Purchase in the City: Wandering the MoMA
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
By Xiaoying Wu Hong
With the sun close to its highest peak at 11 a.m., Purchase students mingle around outside Fort Awesome, all bundled up in the frigid weather. Just down the road, a bright yellow school bus pulls down Lincoln Avenue, sunlight gleaming off the windshields.
They pile onto the bus, one by one in a single file, en-route to the Museum of Modern Art.
The smell of leather seats fills the warm air as each bump of the road rocks the rows of seats. Students are taken back to when they were smaller, legs swinging as they eagerly wait for an exciting field trip in the big city.
“Purchase in the City” is an initiative facilitated by Student Affairs and Enrollment Management with a mission to “create connections among peers, alumni, and faculty, and with the city itself,” according to the Purchase website.
Lizz Elvira, associate director of the Multicultural Center, is in charge of researching the locations and activities for the trips.
“We come up with different ideas of trips that we can take the students into the city,” they say. “It's really based on what we think students will be attracted to and interested in.”
Many of these activities are art-related, perhaps due to Purchase College’s affinity for the arts, Elvira assumes.
With the bus parked outside of West 53rd Street, students exit the bus and congregate outside the glass doors. The group is instructed to return in three hours for the bus back to Purchase.
Although the event is listed specifically for the Wifredo Lam exhibition, “When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream,” students venture freely throughout the museum.
Puck Costa, a junior playwriting and screenwriting major, beelines for the Wifredo Lam exhibition. “It’s what we were supposed to be looking at,” he says. After an hour or so, he decided to explore the other exhibits as well.
“I was just wandering,” Costa says. “I saw a bunch of stuffed animals suspended from the ceiling and different colors.”
Down a flight of escalators from “When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” on the second floor, past walkways aligned by glass railings and through pale walls cataloged with paintings and photographs, is a stark white room encased by towering walls.
The scent of pine is thick in the air, emanating from the countless colorful stuffed animals sewn together in enormous masses, which are suspended in the air on a wire.
Mike Kelley’s “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites" displays the irony of discarded, second-hand stuffed toys in a sanitized, pine-misted environment. The MoMA’s collection gallery page describes his work as commenting on the "hierarchy between obsessive hygiene and moral decline.”
“I was really just like a witness to the weird setting around me,” Costa says, “and I was just taking it in.”
Sarah Barnett, a junior theater and performance major, and Aaron O’Driscoll, a junior playwriting and screenwriting major, stuck together throughout their journey in the MoMA.
Rather than heading straight for Lam’s exhibition, the pair were on the prowl for “the famous paintings first,” O’Driscoll says.
“I did read about it on the website and I wanted to go,” O’Driscoll says. “I didn’t know if anyone else in the group was interested in it.”
Though after a “recommendation from a friend who said it was cool,” as O’Driscoll puts it, the two managed to squeeze a quick visit to “When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” right before the bus arrived for the return to campus.
After a long day of wandering about the MoMA and admiring a variety of different pieces, students gather at the lobby, waiting to take that yellow bus back to school.
“It was fun, I felt like I was really tired by the end of it.” Barnett says, “The best part is the free bus ride back.”
“Purchase in the City” runs every weekend, with every trip departing from the Fort Awesome parking lot by Starbucks. Further details and accommodation information are available on https://www.purchase.edu/offices/student-involvement/purchase-in-the-city/.