All This and Pink Cupcakes!

AVAM Director Rebecca Hoffberger poses with Andrew Logan's statue of Divine - coming to NYC this week!

Artist Kate Graves brings word that the incredible American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) in Baltimore is bringing 50+ pieces of work from their permanent collection to NYC this month. From this Friday, June 26, through July 20th, these works will be energizing the oh-so-so Fifth Avenue windows (they’re at #754) of Bergdorf Goodman. If you get up there on Friday, you may be able to grab one of the Sweet Things Bake Shop pink cupcakes being served by the Lower East Side Girls Club.

It may be an odd juxtaposition: a museum known for its outsider, found object, money-be-damned artists and a department store so lux that an on-line search of their site for “visionary” turns up a $195 ‘Visionary Top’ (in a rich blue!), and a search for “pink cupcake” gives you a $700 sapphire cupcake necklace. But we’re the winners here, with free cupcakes, and the chance to see works by AVAM artists like Vollis Simpson, Clyde Jones, and Judith Scott a little closer to home.

If you haven’t yet made the pilgrimage to AVAM, please do yourself a favor and get it on the top of your “to do” list. Wilbo and I happened to take one of the first of our “24 hour” vacations in Baltimore shortly after the museum opened in November, 1995. Browsing brochures for something to do (good marketing does work!), their little fold-over jumped out. Lucky us! We experienced the inaugural exhibition, the luminous Tree of Life. The show’s catalogue remains a favorite. The museum installs a new exhibit each year – giving you 10 -11 months to revisit and digest each new visual wonderland that they’ve so generously constructed.

This year’s show, The Marriage of Art, Science & Philosophy, is up through September 6, 2009. I can't wait to see it. It promises to be about“...100+ visionary artists/scientists/ inventors and philosophers taking a fresh look at the very notion of light, color, sound, pattern, number, scale, and purpose in their personal pursuit of Wonder." Not a lot of museums could really live up to that kind of hype. But the American Visual Art Museum really delivers.