I just happened to stumble across this museum on the way back from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw that they were having an exhibition entitled “A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate”. The exhibition is on the craftsman who created the ‘Ishtar Gate’ and the ‘Processional Way’ in the Ancient City of Babylon.
Glazed brick art from the ‘Processional Way’
The small exhibition contains many examples of clay bricks that were used to build the decorative walls and pathways, artwork from the ‘Processional Way’ were displayed as well as smaller decorative art pieces from the time period.
Some of the works in the exhibition
The exhibition also showed tablets from the time period, information on the digs on the site of Babylon and some of the recorded history of the civilization.
There are interesting tablets on display
For two small rooms of gallery space, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World covers a lot of information on the time period. One nice thing about the museum is that you can see the whole exhibit in less than an hour and they do have a very nice gift shop.
The History of the Museum:
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World is a center for advanced scholarly research and graduate education, which aims to encourage particularly the study of the economic, religious, political and cultural connections between ancient civilizations. It offers both doctoral and postdoctoral programs with the aim of training a new generation of scholars who will enter the global academic community and become intellectual leaders.
In effort to embrace a truly inclusive geographical scope while maintaining continuity and coherence, the Institute focuses on the shared and overlapping periods in the development of cultures and civilizations around the Mediterranean basin and across central Asia to the Pacific Ocean. The approaches of anthropology, archaeology, geography, geology, history, economics, sociology, art history, digital humanities and the history of science and technology are as integral to the enterprise as the study of texts, philosophy and the analysis of artifacts. The Institute’s Director and permanent faculty determine particular directions of research but both historical connections and patterns as well as socially illuminating comparisons will always be central to its mission.
The public presence matches its vision, engaging both the public and scholars worldwide in the work and findings of its scholarly community. Exhibitions, public lectures, publications, digital resources and other programs reflect the Institute’s ideal of study that bridges disciplines and ancient peoples.
The creation of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University has its roots in the passion that Shelby White and Leon Levy had for the art and history of the ancient world, which led them to envision an Institute that would offer an unshuttered view of antiquity across vast stretches of time and place. It was founded in 2006 with funding from the Leon Levy Foundation.
Areas of specialty among the museum’s faculty include the Greco-Roman world, the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Central Asia and the Silk Road, East Asian art and archaeology, Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, ancient science and digital humanities.
Disclaimer: This information was taken from the museum’s website and I give them full credit for it.
I am finding more and more that the university art galleries are mounting very interesting and clever exhibitions and some as edgy as their large museum counterparts. I recently attended the ‘Art After Stonewall’ exhibition which is created as a two part exhibition with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art to showcase the post Stonewall riots to the beginning of the AIDS crisis.
“Art After Stonewall” exhibition
The exhibition was an interesting mix of pictures, video, graphic paintings and posters and documentary work combined to show the mood of the times. Some of the most impressive works came from clips of documentaries on Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory Movies’, and the documentaries on ‘Tongues Untied’ and ‘Paris is Burning’ about the gay crisis about men of color and the racism that they faced even within the Gay Community.
The East Village Art Community from the 1980’s “Art After Stonewall”
Some of the photos of then fringe neighborhoods are funny to see as they have been gentrified beyond what anyone could have thought thirty years ago from the early 1980’s. The East Village of back then and of today are world’s apart.
The College did a good job mounting the show and telling the story that is both humorous and sad at the same time. Also, the Grey Gallery is small so you can get through the exhibition in about an hour.
The Grey Gallery exhibition “Art After Stonewall” This is a Keith Haring poster.
The most recent exhibition that I visited “Mudd Club 1978-1983: The Stephen Mass Papers” and the people who had visited the club at that time.
The Broadway Windows of the “The Mudd Club” exhibition in the NYU Broadway building.
In collaboration with NYU Fales Library and Special Collections, 80WSE Gallery presents an exhibition featuring materials from The Stephen Mass Papers, focusing on the legendary Mudd Club venue in New York City (1978-1983) through photographs and extensive notes. Located at the street-level Broadway Windows gallery and Project Space, the exhibition materializes the file structures of the archive and select visual documents contained within the collection.
