Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up later in the week, we're going to learn about Toni Morrison's career as an editor. We'll be joined by Professor Dana Williams. Her new book is titled Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship. It includes stories about the authors she shaped and her efforts to change publishing for the better.

Plus, this summer marks the 50th anniversary of when Jaws first terrorized a generation in the movie theater. Radiolab is commemorating the anniversary with a week of programming dedicated to sharks. We'll hear from two of their producers. Plus, we want you to call in and share your memories of seeing Jaws. That's in the future. Let's get this hour started with the final installment of our 100 Pieces of Art series.

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Alison Stewart: In honor of WNYC's 100th birthday, we've been asking, asking experts from across the art world to share 10 pieces of art in New York City that they think you should make time to see. From famous world museums to hidden gems of public art. Over the course of the year, we've heard from Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum, ARTnews editor Sarah Douglas, New York Times critic Will Heinrich, and Hyperallegenic's, Hrag Vartanian, and so many more. In fact, once we finish, we have a surprise headed your way, so stay tuned for that. Today, for the final installment in the series, we're joined by Sarah Cho, assistant curator at the Queens Museum. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Cho: Hi, Alison. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well. Listeners, this is your final chance to shout out your favorite pieces of art that you think everybody should see in New York City. It could be in a museum. It could be art you see in the subway. It could be public art on the street. Our phone number is 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call in and join us on air, or you can text that number as well. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Let's jump into your list. The Panorama of the City of New York, 1964, at the Queens Museum. Apparently, it took more than 100 people three years to complete the Panorama. First of all, why was such a large team needed?

Sarah Cho: There are so many, many tiny, tiny little buildings that comprise the beautiful city of New York. Well, many big buildings that comprise the beautiful city of New York that have been miniaturized for the Panorama. It was compiled or created by Lester & Associates and was the brainchild of Robert Moses, who is the unelected public official and city planner whose 40-year career shaped New York City. Actually, it was Last updated in 1992, so it has taken hundreds of more people to continue updating the Panorama. When you go visit, you'll see buildings that no longer are part of the New York City landscape today, such as the World Trade Center.

Alison Stewart: When you go see the Panorama, what perspective does it give you on the city?

Sarah Cho: It's built on a scale of 1:1200. Really, you walk in and you're like, oh my gosh, I can see all of New York in one viewing. As you enter, there is a glass pathway that takes you all around the Panorama so you can really see the city almost beneath your feet. The scale of 1:1,200 it's kind of hard to comprehend conceptually. For comparison's sake, the Empire State Building is 15 inches tall in the panorama. Being able to see the city at that scale is really wonderful.

Then there's also, the Panorama goes cycles through night and day with lights that dim on and off. At Moses's instructions, there are different parts of the map that indicate different public services. When the lights dim to nighttime, the public park areas light up in a fluorescent green and public recreation centers in a neon orange. You get to see all of these public services available in New York City. Also, a little other fun fact is he finished building bridges and highways as the head of Department of Transportation at the time, or built tunnels, bridges, authority, TBTA. When you go see the panorama, you'll actually see that the bridges and the highways are a little bit bigger than scale to emphasize those achievements.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's funny.

Sarah Cho: Just a fun little thing.

Alison Stewart: Do you have a favorite part of the Panorama?

Sarah Cho: Oh, my gosh. Okay, so I was born and raised in Queens, so I have to say being able to find where I grew up is fun, but the actual answer to this is actually Staten Island. Because every single time I walk through the Panorama, I am always astounded by how large Staten Island is. Being able to see it at this scale makes you realize that it's a big island.

Alison Stewart: I like when the little planes come flying in.

Sarah Cho: Oh my gosh, that is really, really fun. Coming in and out of LaGuardia.

Alison Stewart: That is the Panorama of the City of New York, 1964. You also highlighted a model of Queens Museum by Jessica Rylan.

Sarah Cho: Yes. This is kind of an Easter egg of the Panorama. Over the years, many artists have been responding to the Panorama for exhibitions at the museum. There's Mel Chin, Stephanie Dinkins, among others, including an artist that I worked with last year, Cameron Granger, who included a film excerpt of edited highway footage to address segregative urban design, which really points to Robert Moses's legacy. On the Panorama, there is an artwork that is permanently there by electronic musician Jessica Rylan entitled NanoQMA. She made a scale model of the panorama that fits inside the model of the museum on the Panorama. It's kind of like a Russian doll.

