Good News for Artsy Women: We’re Gonna Make It After All

When you think about the Bronx, what building comes to mind? Is it, perhaps, a poured concrete and Plexiglass stadium? Unfortunately for architecture buffs, Yankee Stadium is the most well-recognized and well-loved building in the Bronx. But just because this borough has one renowned tourist attraction does not mean that there are no others to discover. The next time you head to the Bronx, leave the baseball cap at home and take a trip to the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts startles. Rising out of the exhaust of the Grand Concourse—a heavily trafficked thoroughfare—the building’s glistening edifice is perfect for catching shadows and reflecting afternoon sunlight. Indeed, the structure initially seems more appropriate for the elegant, waterfront settings of Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum or Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao than a congested New York causeway. But unlike the Milwaukee Museum or the Bilbao, the Bronx Museum presents an exciting structure without any architectural ostentation. Indeed, the museum transcends the congestion of its setting.

The most striking aspect of the façade is the vertical folds that extend out from the flat brick faces of the neighboring buildings. These angular protrusions are bold, but they do not clash with their surroundings. Capitalizing on geometry and straight lines, the façade’s architecture possesses a rhythm that gives the building a wonderful lightness. Like the folds of a Chinese screen, the façade defines the space around it and creates an air of intrigue.

The balance between light and clarity, exterior and interior, and art and public domain continues inside the building. The open arrangement of galleries, visible upon entrance to the building, creates an airiness and sense of immediate accessibility. The galleries rise together on the steep ramps, and a set of stairs leads to a series of simple, unadorned spaces. A mix of concrete and chiseled rock composes the floors and ceilings and gives the interior the same sense of bareness that defines the exterior.

The Bronx Museum’s current exhibition, “Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art and Community,” occupies part of the lobby and a small adjacent gallery. The show focuses on the groups and collectives that linked feminist art to its larger social context in the 1970s. Both the museum’s architecture and the exhibition within underscore a desire to engage the community and attract a diverse audience.

The show explores how collaborative performances and inclusive artwork broke away from the pre-established norms of art-making to produce something that reflected the changing ideas of artistic authorship and entitlement of the era. The artists on display make use of a variety of materials and mediums. Eschewing oil and canvas for video recorders and collaborative murals, the exhibit rejects both traditional materials and the prestige normally bestowed upon the male artists who used them.

A large mural called Activism Is Never Over, by the graffiti artists Lady Pink, Doña, Muck, and Toofly, voices these women’s demands for respect and responsibility. With empathetic intensity, the names of influential feminist thinkers from Betty Friedan and Jenny Holzer to Nina Simone are emblazoned across a boldly painted backdrop.

“Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art and Community” is more about the social context in which the art was created than it is about the subject matter of the art itself. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The feminist movement is all too often marginalized, and the Bronx Museum’s exhibit offers a refreshing, albeit serious, look at the movement—both at the time it occurred and its lasting resonance today.

Though the Bronx Museum holds the honor of being the borough’s oldest museum, it has neither the stifling affectations of the encyclopedic museum nor the pretensions of a contemporary art gallery. In both physical construction and ideological mission, it is built on the notion of merging art and the public.