Aimee Ng

In this episode of Renovation Stories, Curator Aimee Ng offers a preview of the Breakfast Room, one of the new galleries Frick visitors will encounter as part of the unprecedented public access to the museum’s second floor. The room, long used as staff offices, was originally where the Frick family had breakfast when they resided at 1 East 70th Street. Based on archival images and documents, the reinstalled Breakfast Room will display mostly nineteenth-century French landscape paintings—a particular favorite of Henry Clay Frick—along with meticulously restored furnishings.

Watch the organizers of Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick, the Frick’s Curator Aimee Ng and Consulting Curator Antwaun Sargent, in conversation with Thelma Golden, Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, about the acclaimed exhibition and the legacy of Hendricks’s groundbreaking work.

Curator Aimee Ng and Consulting Curator Antwaun Sargent introduce the exhibition Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick, on view at Frick Madison through January 7, 2024. The show presents fourteen of the finest portraits by the American painter displayed in the context of the Frick—one of his favorite museums—and explores the enduring legacies both of Hendricks’s pioneering work and of the museum itself.

In the final episode of the series, Curator Aimee Ng is joined by Xavier F. Salomon, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, to explore ultramarine, the world’s most expensive pigment. The rich blue color appears in the Frick’s Coronation of the Virgin by Paolo and Giovanni Veneziano and in paintings made centuries later by Johannes Vermeer.

Marie-Laure Buku Pongo, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts, joins Curator Aimee Ng to investigate two cross-cultural cabinets from the 1760s. The pair of cabinets combines French materials and craft with elements made a century earlier and oceans away—eight sumptuous black-and-gold lacquer panels taken from imported Japanese objects. A traditional Asian art form, lacquerware was made through a time-consuming and dangerous process, and the mysteries that Japan held in Europe enhanced the material’s popularity in fashionable French furniture.

Reflecting on the only oil painting in The Eveillard Gift—on view at Frick Madison through February 26—Curator Aimee Ng analyzes John Constable’s deft brushwork and how, in this small oil sketch, the artist evokes the richness and vitality of the larger painting to come.

John Constable (1776–1837)
Study for "The Leaping Horse," ca. 1824–25

Curator Aimee Ng explores why she views this newly acquired study for John Singer Sargent’s infamous painting Madame X as “one of the most human of his many renderings of Madame Gautreau.” The expressive drawing is currently on display at Frick Madison in The Eveillard Gift, through February 26, 2023.

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
Virginie Amélie Avegno, Madame Gautreau (Madame X), ca. 1884