Alison Stewart: That's cool.

Sarah Cho: It's a much smaller, to-scale version. In terms of scale, it's 40 micrometers wide, which is roughly 125th the size of a grain of salt. Super, super tiny. It's made from two-photon polymerization, which is a technique used in manufacturing nanotechnology.

Alison Stewart: Very interesting. Wow. Let's take a call from David from Manhattan, who is calling in. Hey David, thank you so much for calling, All Of It.

David: Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: What should I go see?

David: You should go see the Invisible Man monument in Ralph Ellison Plaza at 150th Street and Riverside Drive.

Alison Stewart: Why do you think I should go see it?

David: Why?

Alison Stewart: Yes, tell me why.

David: It's fantastic. It's a piece by Elizabeth Catlett, who just had a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Fantastic artist. It's a big, beautiful outline of a silhouette representation of the Invisible Man. That park is also a great place to hear live music and just enjoy the wonderful park.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling, David. Let's talk to Tristan from Chelsea. Hey Tristan, thanks for calling All Of It.

Tristan: Hi there. Very happy to be on.

Alison Stewart: Tell us what we should go see.

Tristan: I was just listening to the co-curator of the Queens Museum talking about that wonderful panorama, which actually would have been my first suggestion. The second suggestion is also at the Queens Museum, and it is the Neustadt collection of Tiffany glass, which is a wonderful collection that is also a really interesting slice of New York City history.

Louis Tiffany, who's buried in New York, a lot of people know as a-- they know Tiffany as jewelry, but really the kind of advent of the Tiffany name started in Corona Park, Queens, not far from where the museum is right now. The glass manufactory and a lot of the opalescent glass that we now celebrate all over the world in churches from Edinburgh to Tokyo, was produced there almost on the same grounds as the museum. Going to see that collection is a wonderful way to tap into New York's 19th-century industrial history and also to get to taste a little bit of the neighborhood, which has changed so much since then, but has still a really extraordinary presence.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to out you as an architectural historian PhD student. He knew quite a bit.

Sarah Cho: Yes, that's correct.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in, Tristan. Our guest is Sarah Cho, assistant curator at the Queens Museum. She's joining us for the final installment of our WNYC Centennial Series, 100 Pieces of Art You Should See If You Live in New York City. Give us a call. Shout out your favorite piece of art. Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Let's move over on to Harlem Renaissance Sculptors. The first is-- well, I'm going to let you explain this. It's Lift Every Voice and Sing from 1939 by Augusta Savage. First of all, what should people know about her?

Sarah Cho: Augusta Savage was born in Florida, moved to New York City, attended Cooper Union. She helped found the Harlem Artists Guild and was the director of the Harlem Community Arts Center. That's actually when she received a Commission in 1939 to create the sculpture that we're about to talk about.

Alison Stewart: All right, so tell us a little bit about the sculpture and what we can see of it.

Sarah Cho: Yes. Originally, the sculpture was 16 feet tall and was created in plaster and then painted in a dark color. The piece looks like a harp, except where the strings of the harp is made up of 12 standing Black chorus singers who wear long gowns that make them look like columns and steadfast in time. Much like a harp, the chorus singers are all varied in height, and the tallest one in the front, the shortest one in the back. They're standing on a curved base that takes the shape of a godlike omnipresent hand. In front of the singers is a kneeling Black man who holds a music sheet. There is a lot of musicality in this sculpture.

Alison Stewart: Because Lift Every Voice And Sing, as people know, is the Black national anthem. What happened to the original sculpture?

Sarah Cho: Right. It was commissioned for the 1939 World's Fair, and it was located next to the Contemporary Arts Building on the grounds that is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Much like a lot of the artworks that were on temporary display at the fair, this one was also destroyed at the end of the fair. Along with Savage's piece, works by Salvador Dalí, Arshile Gorky, Alexander Calder, and so many more great artists were unfortunately destroyed. However-

Alison Stewart: However--

Sarah Cho: -this work does live on through maquettes created by Savage's studio that were originally sold as souvenirs, but have now turned into artworks of their own right and that immortalize the artist's vision and contribution. The one that we have at the Queens Museum is a 10 by 9 by 4 inch sculpture that is a light colored metal. Though I've seen some in other museum collections that are more bronze. They're peppered out throughout the country, but please come to the Queens Museum to see ours.

