in handy.  And how often you find no word buy "juxtapose" will do.