Alexander McQueen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Alexander McQueen's, legendary fashion designer, has made the headlines in the most selective circles lately. The line's creative director, Sarah Burton, was the top secret designer behind Kate Middleton's wedding dress for the most viewed royal wedding in history. And for those of us lucky to live in NYC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's special exhibition, Savage Beauty, features an in depth look at McQueen's extraordinary contribution to fashion.


I had the opportunity to view Savage Beauty last week, and it was an impressive display of McQueen's imagination, creativity, and construction skills. His themes of romance, nationalism, and primitivism inspired innovative designs and fresh viewpoints.




The Metropolitan Museum of Art has done a fantastic job curating the exhibit, setting the mood with lighting, gilded mirrors lining the walls, and interspersing music and video footage of his previous fashion shows. Not only are the fashion pieces artfully displayed, but viewers also get close looks at the headpieces, shoes, and accessories.


The exhibit will be on view until July 31st. The Museum's hours are Tuesday - Thursday, 9:30am - 5:30pm, Friday and Saturday, 9:30am - 9pm, and Sunday, 9:30am - 5:30pm. The Museum is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street.



Karina

Around the Corner: The Cloisters

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Hey all, Happy Summer to you!  Hope everyone's getting out to the beach or have some nifty plans this season.  Yesterday I was driving by the Cloisters and thought, "by golly! that's as good a place as any for my next around the corner feature".  And so here you have it.

Have you been to the Cloisters yet?  Did you know that it's a part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art?  Did you also know that this amazing castle-like setting is right here in Manhattan?  Neat-o.  It's free to walk around the grounds (that's connected to Fort Tryon Park) and admission inside is whatever you can donate.  This branch of the Met is dedicated to the art and architecture of medieval Europe and is seriously breathtaking.
Overlooking the Palisades -- right off Riverside Drive
Are you staying local these next few weeks?  What places will you be visiting either on-the-cheap or *free*?  Please let me know a place you recommend in the comment section below.   Thanks so much!  Ta Ta and happy travels.

Brought to you by:
Virginia Kraljevic

Calder Jewelry at the Metropolitan Museum

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Now through March 1 the Metropolitan Museum of Art is viewing jewelry made by the famed sculpture and inventor of the mobile Alexander Calder.

I actually had no idea Calder made jewelry and loved to see his signature style played out in beautiful bold and often kinetic jewelry. Mostly using brass, steel or silver he cut, hammered and wrapped large abstract shapes to create jewelry that was often extremely oversized - like this piece to the left - with points of articulation to allow the whole thing to rest on different body types and move with the wearer. Some of the smaller brooches and earrings showed more of a direct relationship with his larger mobile scupltures - being built using the same type of structural elements. Some of the pieces on display here incorporated found objects like broken glass and ceramics into colorful the necklaces and rings, using heavy wire.

For more Calder work - you can also head over to The Whitney Museum of American Art where Calder's early work in Paris from 1926 to 1933 is on view until February 15. In these early years his forays into sculpture were more about breaking down forms into wire drawings best represented by his circus series (which is in the permanent collection of the Whitney). This initial breaking down of forms soon became fully developed abstraction paired with a focus on structure and movement that his engineering degree gave him. His early work is a great starting point to see how he later developed these themes of of movement and structure into fully kinetic mobiles.