Museum of Arts and Design

Center of Olfactory Art Opens In New York City Museum

New York City's Museum of Arts & Design is launching a new center that will explore scent as an art form. The Center of Olfactory Art opened at the Museum of Arts and Design last week. Chandler Burr, author of "The Emperor of Scent" and the former NY Times fragrance critic, has been chosen as the nation's first curator of scent. The center's first exhibition, "The Art of Scent, 1889-2011" will debut next November, examining some of history's best-known perfumers through 10 seminal scents, displayed as works of art. The AP reports that visitors won't be sniffing elaborate bottles, instead they will experience each fragrance along a 6-foot-wide path where buttons on an atomizing machine will release scent.

The center will also host public programs including discussions with scent artists and perfume industry executives. Other planned exhibits will focus on the technology behind synthetic scents and the raw materials involved in scent creation. There will also be an artist-in-residence program that will have perfumers working in the museum's artist studios creating new fragrances over a period of several months.

Tags: center of olfactory art, chandler burr, museum of arts and design, scent museum

Fur, Feathers, Bugs and Butterflies at MAD

by Bobbie Leigh (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Events, Art

If the Museum of Arts and Design's new show had a soundtrack, it would be Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive." As Jovi says and MAD's show tells, "Every day it seems we're wastin' away." Yet in the fascinating "Dead or Alive" show at MAD nothing -not fur, feathers, bones, insects, shell - goes to waste. In fact, 37 international artists whose work is on view have transformed once-living material into "lively" sculpture and installations.

Rather than morbid, the work is mysterious, highly personal, and each in its own way comments on the human condition and the transcendence of life, whether man or beast. One of the most remarkable installations is Keith W. Bentley's Cauda Equina,
made up of 1.4 million hand-knotted horse hairs mounted on fabric and applied to a horse mannequin. The result is a shaggy pony that resembles a huge sheep dog in mourning. Bentley is a self-trained artist who is passionate about animals. On learning that more than 250 horses were going to be slaughtered in processing plants, the artist obtained all the hair from the horses' manes and tails. He twisted and hand-knotted them, a painstaking process that took 12 years. He then created what is, in effect, a horse-hair blanket that he placed over the pony form to create the spooky installation. The idea of covering the pony's head with a flowing veil of horse hair evokes the Victorian custom of mourning when women covered their faces with a veil.

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Tags: art installation, craft, damien hirst, design, museum of art and design, Museum of Arts and Design, new york city, new york museum, shen shaomin

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