Museum Hopping + Queens, NY

When my daughter said she wanted to see the Mad Men exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image, I said “heck yes!”  She has Fridays off from her internship in NYC so every Friday we plan a field trip so to speak.  This Friday was Queens.  Turns out we’ve spent very little time in the borough of Queens.   Sure we spend lots of time at JFK and LaGuardia airports, but even baseball….we’re Yankees fans.   So you won’t find us at CitiField.   Yesterday we spent the afternoon museum hopping all in about a three mile radius.

The first museum was the Museum of the Moving Image for the Mad Men exhibit.  It was a hot day so we started with a sparkling water in the cafe.

Don’t let this image fool you.  There were plenty of people in the museum, but at this moment we had the cafe all to ourselves.  All white with a view of the minimalist garden.

Can’t you just smell the stale smoke while viewing this image?!  Matthew Weiner’s  Mad Men exhibit is open through September 6, 2015.

Next, we went to MoMa PS1.  We are regular visitors at MoMA in Manhattan, but we had never been to  MoMA PS1 that occupies the space of a 100-year old Romanesque Revival school building.  The building was still very much like a school with all the school lighting, doors and windows that seemed to be original to the building.  Again…no museum tour is complete without a stop at the cafe where Madeline posed as if she were a school girl during morning attendance.

Our last museum of the day was The Noguchi Museum.  I have been wanting to visit this museum for years.  My familiarity with the artist was through his design of the popular Noguchi Table  produced by Herman Miller.  I am so intrigued by the artist and his painstaking methods of working on pieces of granite to create these large sculptures.  The building itself is incredible.  Indoor/outdoor space with atrium like gardens and white painted brick walls and salvaged wood floors throughout the galleries.  Walls of windows creating gorgeous light flooding through the space.  The garden was closed for restoration, but don’t miss the Socrates Sculpture Park just a few blocks away like we did!

Madeline is always rarely open to modeling.

But we did manage to find a great spot for lunch at Gastroteca and an adorable shop called Lockwood on the way back to the car.  We had a great afternoon.  All in we spent about 6 hours and 2 of those were driving.  So three museums, a little lunch, a tiny bit of shopping and six hours with Madeline….I’d say that’s a perfect day.  Well to me anyway!

SaveSave