Last week, I wrote about Poster House, the new museum on 23rd Street in Chelsea focusing on poster art, a discrete medium that’s both a print, usually a lithograph, and produced on a massive scale for advertising. From Toulouse-Lautrec to circus posters and recruitment art in wartime to movie posters and protest art, posters have a special magic and, now, a new place of pride. It’s the only poster museum in the country. I adored one of the two shows on view but thought that the other — with its trite, boring posters from the 2017 Women’s March in D.C. — was an abuse of museology. How many times can an art show say, “I’m aggrieved,” but only about politically correct issues? It’s a new museum, though, and I think its potential is big.
From posters, I’ll go to pastels and power suits. In the same Chelsea neighborhood, far from Museum Mile, are the FLAG Art Foundation and museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Both are free art spaces, smartly and elegantly programmed, and both promote contemplation and learning. FLAG is a privately funded, experimental art space on 25th Street and Tenth Avenue, amid the high-end contemporary art dealers. It’s open to the public and a welcoming place. The FIT museum belongs to the school. It’s got a great fashion collection — fashion is indeed art — and considers the body as a canvas for the best design and materials from the exotic to the synthetic to the prosaic.
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