♪ Philippe: Coming Up on NYC-ARTS, a look at the Arts of Japan Gallery at the Brooklyn Museum which reflects 2,000 years of artistic accomplishment.

Joan: One of the great highlights in the new gallery is a pair of folding screens that date from about 1610.

These were made for the interior of a castle.

And they have largely gold backgrounds, which would have helped to reflect light in the dark interior of the castle and made the rooms sort of more warm and glowing.

Philippe: a visit to the Noble Maritime Collection at the historic Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island.

Curator: Our mission is the celebrate the people and traditions of New York Harbor, and we also celebrate the modern waterfront.

Philippe: and a trip to the American Folk Art Museum.

Stacey: One of the most highly recognized American self-taught artists is the portrait painter Ammi Phillips.

In the period of 1817 to 1820 or so, his portraits are very dreamy.

They're beautiful palettes of these shimmering muted colors.

>> Funding for NYC-ARTS is made possible by The Ambrose Monell Foundation Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation Jody and John Arnhold The Lewis "Sonny" Turner Fund for Dance Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown Charles and Valerie Diker The Mildton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation The Nancy Sidewater Foundation Elroy and Terry Krumholz Foundation And Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in parternship with the City Council.

Additional funding provided by Members of Thirteen.

NYC-ARTS is made possible in part by First Republic Bank, and by Swann Auction Galleries.

>> Swann Auction Galleries.

We have a different way of looking at auctions, offering vintage books and fine art since 1941.

Working to combine knowledge with accessibility, whether you are a lifelong collector or a first-time buyer, or looking to sell.

Information at swanngalleries.com.

♪ Philippe: Good evening and welcome to NYC-ARTS.

I'm Philippe de Montebello on location at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, just a 35-minute train ride north from Grand Central Station.

Located on the banks of the Hudson River, it is the largest museum in Westchester County.

Its offerings include exhibitions of American art from the 19th century to the present day; a state-of- the-art Planetarium; an outdoor Amphitheater; and Glenview, a Gilded Age home on the National Register of Historic Places.

I'm here in The Sitting Room of Glenview, the mansion built in 1877 for Wall Street financier, John Bond Trevor, his wife Emily Norwood Trevor and their family.

Charles W. Clinton, architect of the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, designed Glenview as a magnificent castle-like perch surrounded by the beauty of the natural world, with views of the Hudson River and the Palisades.

It's one of the first suburban homes, made possible by the new commuter train lines.

The Glenview mansion is a magnificent representation of the early Gilded Age.

It features design and décor of the era's Aesthetic Movement embracing straight-lined furniture and handcrafted woodwork, often medieval in appearance and simply decorated.

The first floor contains six fully restored period rooms: the -- all of which are open to the public.

Glenview's Walnut Grand Staircase with its sunflower carvings is a masterpiece of the "Aesthetic Movement."

It has newly restored post lights and a skylight at the fourth-floor level.

On the landing, is a 1906 oil of Mrs. Samuel Untermeyer.

She and her husband lived at Greystone, the grandest estate in Yonkers.

Her portrait is considered a treasure of Edwardian-era portraiture, she is captured full-length and formal, her gray hair upswept in a graceful, Gibson-girl knot.

Floral motifs abound throughout the house.

The interior is designed as a whole integrated work of art.

In the parlor, the furnishings, wallpaper, and stencils, tied the room together as a smart ensemble, right down to a photograph of Emily Norwood Trevor in a fashionable frame.

Hanging in its original location is a painting with special significance.

The artist intended to paint a scene of Hester Prynne with her out of wedlock baby from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

She was discouraged by an advisor, and instead the canvas became A Patrician Mother depicting traditional ideals of motherhood.

It earned a medal at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 and in 1879 the Trevors bought the painting for Glenview.

Over in the galleries of the Hudson River Museum, a bold new contemporary exhibition is on view.

Korean born, New York City artist Seongmin Ahn is having her first solo exhibition at an American art museum.

The artist combines traditional Korean painting technique with abstract and conceptual art modalities.

