On the weekend of June 26, the summer season will open with bands, jugglers, museum activities outdoors and architectural tours.
Presenting everything from traditional African and African-rooted music to current Afro-pop and jazz, the six-concert series starts with African rumba by Wendo Kosloy and Band at the museum, at 593 Broadway, between Houston and Prince Streets in SoHo.
In a year of good and bad stewardship of antiques, museums opened that are devoted to handbags, gelato artifacts and the 1970s band Cheap Trick, and museums closed and sold off displays of wax figures, farm equipment and bicycle memorabilia.
But the majority of American memorials — for example, all those classical auditoriums, parks, band shells, boulevards, museums, and parkways dedicated to the dead of the First World War — are rather soft.
Why didn't museums band together and say, "How are we going to deal with this?" They ran off instead to make their own deals — deals which may not exactly be very good in the long run.
Backed by former band member Bjorn Ulvaeus, the museum will feature some of the band's glitzy stage costumes, instruments and other mementos.
The tale of a ragtag band of art historians, museum curators and academics racing to rescue paintings and sculptures looted by the Nazis — slated to open Dec. 18 — now will be released by Sony Pictures early next year.
It is challenging enough for a band to churn out museum-ready facsimiles of 80-year-old pop tunes outfitted with stylistically accurate period arrangements.
Zwirner's in-house secondary-market research department, a museum-calibre band of Ph.D.s, ferrets out the particulars (provenance, context, the whereabouts of other editions or analogues, and so on) of each work that passes through the gallery.
The theory is that the orchestras that have the most to prove, the least to loose, and perhaps less traditional baggage than the most established bands (like that fiddling museum incarnate, the Vienna Philharmonic or conversely the LSO), are also those that might risk the most.