Alison Stewart: Another piece by Richmond Barthé, Exodus and Dance from 1939. It's in Crown Heights. It's an outside piece. Yes?

Sarah Cho: Yes. It's a public mural. It was created by Barthé, who's, as you said, a Harlem Renaissance artist commissioned by the WPA to create a mural for one of New York City's public housing projects. It's created in cast stone, so it's actually like poured concrete.

It features Black Americans who are dancers and actors from two separate performances. On the left is inspired by Marc Connelly's 1930s play, The Green Pastures, which portrays scenes from the Old Testament from the perspective of a Black child in the South. Barthé here reimagines it in a frieze-like fashion. We've got a linear progression of Black folks moving from right to left across five panels. There's 19 women, children, and men that are precessing, robed in a biblical style, many of whom are carrying a bundled bag over their shoulder.

That also speaks to the great migration, especially because Barthé was born in Missouri and experienced that great migration himself, moved up to Chicago, and then to New York City in the '30s.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a couple of calls. Let's talk to David, who's calling from Windsor Terrace. Hi, David, thank you for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

David: Hi. Good to be here. Thank you for having me. I want to nominate the little modest rosary bead in the Cloisters Museum up in Northern Manhattan, as much for itself as for people to see the gem that is the Cloisters, which often gets forgotten. The rosary bead opens and shows incredible scenes of the Magi and the Crucifixion. The characters are, I want to say, about a 32nd of an inch high, in complete 3D detail. I once heard a young high school student on a tour next to me say, "Man, whoever made that always knew what he was going to do on Saturday night."

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Thank you so much for calling. Let's talk to Christina from Staten Island. Hi, Christina. Thank you for calling All Of It.

Christina: Hi. Oh, love your show. I'm into miniature, and I also do day trips, and I take people different places. I got so excited when they restored the Stettheimer Dollhouse in the Museum of the City of New York. It's from the '20s. Florine, the one of the three sisters, was an artist in her own right. Her work is in MoMA, which I remember discovering and saying, "Oh my gosh, that's her." It's worth seeing. Oh, it's so beautiful. They completely restored it from the '20s, this beautiful dollhouse.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. We really appreciate it. I want to ask about one more piece before we go to a break. It's the side of Rockefeller Center. It's called News by Noguchi. It's his first public commission in the United States. What does it look like, and what was the inspiration for this piece?

Sarah Cho: Sure, it's 22 feet tall and it's made entirely of steel. It's vertically oriented, features an art deco style of relief. There are five people in action as they report on the news. There's someone photographing, someone jotting down notes, typing on a teletype, picking up the phone, and also observing. There's such a sense of motion and rush with diagonal lines or rays that increase in thickness as it goes from top left to bottom right.

The people are piled on top of the lines. They seem to be clamoring, rushing, and climbing over each other to get to the news.

They're quite muscly, and so it adds to the sense of movement as they bristle forwards. They seem to be unafraid of harm or censorship or anything in their path.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sarah Cho. She's assistant curator at the Queens Museum. We're talking about 100 pieces of art you should see in New York City. She's giving us 10 of her picks to close out this series. We're talking to you as well. It's your last chance to give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Shout out your favorite piece of art. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Sarah Cho, assistant curator at the Queens Museum. She's joining us for our final installment of WNYC's Centennial Series, 100 Pieces of Art You Should See in New York City. Listeners, we've been asking you to call in. Paula from Oyster Bay has called in. Hi, Paula. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Paula: Hi.

Alison Stewart: You're on the air.

Paula: [unintelligible 00:16:50] I should be saying this. Two of the other items relate to it. Gaston Lachaise, is represented in the [unintelligible 00:17:00]. So many of the other artists at [unintelligible 00:17:04]

Alison Stewart: Paula, I'm going to have to dive in. You're going in and out on your phone. She was going to also shout out the Rockefeller Center limestone carvings. Thank you for calling in. Your phone was breaking up, though. Jake. Let's talk to Jake in Jersey City. Fingers crossed. Your phone sounds okay, Jake?

Jacob: Yes. Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: I hear you great. Go for it.

