This year, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is celebrating its 150th birthday, marked by an opening bash this past weekend. The 585-acre urban oasis of winding trails through forests, a sprawling lawn, and a serene lake, is as much a work of human engineering as nature. The landscape architecture team Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux guided the placement of each boulder and tree (using a custom tree-moving machine), with 2,000 workers planting flora and hand-digging the lake with picks and shovels. Glacial ponds from New York’s ice age were gently shaped into Victorian ideals, and touches like a dairy with live sheep and cows contributed to the rustic experience.
After Olmsted and Vaux had completed Central Park, which was established in 1857, they weren’t eager to take on another New York City park project. Olmsted wrote that he was frustrated at “accommodating myself to infernal scoundrels.” Yet Brooklyn philanthropist and politician James S. T. Stranahan helped convince the duo to cross the East River for greater creative freedom. When the park opened in 1867, it represented the height of their ideas on nature’s potential to morally elevate humanity.
The park has changed over the years. The dairy is gone, as are some questionable additions like a replica of Mount Vernon constructed in 1932 under Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. In the later 20th century, Prospect Park fell into disrepair, its recent revitalization led by the Prospect Park Alliance that formed in 1987. (Happy 30th to them!) Below, you can contrast the 19th-century park through selections from the New York Public Library’s collection of stereoscopic images, to photographs of the park in the 21st century. And if you want to see the stereo cards in motion, click over to the NYPL Stereogranimator to animate the archival views.
They Managed to Mess Up an Art Heist Movie
There must be a lesson in Vasilis Katsoupis’s film Inside about the vacuousness of the art market or the claustrophobia of exhibition spaces — I just don’t care.
Ten Painful Stories of the Dutch Colonial Slave Trade
The Rijksmuseum’s traveling show strives to remind us that we are all, in some way, a part of this chapter of human history, whose legacy continues today.
The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation Presents The Feminine in Abstract Painting
Curated by Jennifer Samet and Andrea Belag, this group exhibition in NYC explores the feminine through aesthetics, as opposed to identity or gender.
Textured Histories at Shiprock Santa Fe
The Santa Fe gallery features Indigenous textiles and jewelry from the early 19th century to today.
Renaissance Portrait of “Ugly Duchess” Likely Depicts a Man
A curator at London’s National Gallery believes the subject of painter Quinten Massys’s painting “is most likely a he.”
NYU Steinhardt Opens 2023 MFA Thesis Exhibitions
Taking place at 80WSE Gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village, Part I is on view from late March through April while Part II opens in May.
Hokusai’s “Great Wave” Makes a Splash at Auction
An edition of the iconic woodblock print broke records when it sold for $2.8M this week.
MTV’s The Exhibit Is Back With an Inflatable Dolphin
Episode four, in which artists tackled themes of justice and injustice, was the most lifeless of the reality TV show so far.
Miniature Worlds: Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson, Yayoi Kusama
Through small-scale works, this exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York examines Cornell’s prominent role in the lives and careers of Johnson and Kusama.
Florida Principal Ousted Over “Pornographic” Michelangelo Sculpture
Parents complained that the famous sculpture was shown to their sixth graders.
Tickets to Sold-Out Vermeer Show Are Going for Hundreds
The online resale market for the Rijksmuseum’s smash exhibition is booming, with tickets selling on eBay for over $2K.
The Wider World and Scrimshaw
On March 28, join the New Bedford Whaling Museum online and in-person for a symposium on global carving traditions from across the Pacific Rim.
Three Looted Antiquities at the Met Repatriated to Turkey
Nine other repatriated works were seized from Met Trustee Shelby White, whose collection was subject to a criminal investigation.
This week, the world’s lightest paint, Pakistan’s feminist movement, World Puppy Day, and were some of Vermeer’s paintings created by his daughter?