Although she’s been a New Yorker for more than a decade, many Minnesotans will recognize Wendy Lubovich from her 13-year stint as a news anchor at KSTP-TV.
In her latest career, the Hibbing native has become an expert on New York’s museums, offering small-group tours via her company, Walk of Art (walk-of-art.com). Lubovich also spent a year researching and writing the just-published “111 Museums in New York That You Must Not Miss” (Emons, $19.90). The guidebook introduces readers to the well-known (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, aka the Met) and the obscure (National Museum of Mathematics, Self-Taught Genius Gallery), covering a far-flung range of subjects that include art, baseball, sex, gangsters, bonsai and maps.
Q: Why 111?
A: The number originates with my publisher. It’s a catchy number, and they’ve used it to launch a series of books around the world [including “111 Places in the Twin Cities That You Must Not Miss,” by Elizabeth Foy Larsen].
Q: Was it more difficult to come up with 111 examples, or to whittle your options down?
A: It was more the latter. When I began, I wasn’t really sure which way it was going to go. It was pretty intense: Can you go to 111 museums in a year, and then write about them? I started with the mainstream museums and then set out to discover the hidden ones, and one led to another, and another, and another, and pretty soon I had more than 130 of them. And since we’ve finished the book, several new ones have opened, including the Museum of the Dog (museumofthedog.org). The plan is to keep updating the book in small batches to keep it current.
Q: The book devotes two pages to each museum — text on one, photo on the other. What was your strategy for encapsulating the city’s huge attractions?
A: With the big museums, we decided to go small, and look at a single work, or choose a work that everyone thinks that they know but has surprising elements. For the Met (metmuseum.org), there’s the famous painting in the American Wing, “Washington Crossing the Delaware” — it’s a Christmas Day attack, with boats crossing the river — and there are all of these historical inaccuracies embedded in the canvas. He’s holding the American flag, but the flag wasn’t adopted at that point. There are horses and men standing in these shallow boats, which in real life would have tipped over, but they look great. It’s the light of day, but the attack took place at midnight. When you know these things, you think about it in a whole new way.
