Posted on 03/15/2024 12:44:38 AM PDT by dennisw
It’s truly the upper class.
At the end of February, Friends Seminary, a $63,200-a-year private Quaker school on East 16th Street, unveiled a $3.9 million art installation on its roof.
The Skyspace by James Turrell is a jewel box room where light from windows and artificial sources are mixed together to stunning effect.
There are just 85 Skyspaces in the world, and the one at Friends, where students range from kindergarteners to high schoolers, is the only one at a school that isn’t a university.
Insiders say the art installation, which is open to the public on select Fridays, is the latest shot fired as NYC private schools compete to offer increasingly lavish amenities.
“There is absolutely an arms race,” an educational consultant told The Post. “You have parents paying over $60,000 to send their kids to private schools. That’s a big ask. And they generally want the best bang for the buck.” Turrell’s work is in top museums around the world and is beloved by celebrities. Kendall Jenner has a $750,000 Turrell sculpture in her Beverly Hills home, while Kanye West and Zynga mobile games founder Mark Pincus have donated millions to fund the artist’s life’s work — Roden Crater — a massive piece, 40 years in the making, that’s carved out of an extinct volcano in the Arizona desert.
But, the 80-year-old art-world star is also a quaker who used to live near Friends and worship on its campus. He proposed the project and donated his time and another artwork, which was sold at Christie’s for $187,500, to help offset the $3.9 million in construction costs.
Friends’s president, Robert Lauder, fundraised the remaining millions and thinks the Skyspace has the potential to draw in families who might not have otherwise considered the school.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Its NYC = Don’t mind the maggots!
He is a truly great landscape artist IMHO.
He purchased a meteor crater in Arizona that he is turning into an observatory akin to what the Aztecs or Incans might have had.
I saw an exhibit of his at LACMA that was amazing. I also visited one of his earthworks in Ireland near the town of Skibbereen. Truly beautiful.
James Turrell is this good! Then I hope he made a million from this deal aka art installation.
UUh Huh......Maaanhatten
UUh Huh......Maaanhatten
Your link didn’t go to the real source, why not send people to the article rather than MSN?
Okay, so why will the school’s buying this art convince me to send my child to this school? Pretty sure I can give him lessons on my own in wasting money.
Is there an art shortage in NYC that we don’t know about?
BTW during the Vietnam War Quaker missionaries were able to use US military transportation to take them anywhere in the country they needed to go. Can anybody tell me why they received this special treatment?
I am getting dizzy from his alleged art. My breakfast is coming back up n out. Thanks for posting them.
A $3.9 million dollar skylight. The school deservedly got ripped off. We didn’t pay anywhere near that for our bathroom skylight.
Is this Friends school connected with the obama’s Sidwell Friends school?
So, people pay $63K/yr. to get gourmet food because that’s going to somehow make their kids have a great future. My old public school lunches were prepared by farmers wives and mamas. We had real roasted chicken on the bone with lemon pepper, big peanut butter cookies from scratch (no one died), real whole fruits and the most amazing homemade yeast rolls that the smell drifting through the hallways would put you to sleep during the class right before lunch, oh my!
All the finest people have a meteor crater.
Back in the 1970s, we had the choice of playing basketball in the school’s gym or walking across the street to have PE in the city pool which was nicer than that pool. IOW, double the use is a great way to save tax dollars.
That lunch menu doesn’t sound very gourmet. Just checked online and found out shawarma chicken is nothing but a Middle Eastern burrito made with “a handful of every day spices”. Wow, $63K for mac & cheese! I was going to make mac ‘n cheese with fake crab meat for dinner to see what lobster mac ‘n cheese might taste like. And I’m having leftover vegetable cheese soup for breakfast since we’re trying to eat down the freezer. We had super cheap jalapeno and orange zest cheesecake last night from homemade yogurt, so top that, Manhattan! 79 cents milk (qt. homemade yogurt), 64 cents eggs, 40 cents sugar and a few pennies for misc. (frozen jalapeno stems not tossed into the trash, homemade vanilla extract, salt, a zested orange by my own hand and electricity) so <$2.
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