Connections: At the grand opening of the Hudson River Museum”™s new West Wing on Thursday, June 15, in Yonkers, museum, city, county and state officials all spoke about connections. They included the professional ones that enabled Yonkers ($5.45 million) Westchester County ($6.2 million) and New York”™s Empire State Development ($630,000) to collaborate on a $12.28-million project that is adding 12,000 square feet to the 40,000-square foot museum, including more than 3,800 square feet of new galleries.
But the connections were also personal: Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano recalled biking as a child to the interdisciplinary museum, which explores artistic, historical and scientific connections to the Hudson River. Museum Director and CEO Masha Turchinsky said she visited the museum as a babe in arms.
And the connections were aspirational as well, as official after official spoke about the tourist and educational reach of the museum ”“ and, by extension, its new wing ”“ beyond the Hudson Valley.
“This broadens the museum experience for all of Westchester and way beyond,” said Tom D”™Auria, chairman of the museum”™s board of trustees. “This is a big moment, one long in the making. It”™s the start of the new era.”
But only a start. The Special Exhibition Galleries; The Jan and Warren Adelson Gallery, a sculpture court; and the Community & Partnership Gallery, along with climate-controlled art storage space ”“ all designed by Manhattan-based, museum-centric Archimuse, led by Benjamin D. Kracauer, AIA, and Reuben S. Jackson, RA, principals and architects, and built by GTL Construction LLC of White Plains ”“ are but phase one of a master plan begun in 2002 that has already resulted in an education center, a 400-seat outdoor amphitheater and capital improvements to the entrance, lobby, galleries and Hudson Room events space. (The new storage is designed to ensure the housing and display of works from a permanent collection that contains more than 18,000 objects, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts, costumes, textiles, graphic designs, historical artifacts, archival materials and ephemera.)
Phase two includes the nearly completed 100-seat tiered auditorium and adjacent River Terrace, with the terrace receiving a new concrete floor and sleek glass parapet, connecting the auditorium to the Hudson Room, which overlooks the river. Phase two also features plans for a meadow-style perennial and shrub garden on the museum”™s western slopes, to be filled with native plants and pollinators to offer sustainable opportunities for interdisciplinary education, connections to the collection and partnerships.
Phase three (2024-25) will turn its attention to the museum”™s Glenview Historic Home, an 1877 mansion listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Designed by Charles W. Clinton, the architect of Manhattan”™s Park Avenue Armory, Glenview showcases period rooms furnished in the late-Victorian style of the exterior architecture, making it a favorite of Hollywood and visitors alike. (The house was recently featured in HBO”™s “The Gilded Age” as the riverfront home of 19th-century New York society arbiter Caroline Astor.) The third phase will include what museum officials described as “much-needed” conservation to exterior stone and woodwork, the roof and the windows. To complete the second and third phases, the museum is conducting a major gift initiative through its Fund for HRM: Expanding the View.
In the meantime, visitors can savor the exhibits in the new spaces. Flowing through the Special Exhibition Galleries is “Kengo Kito: Unity on the Hudson” (through Sept. 24) an installation of some 2,500 colorful hula hoops that evokes Buddhist circles and humanity”™s links. With materials in Kito”™s native Japanese, English and Spanish that invite you to record your moments of connection in life and a through line to the cantilevered glass overlook offering a Hudson-Palisades panorama, the exhibit ”“ made possible by San Francisco”™s W.L.S. Spencer Foundation, New York state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins and Yonkers ”“ is also about the community”™s relationship to the river.
“The process of transformation of consciousness through connection is an element that is crucial in the effort to improve the condition surrounding the river,” Kito said in a statement. “Environmental issues are the responsibility of not just one singular person but of the community as a whole.”
The new Community & Partnership Gallery unites past, present and future. The museum comes full circle with an exhibit, “Sylvia Sleigh: Invitation to a Voyage” (through Oct. 15) ”“ featuring one of its most treasured works, a 70-foot-long group of 14 panels made between 1979 and ”™99, in which the Welsh-born painter depicts herself and art-world friends on the east bank of the Hudson near Fishkill in the manner of Jean-Antoine Watteau”™s “L”™embarquement pour Cythère (The Embarkation for Cythera)” (1717). The work, Turchinsky said during an impromptu tour at the opening, is now displayed as the artist wished it to be, with viewers invited to take a seat in beach chairs set before it.
But this gallery looks to the future as well, with Karintha Lowe, Ph.D., serving as the Mellon”¯Public Humanities Fellow at the Hudson River Museum and Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers ”“ teaching and working on community projects for the next two and a half years, with support from a $1.2 million, five-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
More immediately, the museum is welcoming back its”¯Summer Amphitheater Series, with free performances of tango, jazz, soul, Latin Fusion, drama, magic and even falconry Friday and Saturday evenings July 7 through Aug. 12. The series is sponsored by”¯Ã˜rsted, with additional support for select performances by Art Bridges and Sax LLP.
For more, visit hrm.org.
