The Museum of Arts and Design

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Columbus Circle⎯home of the tourists, swindlers, and major retailers our city knows so well.  Located on the southwestern most corner of Central Park, the circle is almost always packed with visitors.  However, not all people go to this traffic-prone circle for the overly priced shops and restaurants; some people visit this New York City hub for its art appeal.  If you do visit Columbus Circle and look toward the towering Time Warner Center, you can see a building out of the corner of your left eye.  Past the perpetual commotion, inflated price tags, and flashy lights of the Circle’s shops, there lies a quiet museum with the most riveting artwork in the city. The museum utilizes the same ingenuity the shops use in their promotions, but with a tad bit more eloquence.  Innovation is essential for the success of any organization in New York, and is the foremost characteristic of the Museum of Arts and Design.

The MAD was not always located where it is today.  Since its start, the museum has grown in both size and popularity.  Before September 2008, it was located in a “small” 4-floor building on 53rd street.  After expanding its collection beyond what its walls could hold, the museum was forced to move to its bigger 12-floor location on Columbus Circle, right off the corner of 8th avenue.  Still the museum had trouble fitting their artwork.  The designers used their familiarity with innovation to solve their problem, optimize their space, and surprise their visitors; at the bottom of each stairwell was a miniature and very unexpected art exhibit.  Even more inventive and startling were the drawers under each display case.  Each drawer could be pulled out to reveal another work of art, thus adding about 100 additional pieces that, without creativity, would have otherwise not been able to fit on display.

The new location at the heart of New York City is perfect for several reasons.  Here the museum can employ technology while still harnessing New York City culture.  The corners of each floor are furnished with Macintosh desktops⎯each fully equipped to browse the Internet for everything related to the museum.  In-between the Mac’s, there are interactive touch-screen televisions on which you can view every single art piece located on that floor.  The screens allow you to see the entire collection, zoom in on a certain piece and read a brief, yet extremely informative description of the selected artwork.  Moving to the new building gave the MAD extra space and new technology.

Even more imaginative than the museum itself were the exhibitions on display.  Far surpassing any other exhibition⎯in both creativity and floor space⎯was the “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary” exhibit located on the 5th and 6th floors.  The title of the exhibit says it all; each piece is made of ordinary materials put together to form a completely new object with an entirely new purpose.  In one piece, an artist formed a life-sized pyramid out of plastic spoons and rubber bands.  Another artist sewed the tags of hundreds of shirts into a giant picture of a woman sewing.  In my personal favorite piece, an artist took different colored spools of thread and aligned them to form a very blurry and inverted “Mona Lisa”.  After looking through a glass globe in the middle of the floor, the inverted “Mona Lisa” flipped and the picture became clear.  In essence, it transformed an ordinary collection of thread into one of the world’s most highly regarded portraits.  Each piece was deep, but simple enough to conceptualize without any excessively profound thinking.  By using this creative style, the museum further appeals to its movement toward modernization.

The Museum of Arts and Design is the unbeknownst core of Columbus Circle.  Distracted by the Columbus Circle shops, many people often look past the museum⎯they don’t know what they’re missing out on.  The MAD encompasses all of the same culture and innovation that makes New York the lucrative City that it is today.   In every corner of the museum there lies something new⎯from Macintosh desktops to Mona Lisa replicas⎯making it the best and most innovative museum in the City.