more art in New York

And what do I bring you today?  Beans!  Lots of yellow beans!  Oh, umm, whooops - I'm meant to be looking at art, not wandering round Union Square Market wishing I had a kitchen.  I was about to spend a lot of time with Maya Lin's Ghost Forest, in Madison Square Park:

forty-nine (dead) Atlantic white cedars taken from a stand in New Jersey's Pine Barrens that had been infiltrated by salt water, thanks to rising sea levels, and looking very much at home (if dead) in central NYC, with kids playing round them; people (like me) sitting on the grass with their backs up against them, and so on.  But ... they weren't entirely dead!  At least, the trees were, of course, but some of you will understand how delighted I was to find that their bark was covered in powdery grey-green lichen.

And then I (and my heavy camera - I'd brought it along to take some formal pics of the installation, which I did, but iPhone ones will have to suffice here) went off to the Whitney, and the Jasper Johns show - or rather, half of it: the other half is in Philadelphia.

There is, to be honest, only a certain amount of flags and forks that I can take, even although repetition (rather than multiples themselves) had me thinking about constancy of motifs throughout an artist's career.

But the view was terrific ...

and on the floor above, what was to me a much more fascinating show, Making Knowing: Craft in Art 1950-2019, with a huge amount of variety, from Charles LeDray's Milk and Honey I (1994-96) - 2,000 miniature and non-identical tiny porcelain vessels; to

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt's A Rite of Passage: The Velvet Cat Tail and the Silk Tiger Lily (1987-88) - encapsulating memory and desire, for him ...

to Marie Watt's Skywalker/Skyscraper (Axis Mundi) (2012) in which blankets - reaching for the sky, grounding us, since we are received in blankets, and leave in blankets - are pierced by an I-beam, referencing the Mohawk ironworkers who built many of Manhattan's skyscrapers in the 1920s, with, in the background, an extraordinary thing - part woman, part dwelling, part woven raffia, part pot: Simone Leigh's Cupboard VIII (2018).

And then a walk down the (very crowded) High Line.  

I should say - these weren't necessarily my favorite works, or the most interesting ones, but I liked these particular photos of them the best ...