Julia Halperin

It is a commonly held and oft-repeated belief that students come to Columbia not only for the school itself, but also for the wider cultural education New York City provides. Visual art is, of course, one of the pillars of the city’s cultural offerings. But it is all too easy to cast your eyes to the Met or the MoMA and overlook the visual-art venues here on campus. Campus venues are almost never crowded, and provide convenient escapes from frenzied Columbia life. They are all over campus—you just need to know where to look.

Upon arriving on campus, the word “bar” takes on new meaning—it isn’t just for chocolate anymore. Indeed, bars in and around Morningside Heights are the hubs of late-night social activity.

The one-item food establishment has become an integral part of the Manhattan cuisine scene—restaurants devoted exclusively to macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, or cupcakes are charming in their gimmicky glory. A primary player in this class of restaurants, established long before its peers, is the burger joint.

The Chelsea Art Museum
If you’ve ever wanted to get an idea of what pre- and post-Soviet art looks like, then you’re in luck! Head downtown to the Chelsea Art Museum where the exhibition “Moscow-New York=Parallel Play: Selections from the Kolodzei Art Foundation Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art” has found a home where it can be less polemic.

Antonio Ferrera still sounds tired. Reflecting on the documentary The Gates, a chronicle of environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s February 2005 installation, the co-director of the film admitted with a surprising amount of candor right at the beginning of our interview: “I didn’t know what I was in for. I didn’t know it was going to be so hard.”

After visiting Beth Campbell’s installation on the first floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, you’ll never complain again that all dorm rooms look the same.

One of Lawrence Weiner's works of art currently on display at the Whitney Museum is A Square Removal From a Rug in Use. But if you go to the Whitney to look for this work, don't scan the floor for a square of blue shag or a richly colored oriental rug with a piece missing—look at the wall.

When you walk into a gallery, you usually know that you are in the right place—there’s art on the walls, an information desk, signs that tell you what exhibition is on display.

If you’ve missed watching the leaves change in your New England hometown and want to remember what it feels like to walk among tree trunks, Martin Puryear’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is not the show for you.

If you are going to write a play about star-crossed lovers, you had better have something new to say. Rifka Milder wrestles with a similar challenge in her attempts to bring a new sensibility to a potentially overused subject. In her solo show “Reflections,” Milder goes where many artists have gone before—Central Park.

It seems improbable that one could find peace and quiet in a building on Madison Avenue with a line around the block. But the Rudolf Stingel show at the Whitney Museum of American Art offers an unlikely respite from the gritty and frenzied streets of New York.

In an era of podcasts and cell-phone tours, it seems that any handheld digital device can offer information about your favorite artwork. But what of the traditional audio tour? Unlike the manifold podcasts available on museum Web sites, audio tours are not designed for a specific age group or demographic.