The paintings convey multi-dimensional realms with magic portals spilling out waterfalls, peonies and plum trees.

Its Inside Is Bigger Than Its Outside: Paintings by Seongmin Ahn is on view through October 15, 2023.

On tonight's program, we'll take a trip to the Brooklyn Museum to visit its Arts of Japan Galleries.

The objects on view trace over 2,000 years of innovation in Japanese art, including Buddhist temple sculptures, paintings, textiles and woodblock prints.

Also on view are ceramics that reveal Japan's 10,000-year history of craftmanship in this medium.

Here's a look at some of the highlights of this exhibition.

Joan: We've been closed for about six years and we are so excited to finally bring out these galleries with all of our beautiful treasures and to tell, new and interesting stories that we've never told with the collection before.

The Brooklyn Museum is quite unusual in its large holdings of material from the Ainu culture of Northern Japan.

We are very fortunate to have roughly 1000 artifacts in the collection from the Ainu people and that ranges from carved wood objects to personal ornaments to costumes.

What they actually wore usually in a ceremonial setting.

And we have a number of robes from the Ainu people that were probably special occasion attire.

Most of the robes made by the Ainu costume makers were made of an indigenous fabric which was made of bark cloth and it has a texture kind of like burlap.

The robe that we're showing right now is unusual because it's made entirely of cotton.

And cotton was something that they had to trade for because they couldn't grow cotton up in the northern climes of Hokkaido Island.

So cotton as a trade good would have been a luxury item.

The robes that were made entirely of cotton were very much status objects.

This wonderful, oversized green head of a Buddhist guardian figure dates from the 1200s from the Kamakura period which is a moment when sculpture in Japan became much livelier, much more expressive.

The head is much larger than life-size and would have stood atop a figure about 12 feet high and it would have been one of four figures marking the four corners of a platform around an even larger seated Buddha at the center.

And they would have been really dramatic figures in the dark, sort of dim light of the temple.

You would have looked way up toward the ceiling and seen the figures' glinting eyes and white teeth and they would have been quite intimidating and quite dramatic.

The eyes are in fact made out of rock crystal that's been painted on the reverse and then inserted into the wood head.

So a fierce figure like this to a Western audience often can be mistaken for a demonic or evil presence.

But in fact, in this Buddhist tradition, these were good guys.

They're fierce, but they're on our side.

They are fighting for the right things.

One of the great highlights in the new gallery is a pair of folding screens that date from about 1610.

These were made for the interior of a castle.

And they have largely gold backgrounds, which would have helped to reflect light in the dark interior of the castle and made the rooms sort of more warm and glowing.

The theme of these two, folding screens is drying fish nets, which is not something that we in the modern world see a lot of.

But back in the days when fish nets were made of natural materials, there was concern that they would get moldy.

And of course if you're a fisherman, you need to throw them so you need your fishing net to be lighter and not so wet.

So it was a common sight in fishing villages throughout the world to see nets hanging out to dry.

And that was considered extremely scenic, picturesque, by artists and poets in East Asia.

And so they became a famous kind of romantic trope that you see over and over again in East Asian art.

the fishing nets are on the surface, the subject matter of this screen.

But as you look carefully at the screen, we see that it also represents the four seasons.

So we're going to read it from right to left, which is how Japanese is read.

So if you start at the far right end you see that there are grasses growing around the fishing nets and they're relatively short.

Then as you move to the left, you have taller grasses.

So you've gone from spring to summer.

The next screen, the grasses are a little bit brown around the edges and they've gone to seed: that's fall.

And then in the far left, we have grasses that are completely desiccated and dusted with a light dusting of snow, and that's winter.

The Brooklyn Museum houses a wonderful collection of Japanese prints, many of which have not been out on view in decades.

Now this is from the same series as The Great Wave, the image by the great Japanese print designer Hokusai.

And it's a series that focuses on Mount Fuji.

The mountain is so large that you can have sunny blue skies on one side of the mountain and thunderstorms on the other side.

And that is in fact what we're seeing here.

