The Rubin Museum and West 17th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue

I get the sense that the Rubin Museum in the Chelsea neighborhood is not very well known, even among local New Yorkers. I had never even heard of it until a few years ago. Now, however, it is one of my favorite museums and I consider it a great little secret of the city. 

The Rubin features mostly Eastern religious art, especially from the Himalayan region. Some of its exhibits change from time to time but the permanent areas include religious statues, scrolls, carvings, and more. For example here is a sculpture from the 7th century (!):

The museum has required admission fees, which isn't as good as the suggested fees of places like the Met and Natural History Museum. But there are various discounts available at certain times, and also you can get in for free if you have a city university id, which is not mentioned on their website.  

There are 6 floors but each one is small and basically just a short circular walk around the building's center spiral staircase. Here is the center area at the top floor:

And a view up from the ground floor!

And from a middle floor!

I think I've made my point that there's a center spiral staircase. 

A recent visit to the Rubin began at the 6th floor, because hey why not take the elevator to the top and then work our way down?

This strategy led to a shaky start to the visit, at least for me personally, because the exhibit up there was very avant-garde and not typical of the rest of the museum's sensibility. I'm open to many different kinds of art but this wasn't doing it for me, perhaps especially because I was in the mindset of seeing more of what the Rubin typically has to offer in terms of older Eastern religious works. 

Here is one piece from this exhibit, which had the top head continuously spinning and the knife-tongues almost touching at one point:

This was actually one of the tamer works in the exhibit. No offense to the artist but I'll move on to other areas now. 

There was an interesting exhibit that explored the rainy season in Nepal and how important it is to annual cycles of life there.

Most of the rest of the floors, however, featured the religious art that I associate with this museum. Here are some looks:

There were some interesting figures with rather intimidating expressions:

One of the floors had a shrine room with many elaborate figures and objects. Here is a portion of it:

Here are a few more looks around the floors:

You can see in the photos that the museum is not generally very crowded, to say the least. That makes it even nicer to visit, along with it being small and well air-conditioned (I'm assuming it's properly heated in the winter as well).

At the ground level there is a gift shop and a very pleasant cafe area, along with stairs leading to a lower level with a few more works of art. Here is an out of focus photo from the stairs, with the cafe to the right and the gift shop to the left:

The gift shop has lots of cool little items. For some reason I only took a photo of a small corner of it:

But don't worry, the shop also has incense and religious and spiritual books and much more. 

I didn't have anything at the cafe but it had a nice menu and seemed high-quality:

The lower area was small but very nice and had an exhibit on Cuban art. I guess that breaks with the Eastern/Himalayan theme but it still looked interesting.

I was excited to see this info on the wall that the lower level does not require admission, and it turns out that the same goes for the cafe and gift shop areas as well. 

That makes the ground floor and lower level a really nice and quiet place to stop in for a while, whether for a bite or beverage in the cafe or to relax in the lower level where there generally seem to be very few people. It's kind of like a hidden public library that has good air-conditioning and more space to spread out. Nice. I'm hesitant to even share this information but I'm not worried because my blog shares the characteristic of not being very well known. 

Let's take a brief look at some more of the block besides the Rubin Museum. Nearby is a Housing Works Thrift Shop:

Housing Works is a non-profit organization that particularly focuses on fighting HIV/AIDS and homelessness. 

Closer to 6th Avenue is also the Angel Street Thrift Shop, with the blue awning:

Just to the right of that is a church, and then a private school called Winston Preparatory School:

And to the left of the thrift shop is a florist and a psychic:

This block has a lot of range. 

At the 6th Avenue corner is a parking lot and a T-Mobile store.

Admittedly these are not very exciting, but in the parking lot is a big and interesting work of art:

I think he's writing 'I heart NY parking lots.' So do I.

Also near 6th Avenue is a row of three restaurants: an Italian place called Da Umberto, Haven's Kitchen which is also a cooking school, and Serenata which serves Mexican food.

I think that covers most of the block. It's a very pleasant street to walk down, and the Rubin Museum is worth visiting for its interesting art and chance to escape the harsher weather of the city in a quiet place that isn't crowded. It's hard to beat that, even if you want to avoid the admission and just hang out at the cafe and lower level. 


Until next time, thanks for reading.