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Who needs IMAX? See a real papyrus fragment of Homer’s Odyssey at The Met.
The oyster, writes Hrag Vartanian, is “no incidental New Yorker, but perhaps its most symbolic creature.” Hyperallergic’s co-founder and editor-at-large visits Mohawk artist Alan Michelson’s poetic installation in Governor’s Island, where about a million oyster shells culled from Manhattan restaurants stir reflections on Native land and historical memory. Vartanian muses on the glorious mollusk’s history, from Lenape shell middens to NYC’s menus to the detrimental effects of their disappearance on our ecosystems. In Michelson’s work, Vartanian writes, “the shells become forces of insurgency, counter-experts that quietly refute settler innocence and its alibi that ‘nothing was here’ before extraction.”
Still can’t get a ticket for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in New York? Welcome to the club. Here’s a cooler plan: Head uptown to The Met to see a rare, 2,300-year-old fragment with lines from Homer’s epic, now on view at the museum. No hot takes about the historical accuracy of Bronze Age armor required. Papyrus > IMAX.
—Valentina Di Liscia, senior editor
The Lost Pearls of New York City
Walking down Pearl Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, you probably don’t realize that the name marks the original 17th-century East River shoreline of New York City. In fact, the street was named for a Lenape shell midden that was located on its southern section, which is also believed to have been adjacent to a Lenape canoe landing. It was one of many prominent middens that marked the region, and as Mark Kurlansky explains in his bestselling book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (2006), middens are “the most common marker of a pre-European settlement anywhere in the area of the mouth of the Hudson.” These piles of oyster shells, he notes, were sometimes as much as four feet deep, sometimes buried in the ground, sometimes piled high. | Hrag Vartanian
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Swann Auction Galleries is hosting it’s 7th LGBTQ+ Art Material Culture & History auction featuring Tom of Finland, Hugh Steers, Lorenza Böttner, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and more.
The sale will also include works consigned on behalf of the Detroit Queer Biennial and the Leslie Lohman Museum.
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News
- A 2,300-year-old papyrus fragment containing parts of Homer’s Odyssey is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- As escalates attacks against historic sites and the artworks housed within them, Democrats and preservationist groups are pushing for protective countermeasures.
- Twenty-six Islamic artworks from the Louvre Museum will be shown at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC, next month.
- “The Bowery: Devil’s Mile,” opening September 24 at the New Museum, traces 400 years of the iconic strip known as a destination for fun, however raucous or refined.
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