Lightning and dark clouds on the front, while there are blue skies off in the distance.

The Brooklyn Museum's Arts of Japan Gallery is a space that we will be changing many times over the course of the next several years in order to show more and more of our treasures.

And we encourage people to come and make discoveries of their own.

♪ Philippe: And now this week's curator's choice.

♪ Erin: Sailors' Snug Harbor is the first democratic charitable institution established in this country.

It was established by the will of Robert Richard Randall, written by Alexander Hamilton in 1801.

When Robert Richard Randall was a young man, a kid could go to sea at the age of twelve or fourteen and maybe never come home again.

End up on the other side of the world separated from his family and Randall had seen this over the years as he went to sea, so when he was on his deathbed he said that he wanted to make a home for aged, decrepit and worn-out seamen.

The trustees bought a farm here on Staten Island, and gradually that became an enormous self-sustaining institution.

Sailors' Snug Harbor was an 80-acre facility, it had 8 dormitories, a beautiful church, a chapel, a sanitarium with nine wards, a 400-bed hospital, a farm, barnyard, pig sty, paint house.

Also, they employed a large staff of people.

It was a self-sustaining place.

This building was a dormitory and there were about 36 small rooms, 2 men a piece.

It was the second building constructed here on site.

I would say over the years it served maybe 10,000 people.

They provided health care, food, recreation.

It was a democratic institution, they respected each other, everyone was called captain, and men worked, they made artifacts, they did basket weaving and scrimshaw, they built ship models and they talked about their past, talked about their lives at sea.

By the 1930's, you see things like Social Security coming in to being but more importantly people did not go to sea never to return.

So the population here began to dwindle, they began to close buildings, then they began to tear down buildings in the 1950's.

The trustees decided that they would give the property to the city of New York, for one dollar.

And the city of New York said, no thanks, we don't want it.

So the trustees sold it to a developer.

And the community then really realized, this is going to be lost, and so led by people like John A. Noble they managed to persuade John Lindsay to buy the property back as a park and cultural center.

John Noble grew up in an art colony, though he preferred playing with the fishermen's children as he said in Provincetown.

And his family moved to New York in the early 1920s.

He went to sea first when he was 13 on a large schooner, the Anna Sophia, and in summers while he was in school, he went on sailing vessels, and then he joined the crew of the Annie C. Ross.

So he had a lot of sea experience.

He discovered a ship's graveyard on the Kill van Kull and began to haunt it.

Port Johnston was the largest graveyard of wooden sailing vessels in the world.

He roamed through the harbor in his rowboat drawing sketches, sleeping under wrecks and meeting all the people that worked in the waterfront.

Port Johnston symbolized to him the end of the age of sail.

And he found this tragic, and that became the passion of his life.

This cabin was on the pier of the boneyard.

He said one day in a fit of creativity he cut a hole in the ceiling to make a skylight and over the years little by little he added things.

This is an engineer's bed.

This is where he went do to his art.

Later on, the pier on which this little cabin sat began to rot away, and he said, you know he was frantic, there was no else place he could draw.

So he built a barge.

He said that's how I became the artist with the floating studio.

There was no cuteness or color to this, I built the barge to save my studio.

And that's where he worked all through the 40's and till he died.

He did about 150 oil paintings, and he did 80 lithograph editions as well as 600 plein-air drawings.

And then astonishingly we have 6000 photographs that he took of the harbor.

Our mission is to celebrate the people and traditions of New York harbor.

We do it through the work of John Noble who captured so much of the 20th century history in his work, we do it by studying Sailors Snug Harbor, which is an extremely important component not only of maritime history but the history of taking care of frail and elderly adults as well.

And we also celebrate the modern waterfront.

♪ Philippe: And now another curator's choice.

Since 19 61, the American folk Art Museum has been celebrating the creativity of artists whose talents have been refined through personal experience rather than formal artistic training.

Its collection includes more than 8000 works of art from four centuries and nearly every continent.

Stacy: One of the most highly recognized American self-taught artists is the portrait painter Ammi Phillips.

