If you were curious about the structure being built out of ship
containers in the West Village on 13th and West St ... The Nomadic Museum...
you'll like this if you enjoy pictures of people with animals, particularly
elephants.
The artist, according to the descriptions in the exhibit
"attempts to break down the barriers between human and animal".
http://www.ashesandsnow.org/index2.html
From the exhibit’s website:
Pier 54: The Nomadic Museum as seen on February 1. The
45,000-square-foot space opens to the public on March 5.
While the city marvels at saffron-bedecked Central Park, another
massive arts project has been nearing completion downtown, one shipping
container at a time. Called the Nomadic Museum, it will take up all of Pier 54,
on the Hudson River at 13th Street. But as a museum it’s a rather curious
monument: It won’t remain standing for very long. And it’s devoted exclusively
to the work of one artist.
Photographer Gregory Colbert—who travels the world taking pictures
of people communing with whales, elephants, and other animals— got the idea
(and funds) for the museum after his one-man installation in 2002 at the Venice
Biennale’s Arsenale, a vast shipyard dating from the Renaissance. “Ashes and
Snow” was the first solo exhibit ever to occupy the entire space. And every
last piece of art in it was bought up by the chairman of Rolex, who then
encouraged the artist to use the money to mount the show—as is—in other cities.
So, Colbert asked the avant-garde Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to design a
museum large enough to travel with it. After “Ashes and Snow” finishes its New
York run, from March 5 to June 6, the Nomadic Museum will be taken apart and
reassembled in Los Angeles. Future stops include Beijing and Paris.
“I was looking for a poetic logic to the building,” Colbert says.
“I didn’t want him to make a building he had made.” Known for his clever use of
paper and recycled materials, Ban recently designed a Pompidou spinoff in Metz,
France. For the Nomadic Museum, 148 empty containers are stacked in a
self-supporting grid. Fourteen containers will be used to ship building
materials; the remaining ones will be rounded up at the museum’s next port of
call. “The idea came from the fact that these can be found in every place the
museum will travel to,” says Ban. “I have not made anything new. I’m just
finding a new function for them.” A tentlike fabric fills in the gaps between the
containers and serves as the roof.
Visitors will enter through the skeletal arch of the old pier,
where the Titanic was to have docked. (The museum is renting the pier from the
Hudson River Park Trust for $300,000.) Inside will be a large wooden-plank
runway, flanked by 6,000 river stones. Colbert’s photographs will float in the
air, suspended between giant paper-tube columns that help support the roof.