Storage solutions take center stage at the V&A East Storehouse and the Met’s Luce Center.
Everybody is going there, if Instagram is a clue: London’s V&A East Storehouse, which opened
a few months ago, huge floors of what’s been donated but not displayed. That’s more than a half a million objects, some of which can be handled, in a new space imagined by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
But my husband, Matthew Zwissler, and I swear by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s even older, if smaller, Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art. Opened in 1988, located just off the American Wing, yet without the contemporary bells and whistles—popup displays, actual people, et cetera of its British counterpart, and beloved by visual artist, Vik Muniz, among others, the Met’s Luce Center is where we saw multiple nesting tables of Chinese origin, all circa 1810, matching the sets we have at home.
The Luce Center is where you will find us, mouths agape, eyes wide, admiring rows upon rows of glass-protected silver teapots, Gilbert Stuart portraits, brass curtain tiebacks, shell dishes, pressed-glass goblets, and more. Some are identified with just numbers, others with names and dates, which is where the Luce Center could use some work. That being said, we are happy to take notes and then, back home, look closely at the desired antique, virtually,
of course.