Phillips was born in 1788 in Colebrook, CT. During his lifetime he painted for more than 55 years.

Today we are aware of close to 1000 portraits painted by Ammi Phillips.

In the period of 1817 to 1820 or so, his portraits are very dreamy.

They're beautiful palettes of these shimmering muted colors.

Mostly, they're very essential portraits, very reductive stripped down to the essence of conveying the character and personality of whoever was being portrayed.

In his portrait of Rhoda Goodrich Bentley and her daughter, Maria Louisa, painted probably around 1817, we have the inclusion of a few details that are significant and that are unusual in portraits by Phillips.

Her daughter is holding a slice of watermelon and she is holding a piece of pleated cotton, which may be a reference to, of course, the cotton plantations in the South.

So we have this portrait that includes these elements that seem unusual for a middle-class family in New York state and that seemed to be making an allusion to this very serious issue of slavery that clearly had great meaning for this family.

Ammi Phillips painted for more than 55 years and his style underwent dramatic changes from one period to another.

Mrs. Bentley was painted at the height of what we call the neoclassical era, reflecting the romanticism and the palette associated with classical iconography and fashion the empire style dresses, but by the 1830s there was a very different aesthetic at play.

It was much harder edged, it was very clear very clearly defined and there were much deeper contrasts of color.

The American Folk Art Museum holds one of Phillips's greatest masterpieces in its collections and it's simply titled, Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog.

And it's the brilliance of the red against this stark black background that sets up these juxtapositions that are timeless and beautiful but very very different from the earlier portraits.

Philippe: Next week on NYC-ARTS, a profile of Ballet Hispánico, the largest Hispanic cultural organization in the U.S. Eduardo: Ballet Hispanico's mission is to bring together individuals and communities to celebrate, share, explore the joys, the heritage of Latino cultures.

Philippe: and a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for a look at Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter, which offers an unprecedented look at his life and artistic achievements.

Born around 1608 in Antequera, Spain, Pareja was an enslaved person in Velázquez's studio for more than two decades.

Upon his emancipation, he charted his own artistic path.

The exhibition features approximately 40 objects including paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, as well as books and historical documents.

♪ Philippe: I hope you enjoyed our program this evening.

I'm Philippe de Montebello on location at the Hudson River Museum.

Thanks for watching and see you next time.

To enjoy more of your favorite segments on NYC-ARTS, visit our website at NYC-Arts.org.

Paula: Good evening, and welcome to NYC-ARTS.

♪ Paula: Leonard, what a privilege to be able to sit down and talk with you.

>> We are at a moment to take nothing for granted.

Philippe: It's a pleasure to be here with the curator of this exhibition for Pope.

We are in the midst of some of the greatest sculptures by the iconic names.

>> Classical and modern dance are extremely different, and I have so much more to learn before I can really articulate the differences.

>> And when I listen to lyrics in that, I suddenly thought, that's what I want to do with my life.

>> My primary play of -- way of playing the piano is by improvising.

>> you are in some respects on sacred ground.

A woman came to see me perform and said, how would you like to play Billie holiday?

I think one of the essential things we learned is that Matisse used pins to compose his work.

Quick spheres of surprise when you are doing a piece 100 years ago and think, this could be now.

Quick suddenly you come and present something and you get applause.

Great.

You know?

♪ ♪ ♪ >> Funding for NYC-ARTS is made possible by The Ambrose Monell Foundation Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation Jody and John Arnhold The Lewis "Sonny" Turner Fund for Dance Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown Charles and Valerie Diker The Mildton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation The Nancy Sidewater Foundation Elroy and Terry Krumholz Foundation And Ellen and James S. Marcus.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in parternship with the City Council.

Additional funding provided by Members of Thirteen.

NYC-ARTS is made possible in part by First Republic Bank.

And by Swann Auction Galleries.

Swann Auction Galleries.

We have a different way of looking at auctions, offering vintage books and fine art since 1941.

Working to combine knowledge with accessibility, whether you are a lifelong collector or a first-time buyer, or looking to sell.

Information at swanngalleries.com.