April 8, 2025
With The Frick Collection’s reopening fast approaching, the Education Department has been busy planning the return of in-person programming, including activating our brand-new space, the Ian Wardropper Education Room. At this pivotal moment, I want to reflect on the programs we offered and audiences we served in the last year of closure.
Frick Madison closed its doors in March 2024, and we said goodbye to the temporary home for our collection in the iconic 1966 Marcel Breuer–designed building. Since then, the museum has mainly been engaging with our community online—through virtual conversation programs and art-making workshops along with online guided visits for students. Yet we also took this closure period as an opportunity to go beyond the walls of the museum and enter the classrooms and community centers of our partner organizations.
In the fall, Frick educators led drawing workshops at the Marcy Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library in Bedford-Stuyvesant, through a partnership with Culture Pass(link is external), and at the Stanley M. Isaacs Neighborhood Center on East 93rd Street, which serves a broad audience of low-income families, out-of-school and out-of-work youth, and aging New Yorkers, including isolated and homebound elderly neighbors. These sessions created opportunities to foster creativity and a sense of connection with artists from the past, and with each other.
One of the richest relationships we developed during our closure period was with the organization closest to home: our neighbors at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House(link is external), on East 70th Street between Second and First Avenues. The Neighborhood House is a settlement house founded in 1894 that provides an extensive array of integrated human services—including social, educational, health, housing, mental health, nutritional, fitness, and art offerings—which significantly improve the lives of over 17,000 New Yorkers in need each year.
Like the Isaacs Center, it supports widely diverse clients, including older adults, unhoused and formerly unhoused adults, children, families, and recent immigrants. Its Older Adult Centers offer at least twenty daily activities, including classes in art, craft, and culture. That’s where the Frick’s programming fit in—as one part of a robust schedule for the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House community.
Since many of the Neighborhood House’s art classes center on art-making, participants were eager for programming focused on the history of art, something the Frick’s close-looking and discussion-based teaching style equipped us well to facilitate. Starting in June 2024, Frick educators began leading a program in the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House Art Room called Looking at Art with The Frick Collection, which invites participants into conversations about celebrated works of art from our permanent collection.
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Examples of the details program participants can appreciate thanks to high-resolution images: the craquelure on the surface of Johannes Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl (left), and thick impasto brushstrokes from Édouard Manet’s Bullfight (right)
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Using high-resolution images, we can zoom in and share details that might not be visible to the naked eye—even in the galleries—such as the craquelure on the surface of Johannes Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl or the thick impasto on Édouard Manet’s Bullfight. The conversations were shaped by participants’ observations and insights and supported by our educators’ knowledge and research. Each session highlighted different areas of the museum’s collection, in order to keep content fresh for repeat attendees—and we had many!
At the end of one session, a participant asked, “When are you running this program again? We are hungry for these kinds of conversations about art.” To date, Frick educators have led twenty-one programs at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, serving more than 250 members of its community.
We often saw familiar faces at these sessions, including attendees from past in-person Sketch Nights or from the online program Drawing Together. Some participants joined to spend time with their friends, or simply because they were looking for an activity to do before their swimming class or after their farm-to-table lunch. Frick educator Olivia Birkelund remarked that this partnership has often opened the door for these New Yorkers to access lifelong memories of the Frick, including recounting their first visit to the museum. Of course, we have also been gratified to welcome many participants who are learning about the Frick for the very first time.
In January 2025, we wanted to try something new. Having recently developed an online collage workshop, we decided to test out this program in person. Museum educator Samuel Snodgrass began with a presentation with examples of collage in the history of art, before inviting participants to explore different techniques for building compositions out of “found images,” pulling from old art books and magazines.
What resulted was a wide range of creations: One student brought in her daughter’s childhood drawings to make a collaged birthday card; a few others used art to reflect on the state of the world. We end the program by walking around the classroom, viewing and discussing each other’s final pieces.
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Collages made by participants at the Neighborhood House
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Following the Frick’s reopening, most of our education programming will take place back at the museum: in the galleries, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium, and the Ian Wardropper Education Room. However, our outreach efforts will continue. These off-site experiences, in which educators met audiences where they are, enabled us to interact with members of our community whom we might never have reached before. Each person we met told us they were inspired to visit the Frick after we reopen—to experience the works of art in person that they studied in our programs.
After April 17, they’ll be able to do just that. It’s especially critical that the community at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House and other local partners feel welcome at the Frick. For them, our historic buildings will hopefully become a home away, but not far, from home.
All photos by Cris Sunwoo, The Frick Collection