orensanz summer museum
Angel Orensanz:
The Island in the Center of the World
New Yorkers and visitors from everywhere are invited to a highly charged cultural experience from outside in. It is going to be a full chock Summer of art enjoyment and discovery in a stunning location. Picture the middle of the New York Harbor, with views to Downtown Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, the Hudson River up to Harlem, the Brooklyn shoreline, the Verrazano Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge and all the views that Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, Martin Scorsese, Jules Dassin, Hollywood and Broadway have immortalized for the world.
The Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation gave Angel Orensanz a two storied house and its surrounding garden for the whole Summer so he could share his creative imagination with tens of thousands of visitors that will come to the island throughout the Summer.
The “Orensanz Summer Museum” follows the concept of such illustrious precedents like Henry Thoreau’s Golden Pond and Leo Tolstoy Yasnaya Polyana. The “compound” of the Orensanz Museum comes with a small green around and a thirty feet high poplar with a fabric sign that announces the domestic culture center. That will propitiate large al fresco meetings and discussions, at times scholarly and at times populist. The museum has scheduled a summer exhibition of Angel Orensanz drawings and sculpture-lights; and occasional poetry readings; high powered discussions on aesthetics and hermeneutics; intimate international video presentations and animated dialectical visions of urban trends and neighborhood struggles. For a detailed program, admission fees, subscription program and how to get there please visit www.orensanz.org. The opening day will be June 14.
In the meantime, for the Fall and Winter, we are preparing a vigorous program of ambitious exhibitions both from Europe and the US, concerts, seminars and workshops for our neighbors and young people from the Lower East Side and exhibitions as far as Tokyo, Moscow and Mexico. The Foundation is now raising its Summer cottage, like a retreat, like an outpost in the heart of the bay for all to enjoy and reassess. A place to rest and think while the world moves around.
The six minutes vaporetto ride from the southern tip of Downtown Manhattan to Governors Island has all the glamour and is as exciting as a trip through the Gran Canale to The Lido in Venice, or from the Hermitage to the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg.
This project has been designed and is developed by the dedicated staff and volunteers of the Angel Orensanz Foundation, Departments of Art, Culture and Social History at 172 Norfolk Street, New York, NY 1002.
For the schedule of events, costs, transportation and other events in the Island or at the Foundation, please visit our web site at www.orensanz.org. Or call us at (212) 529-7194. We are open daily from 9 am to 7pm.
Remember, we have been in Downtown Manhattan since 1849.
