Acceso usuarios
Julia C. Hernández
Turn a corner in New York and when least expected, you might find yourself face-to-face with something unassumingly monumental and surprisingly global tucked away amidst the concrete and steel. Nestled between the three skyscrapers forming New York University's Silver Towers complex, Picasso's massive sculptural installation, "Bust of Sylevette," peaks out at passersby on LaGuardia Place. Down on the Battery Esplanade, just one block from One World Trade Center, a slight turn away from the river and into Kowsky Park brings a chunk of the Berlin Wall into view. Uptown atop the Greywacke Knoll, just inside Central Park, "Cleopatra's Needle," the 3,500-year-old obelisk gifted to the city by the Egyptian government in 1881, appears suddenly from behind trees as visitors round the corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.2 For many, the discovery of The Hispanic Society Museum and Library (hereafter Hispanic Society), home to the suelta edition of Sor Juana's Divino Narciso featured on this volume's cover, creates just this kind of distinctively New York frisson: the unexpected delight of the global suddenly made local. [End Page 5] Situated off the beaten path from the Upper East Side's Museum Mile, cloistered beyond a gateway located between 155th and 156th streets on Broadway, Archer Huntington's monument to Hispanic culture remains one of the hidden gems of Washington Heights (fig. 1).3 Visitors who venture onto the beauxarts Audubon Terrace and pass through the museum's bronze doors leave twenty-first-century Manhattan behind, suddenly finding themselves in a lavish sixteenth-century Spanish courtyard—or at least Huntington's simulacrum of one, meticulously recreated under the railroad heir-cum-Hispanist's expert eye. Moving through the terra-cotta colored galleries, one encounters, among other treasures, Joaquín Soralla's monumental, immersive mural cycle Vision of Spain, commissioned by Huntington for the museum and completed in 1919.