The Broadway Windows of “The Mudd Club”.
The archival extracts provide rare insight into an important epicenter of downtown art, music, fashion, and culture at a transitional point in New York City and American life marked by rapid urban gentrification and the dawn of The Reagan Era. Within this atmosphere, post-punk musicians, independent designers, contemporary artists, and celebrities coalesced to animate the Mudd Club ‘cabaret’.
The Broadway windows of the “The Mudd Club”.
Acquired by Fales in 2019, the Stephen Mass Papers spans 16.75 Linear Feet in 24 manuscript boxes, 3 half manuscript boxes, 2 small flat boxes, 2 oversize flat boxes, 1 media box, 1 oversize folder in shared housing, and 1 sound reel in shared housing, including 33.92 Megabytes in 167 computer files, 1 sound tape reels , 1 videocassettes (u-matic), 10 audiocassettes, and 6 film reels.
The Broadway Windows of the “Mudd Club”.
“Stephen Mass is an entrepreneur who co-founded the Mudd Club located at 77 White Street in downtown New York City in 1978 along with art curator Diego Cortez and Anya Phillips. The venue became a focal point of the downtown music, art, and cultural scene in the late 20th century, showcasing the intersections of popular and avant-garde performance culture, gender and sexuality, celebrity culture, music, visual art, fashion, film, and nightlife.
The opening sign from the Grey Gallery on the NYU Campus.
The Stephen Mass Papers (inclusive dates 1940-2019, bulk dates 1978-2009) documents the founding and operation of the Mudd Club in New York City, Mass’s other entrepreneurial ventures in New York, and his nightclubs and restaurants in Berlin, as well as his personal life and family history. Consisting of both paper and electronic formats, the collection includes extensive notebooks and notes containing the planning and working notes for Mass’s various endeavors, financial and legal documents, promotional materials for events (such as posters, flyers, and newsletters), ephemera (differentiated from promotional material, as promotional material Mass collected from other clubs or organizations), press coverage, and photographic materials such as prints, negatives, and slides.”
The Grey Gallery exhibition of the “Mudd Club 1978-1983: The Stephen Mass Papers”.
—Fales Library and Special Collections
The Fales Library & Special Collections comprises 350,000 volumes of book and print items, over 11,000 linear feet of archive and manuscript materials, and about 90,000 audiovisual elements.
In 2024, the Grey Gallery moved to its new home at 18 Cooper Square and has a whole new contemporary look to it.
The history of the Grey Gallery on the NYU Campus.
Works from the permanent collection at the new “Grey Gallery” at 18 Cooper Square.
The front of the gallery for the “Americans in Paris” exhibition
I was invited to a new exhibition open to students at NYU “American’s in Paris”, an exhibition of American artists who had been living and creating their art in the City of Lights after WWII until the 1960’s.
The sign for the “American in Paris” exhibition.
The entrance to the new Grey Galleries.
The back Galleries for the “Americans in Paris” exhibition.
The works of the artist “Kimber Smith” in the “American in Paris” exhibition.
The exhibition “American’s in Paris” with artist Joan Mitchell’s work.
The exhibition “American’s in Paris” work by artist Ed Clark.
The works of artist Henry Cousin’s in the exhibition “American’s in Paris”.
The galleries of the Grey Art Galleries
Peter Saul’s “Man in Electric Chair”
“Man in Electric Chair”
The Jazz band entertaining us at the opening of the “Americans in Paris” exhibition.
As an Alumnus of NYU, I now come for the exhibitions and just enjoy myself. I came in for the newest exhibition.
The exhibition in 2024 was “Make Way for Berthe Weill”: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde
The main sign from the exhibition
(from the Grey Gallery website)
Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde surveys the groundbreaking career of the first woman modern art dealer. Berthe Weill (1865–1951) championed many fledgling masters of modern art early on—such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani—as well as numerous others who did not achieve wide acclaim. Yet her role in early 20th century modernism has been omitted from most historical accounts.
