Review: A Local Gallery Right Under Our Noses

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Just right around the corner of the Baruch 23rd street building, there’s a little gallery that most people have never heard of. The gallery is located on the ground floor of Baruch’s Administrative Center at 135 East 22nd Street. It is a small gallery that has offered museum-quality shows for over a decade. The gallery is free and open to the public and the schedule reflects the College academic calendar. It seems to be an inside secret. So secret in fact, that a majority of the college students who attend Baruch and who might walk past it everyday, don’t know that it’s there. If you’re not specifically looking for them, it’s easy to miss the plated words, “Sidney Mishkin Gallery,” on the side of the administrative center.

Every year, the gallery mounts five shows. The current exhibit at the gallery, is “Mercedes Matter: A Retrospective Exhibition (October 30-December 14, 2009). This exhibit is a national traveling show, and Baruch College is its first stop. Mercedes Matter best known today as the founder of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. She created her first painting as early as the age of nine, and as she grew her style matured into abstract expressionism, which is surrealism with emphasis on spontaneous, or subconscious creation.

Many of the paintings share something in common. At first glance they look like splashes of color. There’s nothing organized or planned about them, they just seem random. But keep staring at the painting and you’ll probably be able to make out something. In one still life painting, if you keep staring at it you’ll see birds with very prominent eyes that are looking directly at you. Then there are other paintings where even if you stand there and stare at it for five minutes you still won’t see anything pop out at you. Some of these pieces by Matter seemed too abstract for even abstract, but maybe that’s a good thing. It allows the viewer to be creative, and encourages them to think for themselves. Instead of looking at one painting for one second and saying, “bowl of fruit,” before moving on to the next one, Matter’s abstract paintings might cause you to pull your hair out over figuring out just what the painting is of (maybe not that extreme). I was troubled over a few paintings, unable to make anything out of it. A minute after I walked out of the gallery, I walked right back in, not caring about what the people working there might think, to continuing staring at the painting.
The Mercedes Matter exhibit was simple and yet captivating, but the setting definitely took away from the experience. The lighting was dim and yellow, and the poor lighting influenced how the colors of the paintings looked. I had a couple of questions, but I didn’t want to disturb the lady working there who was on the phone having a personal conversation about her daughter’s SAT scores.
This temporary exhibit is very confusing, but in a good way. Good conversations, good novels, good movies, are thought provoking; the same applies to art. Good art challenges the viewer to think and imagine beyond what is placed in front of them.