Jean Zimmerman

Tag: Art

  • Late season.

    Been thinking about the concept recently while visiting some haunts both local and distant. Not ruins exactly. Let’s say slightly faded in the most perfect way. Like the nearby genteel rose garden at the Lyndhurst. Its blooms in November just as exquisite as the ones in June. Possibly even more ravishing. Is it my imagination,…

  • Why fry by the ocean when you can scorch on the NYC sidewalks?

    I hadn’t been to Manhattan in quite some time. Returning, I see all its contrasts as poetry. The old side by side with the new. Burned out church, new construction. Antiquated evidence of New York’s beaver-rich past in the Astor Place subway stop. A million year old hotel, updated several times. The struggles of nature.…

  • Road trip revelations big and small

    included some arresting sights, such as the Wisconsin highway barn painted in mile-high letters by people who obviously wanted to get their message across. These guys should work on Madison Avenue. OKAY, WE HEAR YOU! A flock of blue jays, one of which left a memento behind for someone (me) desiring signs and best wishes for…

  • The meaning of a cairn

    is debatable. It’s a marker or a meditation of some kind, says Sarah. An ode to the fact that people have been here. Yes. Sarah swims in the cold, rough ocean, and knows something about everything. Traditionally, in the Andes or Mongolia, say, rock cairns were used to mark routes to safety, to food, and to…

  • “Who moves into an R.V. and hits the road

    in the middle of a pandemic while our democracy and society crumble? This girl!” This girl goes by the handle Badass Cross Stitch, but her civilian moniker is Shannon Downey, and she is out to teach us all to embroider. On her way across the country she is offering on-line tutorials about hoops, fabric, needles…

  • The most famous tree guy

    that no one now has ever heard of is William Bartram. Maybe you are the exception. If you visit Bartram’s Garden outside Philadelphia you will find the oldest ginkgo tree in North America, grown from a seedling that was imported to Bartram in 1785  as a gift from noted plant collector William Hamilton of The Woodlands,…

  • Not to be too grandiose,

    but it’s as if the universe knows it’s the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 and presents us with a day that eerily resembles that day, the bluebell sky, the lovely cool of late summer, the feeling of peace and anticipation of all the good things fall will bring. You know what comes next. And everyone has…

  • Come for the oak trees,

    stay for the polka dots. That was my idea at the New York Botanical Garden, along with hundreds of other visitors still drying out after being pummeled by Ida. Yayoi Kusama has been the artist in residence for months, transforming outdoor and indoor spaces, populating them with her whimsical works. Now 92 and one of the most…

  • You can’t unsee the graffiti in the Bronx

    once you see it. And it is all around you. Some surfaces would seem to be left alone. Church walls, for example. Or cars. But everything else is fair game, and especially popular are store gates, the kind that get opened in the morning and pulled down at night. Every surface is game. You’ll find…

  • If you go to the High Line

    don’t expect to have it to yourself. Once upon a time if you happened to be passing through Chelsea you could wander up to the one and a half mile long park and the sensation would be one of openness, a respite from the claustrophobia that comes with living in a city with 8 million people.…

  • Nooks and crannies

    pretty much define what’s so great about the Metropolitan Museum. Everyone who has gone there a lot has favorites. It’s hard not to love the Atrium outside the American Wing. You can drink ridiculously overpriced coffee and gaze out the bank of windows at Central Park in its summer glory. But your personal favorite might…

  • “Everyone is an artist.”

    So quoth Joseph Beuys, one of the most influential artists of the last century and German Green Party founder, and certainly the one who most used trees on such a grand scale in his work. One of his best known pieces grows in Kassel, Germany. With the help of volunteers, he planted 7,000 oak trees…

  • Bringing a forest to NYC

    can be a lot of work, even for Maya Lin. Yes, that Maya Lin, the one who designed the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC (opened in 1982, when Lin was 23), winning a lot of criticism at first and then nothing but accolades. The same Maya Lin designed a factory in Yonkers, the city next…

  • I’m tired of flowers

    They’re too pretty. They distract you from all the miseries around you, inside you. They are beautiful effortlessly, which puts everybody to shame. One of my favorite poems, Walking Around by Pablo Neruda, opens with these lines: It so happens I am sick of being a man. And it happens that I walk into tailorshops…

  • Venus in Ash

    When the crew cuts down a tree, they lop off the upper branches first. The pruner in the bucket lowers the limbs carefully to the ground where, shaggy and brittle, they are fed into the monster of a chipper. Then the pruner glides through the air as the bucket returns to the truck. What has…