If you’re looking for unique items to complete that holiday gift list in New York, try heading to a museum gift shop. You’ll find much more than the usual prints and postcards: in the last few years, cultural institutions have really stepped up their retailing game, with shops that are virtually standalone destinations. Some even keep hours outside their parent institution’s this time of the year. Here are our picks for the best places in New York for holiday museum shopping, along with some gift guide suggestions.
Holiday Gifts: China Institute
Be unique and thoughtful this holiday! Give the gift of Membership to your loved one. China Institute offers art exhibits, language classes, film, author talks, business programs, networking and more! Email: membership@chinainstitute.org or call 212-744-8181 for more information.
China Institute, 100 Washington Street, NYC 10006
Holiday Gifts: Museum of Arts and Design (MAD)
The Store at MAD has a number of celebrity followers as well as diplomats and dignitaries who enjoy the presentation of craft and design objects as much as regular museum-goers and shoppers. Among the stand-out products currently available, is a poppy read tote bag in Latico leather. It's the perfect size --neither so big that the contents are a jumble or so small there's no room for your daily haul. For gift givers, there is a stunning Doinne Decayeux Jewelry. Dorine weaves her pieces out of nylon thread, creating designs that are at once subtle and bold. The Store at MAD is on the ground floor as you enter the museum encouraging a visit to browse among the well-displayed merchandise without museum entry.
Holiday Gifts: Morgan Library & Museum
Another historic home provides much of the charm of The Morgan Shop in the Morgan Library & Museum, which occupies two of the original rooms of the famed financier’s family manse—a music room, adorned with gilt moldings, marble fireplaces, and two mirrors facing each other, and an adjoining chamber adorned with bay windows (a pretty picture, when glimpsed from the residential side street they overlook). Everything relates to the museum’s collection, and since Pierpont Morgan collected everything from geodes to Gutenberg Bibles, this makes for a pretty eclectic mix of merch: definitive monographs, Shakespearean folio-like leather notebooks, and stationery are big, as is anything with the impressively paneled library’s image on it. Prints and first editions are the museum’s specialty, though, and this year’s selection of holiday cards includes facsimiles of the 1949 music sheet cover of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” ($12.95 per box). There’s also a bound reproduction ($59) of Dickens’ red morocco manuscript of A Christmas Carol (the museum traditionally has the original on proud display during the festive season). You may not have Morgan’s fortune, but you can take a part of The Morgan with you.
Holiday Gifts: The Guggenheim
Giving people a chance to take a bit of the institution home with them is also the aim of the Guggenheim Museum Store. Located at the base of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s smaller rotunda (look up to see its spiral), it greets visitors with dozens of colorful mobiles, evocative of the designs of Alexander Calder. The inventory abounds in contemporary art and handmade goods that connect with the Guggenheim’s clean, fresh, cutting-edge identity; still, the core products are logo-based, or evocative of the museum’s most famous possession: its own building. Decorate that holiday table with white porcelain spiral mugs ($30 a pair), a sugar/creamer set ($20), salt and pepper shakers ($18 per pair), and teapot ($45) that evoke the famed rotunda. Or build the entire structure in miniature with a special LEGO set ($100).
