I walk in New York.  As my last few trips have been short, I like to pack light.  Workout shoes are bulky and enormous space-eaters and I hate to be stuck in a hotel gym when I’m only in the city for 48 hours.

So I walk.  A lot.  That way, I get my exercise and see the city.  Win/win.  The second day of my last trip I walked from the Standard to the Cooper-Hewitt (with stops in between.)

I just google mapped it and it’s 4.6 miles.  A little trafficy.  A lot touristy (I am one) and a complete delight.  Also, I love big, stone lions (and small stone lions, but, for me, when it comes to stone lions, bigger is better) so passing the front of the Metropolitan Museum on foot makes for a good day.

Heading back, I hopped on the subway at 57th Street; there’s no reason to walk through Midtown twice in one day.  That brings the total to 6.6 miles.  More than I would have walked at home.

And in 6.6 miles I saw mid-century New York, rural Pennsylvania, Ted Muehling, Central Park, Frank Lloyd Wright, a fortune in jewels and had lunch with a Russian-born fabric designer.  A very good day.

The images, above are of the Sonia Delaunay exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt via their website.  Delaunay was a painter and clothing and fabric designer.  This exhibit was one of my favorites.  You can access the site here and read Courtney Barnes’s excellent coverage – anything I would do would be redundant – on Style Court here.  The catalogue is chocked full of inspiring images and absolutely worth the $35.

Intrigued as much by the how as the what,

I stopped to see the quilt exhibit at the Folk Art Museum.

I know some folks think they are kitch and corny,

 but they often contain messages once obvious and now obscured.

And I find them strong and graphic and warm and personal all at the same time.

I just don’t know how you could look at one and not see the amount of work, the number of stitches, and not feel the strain in the back of your neck.

This was my third trip to New York since the MoMA launched the Abstract Expressionists New York exhibit.    I had run out of time on my previous two trips, but was able to get there this time.  (And, horribly, it has closed so I feel terrible about going on and on.  But I’m going to anyway.)

I dig ’em.  The Abstract Expressionists, I mean.

Big and graphic and bold, they jazz me right up.  It was terrific to see all of these paintings together.  I forget, so accustomed to their images, so familiar with their forms, how shockingly foreign they were at their debut.  Forget that contemporary eyes might have gazed upon them and thought, “What the heck?” Puzzled, as Bert Cooper’s employees were with his Rothko.

Willem de Kooning Woman 1.  Really, we’re not all that bad.

I was there Good Friday and the museum was packed.  A swarming museum is an idea that delights, but a reality that detracts.  There were people moving everywhere, looking and talking and listening to audio tours.  But people were visiting Pollack like a rock star.