Now on view at LIC’s artsy heavy-hitters: Noguchi, Deitch, PS 1 MoMA

Tranquil ground floor gallery at Noguchi Museum, Long Island City

As we round out the end of 2009, we decided to bump around the neighborhood and check out the current exhibitions of three of Long Island City’s legendary – and very different – art institutions: the zen/industrial aesthetic of the Noguchi Museum, the spacious waterfront warehouse that is Deitch Studios, and, of course, the school turned modern art repository, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center. Here’s what’s going on:

The Noguchi Museum is one of Long Island City’s original artistic gems. Founded by Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi at Vernon Blvd and 33rd Road in 1985 after having a studio across the street, Noguchi’s is the first one-artist museum to be created by a living artist in the US. He was quite literally an LIC artistic pioneer, mining the industries of Vernon for metal, stone, and marble materials for his sculptures, and creating the oasis of a green garden in the midst of warehouses and chain-linked lots.

After some recent renovations for structural and climate-controlled improvements (as in the upper level gallery, which is now better equipped to house visiting exhibitions), the museum’s director and curator undertook a labor of love: resetting and reorganizing Noguchi’s work to appear the way it was when the museum originally opened. The exhibition was aptly dubbed ‘Noguchi ReINstalled’ and will be on view through October 24th, 2010. 9-01 33rd Rd @ Vernon Blvd, LIC, 718.204.7088

Josh Smith makes the wall his canvas at Deitch Studios, Long Island City

Deitch Studios, the LIC offshoot of NYC’s Deitch Projects located right on the East River at 44th Drive, is a cavernous, white-walled blank canvas for art. Artist Josh Smith apparently saw it the same way, as in an effort to de-commercialize art and prohibit it from being purchased or coveted in any way, he painted the 47 pieces in his On The Water exhibition directly onto Deitch’s walls – in 3 1/2 days. It’s certainly an interesting concept, and Smith executes the 3 themes he is known for – the fish, the leaf, and his own signature – in a fluid, surrealistic manner with deep, bold splotches of color. The exhibition is on view through March 28th, 2010. 4-40 44th Drive, LIC

Glub, glub.. Leandro Erlich’s ‘Swimming Pool’ at PS 1, Long Island City

The PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, which might as well be synonymous with Long Island City, recently launched a new Saturday Sessions program that runs on the 2nd Saturday of each month and is meant to introduce New York audiences to emerging performance art. The last session on December 12th featured Wayne Hodge and Daniel Perlin – the former singing through a megaphone and the latter subsequently using tools to create an audio composition, both in a room with a floor covered entirely in vinyl records – as if they needed another variable thrown in there (!).

The December and January Saturday Sessions events are also being produced in conjunction with a conceptual but legitimately scientific project being housed in PS 1: Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. Rising Currents combines an architects-in-residence workshop at PS 1 and a gallery exhibition at MoMA that “call for architectural teams to propose infrastructure solutions that will make New York City more resilient in response to rising water levels in coming decades and establish lost eco-systems.” On December 12th and again at the next Saturday Session on January 9th, participants in the project open their studios to PS 1 visitors for discussions and presentations about their work. 22-25 Jackson Ave @ intersection of 46th Ave, LIC, 718.784.2084