Sarah Berman’s Closet
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/inside-sara-bermans-closet-at-the-met
The American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is typically devoted to lavish domestic interiors of yore, but a tiny exhibit currently on display celebrates an altogether different kind of private space. It is the modest, minimalist closet of Sara Berman, a Jewish émigré who settled in the Bronx in the early nineteen-fifties, and, late in life, after a divorce, moved to a studio apartment in Greenwich Village, where she purged her wardrobe of all colors except white. Berman died thirteen years ago, at the age of eighty-four. More recently, her daughter and grandson, Maira and Alex Kalman, turned her belongings—frugal, elegant, orderly—into an unconventional exhibit, which premièred at Alex Kalman’s Mmuseumm in Tribeca before moving to the Met this month. As Maira Kalman, who narrates this video about her mother, told Judith Thurman recently, Berman’s life is evidence that “nothing in life has an expiration date. You are free to change at any age.”