The exhibition will feature some 110 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture—many of which were shown at her gallery during the first four decades of the 20th century. Examining Weill’s contributions to the history of modernism as a gallerist, a passionate advocate of contemporary art, and a Jewish woman, it brings to light the remarkable achievements of a singular figure who overcame sexism, antisemitism, and economic struggles in her quest to promote emerging artists (From the NYU-Grey Gallery website).
The timeline of her career
The gallery that night
The art featured were artists promoted by the art dealer
The artwork by female artist Emilie Charmy
The work by artist Mark Chagall
One of my favorite pieces in the show by Mark Chagall
The Mission of the Grey Art Gallery:
The Grey Art Gallery is New York University’s fine arts museum, located on historic Washington Square Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village. As a university art museum, the Grey Art Gallery functions to collect, preserve, study, document, interpret and exhibit the evidence of human culture. While these goals are common to all museums, the Grey distinguishes itself by emphasizing art’s historical, cultural and social contexts, with experimentation and interpretation as integral parts of the programmatic planning. Thus, in addition to being a place to view the objects of material culture, the Gallery serves as a museum-laboratory in which a broader view of an object’s environment enriches our understanding of its contribution to civilization (NYU Grey Gallery History)
The History of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University:
The Grey Art Gallery is located within New York University’s Silver Center-the site of NYU’s original home, the legendary University Building (1835-1892). Winslow homer, Daniel Huntington, Samuel Colt, George Innes and Henry James all lived and worked there, as did Professor F.B.Morse, who established the first academic fine arts department in America on the site now occupied by the Grey Art Gallery.
Demolished in 1892, the original building was replaced by the Main Building (renamed the Silver Center in 2002). Here was located, from 1927 to 1942, A. E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art, NYU’s first art museum and the first institution in this country to exhibit work by Picasso, Leger, Miro, Mondrian, Arp and members of the American Abstract Artists group. Gallatin aspired to create a forum for intellectual exchange, a place where artists would congregate to acquaint themselves with the latest developments in contemporary art. In 1975, with a generous gift from Mrs. Abby Weed Grey, the Museum’s original space was renovated, office and a collection storage facility were added and the doors were reopened as the Grey Art Gallery (Museum history).
Exhibitions organized by the Grey Art Gallery encompass aspects of all the visual arts: painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking, photography, architecture and decorative arts, video, film and performance. In addition to originating its own exhibitions, some of which travel throughout the United States and abroad, the Gallery hosts traveling exhibitions. Award-winning scholarly publications, distributed worldwide are published by the Grey Art Gallery. In conjunction with its exhibitions, the Grey also sponsors public programs including lectures, symposia, panel discussions and films (Museum history).
The new Gallery is at 18 Cooper Square.
(This was taken from the Museum’s website).
Enjoying a evening at the Grey Gallery
The new exhibition in the spring of 2025 was ‘Anonymous was a Woman’ , an execution on the ‘Anonymous was a Woman’s and the great programs effects on mid-Career female artists in the Unit.
The information sign in the front gallery
The entrance of the gallery the night of the exhibition
The entrance to the Grey Art Museum
This was the sign inside for the exhibition
The inside gallery at the start of the show showcasing the collection on display
The main gallery at Grey Gallery
These were the pieces from the show that I found most impressive:
One of the more unusual paintings from the exhibition ‘Monalisa’ by artist Ida Applebroog
The sign for ‘Monalisa’ by Artist Ida Applebroog
The sculpture ‘Rom’s Delhi’ by artist Judy Pfaff
The sign for ‘Rom’s Delhi’
The painting ‘Svati: Now and Then’ by Artist Chita Ganesh
The sign for ‘Svanti: Now and Then’
The sculpture ‘Untitled #1242’ by Artist Petah Coyne
The sign for the sculpture
The sculpture ‘Bones 2000’ by Artist Polly Apfelbaum
The sign for the sculpture
The painting ‘Flamethrower’ by Artist Carrie Moyer
The sign for the painting
The crowd at the end of the evening at the
‘Opening Night’
This unusual sculpture in the middle of the room
Astor Court at the end of the evening at the Grey gallery
Visiting a Museum: The Unique, Unusual, Obscure and Historical 