A: Is for art abounding

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A new year begins and life continues. We are blessed to live in a city where culture abounds and we can take a bus, a subway or a walk to see the wonders of the past and the future. This column is some of the adventures that await you if you’ll only walk out your door.

The Metropolitan Museum of art opened a new gallery for Oceanic art. Featuring sculpture and decorative arts from the regions of Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Australia. It is a glimpse into another world that we can visit in an afternoon. Also until January 13th you can catch Lorenzo Ghiberti’s doors called the Gates of Paradise. Retelling the Old Testament this is a moment in time a of the Italian Renaissance, during the 27 years (1425–52).

At the Whitney until January 13th a collection that includes Alexander Calder, Georgia O'Keeffe and John Sloan, among others — who pushed the margins of American art outward. Also on display is Television Delivers People an examination of how an individual viewer is shaped by television's structure and content. The exhibition takes its title from Richard Serra's video Television Delivers People (1973), deconstruction of specific television programs. You can examine for yourself until Feburary 13th.

One of my favorite galleries has become the sundaram tagore gallery located @ 547 west 27th in the heart of Chelsea. On exhibit until January 19th is Hiroshi Senju is a painter who expresses contemporary modernity with ancient painting techniques. He combines pigments derived from natural materials such as minerals, seashells and corals in a medium of animal-hide glue, and then applies this "paint" to special hand-screened Japanese rice paper. Mr. Senju is the first Asian artist to receive an individual fine arts award at the Venice Biennale for his acclaimed Waterfall paintings in 1995. Some of his more recent exhibitions include Beauty Project at the Museum of Contemporary Art in London in 1996, and a tour of fourteen Japanese cities of his acclaimed Waterfall paintings. His murals are sought after because they sooth the soul and that is a relaxing F.A.C.T.