Jacob: Okay. My name is Jacob, and I'd like to recommend the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation Museum on LaGuardia Place. Chaim Gross was an important American Jewish sculptor in the 20th century. There's a really nice collection of his work, which is in beautiful wood or stone. Also, he had a collection of his contemporary artists. I think the Rachel Sawyer. I think there's various things like that. There's that, and then he had a collection of African. He collected African and pre-Columbian work. It's a really nice place to go visit.

Alison Stewart: Jake, thanks so much for calling in. This says, "My favorite artwork for over 35 years is Rembrandt's Self-Portrait at the Met. It's like visiting a wise, empathetic old friend."

Sarah Cho: Oh. So gorgeous.

Alison Stewart: I want to ask you about this-- I don't know what to call it. It's called Funktional Vibrations at Hudson Yard.

Sarah Cho: I think we can call it a mural-

Alison Stewart: We call it a mural? It's called a mural.

Sarah Cho: -by Xenobia Bailey. It's one of the many subway artworks that you can see courtesy of the MTA. It features beautiful, bright, colorful, concentric, circular patterns that were originally crocheted by Xenobia Bailey. She's a textile artist. I was actually really excited about this commission when it was announced because I was really curious to see how the usual texture found in fiber arts, the strands, the loops, the thread, might translate to the MTA's tried and true subway tiles and glass mosaics. Of course it does, because glass is so versatile.

Each mosaic was handcrafted for this installation. There are different gradations and sparks of color that give dimensionality to a flat mural. These circular patterns butt up against each other like bursts of color and joy. When you ascend up into the Hudson Yards from the 7, it really does feel almost like a religious experience, looking up at the ceiling to me. They also read like fireworks in the sky, especially since they're bursting against a rich blue background.

If you do look closely, some of these fireworks or some beams radiate out from old Atlantic records. There is a visual hint to the musicality in these colors, patterns, and forms, which makes a lot of sense because the artist studied ethnomusicology and is influenced by a whole range of philosophies and designs from global majority cultures.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "Encounters in the Milky Way at the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History, Art and Science on display." Also on your list is Spiral for a Shared Dream. It's from 2022 at MoMA. It's such an interesting piece. What is it made of?

Sarah Cho: Carolina Caycedo's work is made up of fishing nets, 11 fishing nets that are created through vibrantly colored threads, and they're suspended in the air above you. They almost seem to be dancing in the air. To me, it also seems like you're seeing skirts or petticoats twirling around and dancing, and they really do move because the wind weaves through them.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I bet it's cool.

Sarah Cho: These fishing nets are called attarayas, which are often handmade and then cast by hand to catch seafood. Caycedo collaborated with Mexican fishing collectives to create these works and recorded interviews with them that expand upon the environmental and political struggles these Mexican fishers face, including dam and levy creation that endangered the fish and fishing communities and long term effects of pollution, but also speaks to the ways these communities have banded together to preserve indigenous practices and fight for the environment. I saw this installed in 2022 at MoMA, and I love it so much. They had it in their atrium, and they had all these circular sofas that you could lay down and look up at them.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that must have been great.

Sarah Cho: Similar to what the caller or the texter had just said about going to see the constellations. It's almost as if you're looking at the constellations in the sky, and they spiraled down from the ceiling almost like a constellation. I feel like what I love so much about this work is the artist has been long working collaboratively with community collectives and groups, and speak up against intertwined sociopolitical and ecological issues. The work is not only grounding and breathtaking, but it uplifts community connection. It reminds us that together is the way forward.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jillian in Downtown Manhattan. Hey, Jillian, what should we go see?

Jillian: Hi, I'm in Lower Manhattan, and I'm an artist and an art lover. We have lots of public art in Lower Manhattan. We have a Jean de Buffet, Four Trees. It's incredible. We have a huge Louise Nevelson black sculpture. We have a Noguchi, Red Cube, alongside Tom Sachs. We have a Hello Kitty statue and a big rabbit. You can just explore Lower Manhattan and see lots of huge public art displays for free.

Alison Stewart: Love that.

Jillian: That's my [unintelligible 00:22:35].

Alison Stewart: Thank you, Jillian. We appreciate it. We've got two video artists, Pipilotti Rist, Selfless in the Bath of Lava at MoMA PS1, and a video installation from Christine Sun Kim, Close Readings, 2015, at the Whitney Museum. I'm really interested in Rist's piece because you might miss it.

