Exhausted by the time we head back to the Salisbury, we drag ourselves to dinner at Angelo’s Pizza, right next door to our hotel—one of those genuine New York Italian trattorias where you see the pizza dough being flipped and kneaded by the expert chefs in the kitchen as you wait for your own food to arrive. Mmmm….

Friday, Sept. 14

We begin this morning with our visit to TriBeCa, to the studio-loft of artist Melissa Meyer. Meyer has lived in TriBeCa (famed now for being Robert de Niro’s stomping grounds) for 31 years and has seen the area change and grow phenomenally in that time. “When I first moved here I could see the water,” she says. “Now there are so many more buildings. On the other hand, then it was hard to get people to come here to look at my work. Once it became a restaurant neighborhood, that got easier.”

A native New Yorker who attended NYU, Meyer (clad in traditional artist’s black on this day) has made her home almost since graduation in her 1,500-square-foot loft on the sixth floor (the top one) of her building. It’s stacked practically to its high ceilings with books, newspapers, plants and more, with several large-scale abstract canvases in differing states of completion on the walls. Kevin is showing Meyer’s work Feb. 15 through March 19 of this season, so he knows which pieces he plans to show already. But it’s one thing to see them on slides and another to see them in person.

Meyer has come to the Ringling campus before as a visiting artist, but this is her first one-person show at Selby. Kevin has wanted to feature her since her earlier visit, and when Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania organized this show he signed on as a second venue for it.

After paying our respects at the nearby World Trade Center site, now a construction zone, we take another cab back to the 57th Street area for an Indian buffet lunch at the Bay Leaf with Heinz and Suzanne, his wife. Then we take a pleasant walk alongside Central Park to East 70th Street for a stop at the famous Frick Collection, a spot we’ve never visited before.

Industrialist Henry Clay Frick had the money and the savvy to acquire numerous paintings, sculptures, clocks, porcelains and fine decorative art works, many of them priceless today, and then display them, almost casually it seems, in the Frick mansion here, now a museum. Imagine having a Vermeer or two in your foyer, a Rembrandt self-portrait hanging in the library, and a long gallery full of immediately recognizable faces like Hans Holbein’s famous portrait of St. Thomas More. Comparisons to the Ringling Museum and home here in Sarasota spring to mind, but Frick had a head start on John Ringling, beginning his collecting some 20 years earlier.

From the Frick we move onto the Museum of Modern Art, where Richard Serra’s immense and almost overwhelming pieces of coiling rusted steel are still on display and draw the expected sighs of admiration on our parts. It’s a free Friday night at MoMa, though, and between the crowds and the feeling of art overload, I’m getting seriously tired. Heinz and Kevin are indefatigable, however, so while they take in gallery after gallery of modern art icons, I collapse on a couch by one of the escalators and close my weary eyes.

I open them again for dinner that night (grilled salmon and Asian shrimp) at Rue 57, again a restaurant near the hotel, because my feet are killing me!

Saturday, Sept. 15

Saturday dawns overcast, but before we’re ready to head to the sidewalk the sun is peeking out. Today we’re going to Brooklyn to meet Maxine Rosen, the widow of artist and poet Bruce Rosen, whom Kevin is featuring in a show (which actually ran in November here). Immediately turning off the Brooklyn Bridge, the city seems green and leafy compared to Manhattan, and Henry Street is a welcoming neighborhood of brownstones, maple trees and young couples walking their children in strollers. After lunch at the nearby Heights Café (quiche for me, French toast for Maxine, meatloaf for Kevin), we’re ready to look at Bruce’s works and make selections for the exhibition.