Frederick J. Brown

This year, when giving holiday gifts, skip the gift cards, the Amazon Prime products and deals and think way outside that digital, impersonal box, give and share a LIVE experience instead.  Let others jam malls and run around frenzied looking for the “perfect” anything, just dial up a museum, or book timed tickets online, knowing capacity is limited and museums are not jammed just before the holidays.

Accompanying a niece, nephew, cousin, or friend to an exhibit will stay with the giftee. Selfies taken in front of that Mondrian or Chagall, Matisse or Richard Mayhew and Felrath Hines or Sol LeWitt are certain to outlast flashy yoga wear, a tushy spa warmer, or a reinvented shower cap.

A trio of manageable museums are currently exhibiting some of the most talked about work in town: the Hudson River Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the Morgan Library and Museum are three off-the beaten track venues for pint-sized immersions in carefully cultivated and curated shows.

The Hudson River Museum is the fifth and final venue to host this impressive and wide-ranging collection African American Art in the 20th Century, which brings one of the most significant national collections of African American art to Yonkers. Featuring some of the country’s most famous Black artists–it was drawn from the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum–the exhibit features paintings and sculptures by 34 artists who came to prominence during the period bracketed by the Harlem Renaissance starting in the 1920s, the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and beyond.

In addition to Romare Bearden, artists include Frederick Brown, Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, Loïs Mailou Jones and Renée Stout, whose work ranges in style from portraiture to modern abstraction, to the postmodern assemblage of found objects.

Move from the galleries to the Planetarium or consider the Glenview Holiday Tour, the Gilded Age mansion that abuts the museum featuring Yonkers’ favorite dollhouse, Nybelwyck Hall. For a virtual experience, consider the Studio Tour and Demonstration with Jamel Robinson on Jan. 12 at the artist in his own studio.

https://www.hrm.org/
Open Thursday through Sunday, 12-5 pm