Sarah Cho: You totally might miss it. I missed it for quite some time until someone pointed it out to me. When you walk into PS1, you walk into their building, you have to check the floor. It's not something you often do. There is a hole in the floorboards. It's a tiny, tiny hole. You look deep inside, and there is a video playing.

The artist is in the nude and seems to be swimming in a digital landscape of lava. She looks up to you as you peer down into this hole. She reaches up to you, saying things like help in multiple languages. Her eyes are wide, and she kind of rotates around and around, looking up at you while treading this orange hot lava. There's the sense of voyeurism, power, and it's all super tongue-in-cheek. She comically and over the top swims and says intensely self-deprecating phrases, as is implied in the title, Selfless. She says things like, "I'm a worm and you are a flower. You would have done everything better."

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Louise, who's calling from Upper Manhattan. Hey, Louise, thanks for calling, All Of It.

Louise: HI. Thank you, everybody. No doubt, as you're driving southbound on the Harlem River Drive as it merges onto the FDR, you see that great mural that Keith Haring contributed to our neighborhood, the Crack Is Whack. Keith liked drawing his stuff all over the subways back in the day. What I think is so beautiful is that we can remember him and the whole fight of the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic. It's a beautiful piece of art. For those of us who love modern art, to see Keith displayed is just a beautiful thing.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling. All right, we're down to your last two, Sarah. Cobalt Blue. It's at the Museum of Art and Design. It's a ceramic piece. Who is this by?

Sarah Cho: Toshiko Takaezu.

Alison Stewart: It's not a useful jug. It's not a useful piece or a pot. It's a closed form.

Sarah Cho: Yes, it's called a closed form. When she threw it on the wheel, she finished it off by almost as if like, you know bud vases that have just one little hole to put a tiny little stem in? This one closes all the way. What's actually so fun about this is in a lot of her closed forms, she includes a tiny little rattle. It's a small piece of clay. As you hold it and lift it up, it dings as it rattles around. It started off as an accident for her, but then she started to intentionally recreate it in her work.

My wonderful colleagues at MAD went to storage to double-check that it does rattle for me and sent me some pictures of it. I think that really brings the artwork to life as it was intended to be experienced.

Alison Stewart: Your last piece is at the Brooklyn Museum. It's called Seneca Artist New Beginnings, 2022. It's a bag created by two Native American people. What's the bag made of? What does it look like?

Sarah Cho: Sure. It's a flat bag. It's made of, going to list it, fawn hide, brain-tanned buckskin, velvet, gunmetal hardware, mother-of-pearl, Czech beads, vintage German beads, moose hair, dyed deer hair, moose antler, and whitetail deer antler. The bag features this fawn fur tanning. It was sourced from a fawn that was killed in a road crossing. The reuse of the fawn fur and creation of this beautiful bag honors its life.

Hayden Haynes and Samantha Jacobs who are the two artists who collaborated to create this. Really thought about new beginnings in that way. The story of the fawn also comes across in the design of the comb that is on the front of the purse. It features two deer, perhaps the fawn's parents themselves, looking at each other in a beautiful, knowing way.

Alison Stewart: We've got time for one more call. Marissa is calling in from Manhattan. Real quick, Marissa, what do you want to say?

Marissa: Oh, yes, hi, it's Marissa. Thank you so much for this. This is so interesting. Anyway, my father in the probably early '60s, produced a mural which is sitting still to this day by the police station on 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, 7th Avenue and Broadway, where they fork off. Anyway, it is a map. It's mosaic, a map of New York. It's in two colors, orange and blue, for the water. I'm just so excited that it's still there. Whenever I go to Broadway to see a show, I always pass by and put a thumbs up to it. Anyway, we're so lucky to be living here with so much art.

Alison Stewart: What's your dad's name?

Marissa: Well, they always called him Mondo, M-O-N-D-O, was his last name. To this day, to see the proliferation of mosaics in the subway system is just astounding. Whereas at that time, that was really the only thing that I can remember besides what he worked on in the Bronx High School of Science. It's a very large mosaic there.

Alison Stewart: Mondo. Marissa, thank you so much for calling in. We love that call. Thank you to Sarah Cho, assistant curator at the Queens Museum. Thank you for your list.

Sarah Cho: Thank you for having me.