IN the Himalayan art and artifacts that are the heart of the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea, some traditions go back thousands of years. Other traditions there, like Rosanne Cash's series of acoustic performances, are more recent -- and are a stretch from Tibetan Buddhism -- yet are part of the institution just the same.
The singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea, where she is giving her 12th concert.
Since the Rubin opened in October 2004, Ms. Cash has become its unofficial musician in residence, turning out once or twice a year for cozy shows in the museum's tiny, wood-paneled basement theater. Her first performance came less than a week after the Rubin opened its doors, and she has never really left. On Friday Ms. Cash makes her 12th appearance, with the violinist Mark O'Connor.
"I have played in so many venues in this city, from Carnegie Hall to a basement day care center in Brooklyn and everything in between," Ms. Cash said in a recent interview at her Chelsea town house, a few blocks from the museum. "But the Rubin has become really special to me. You do that many shows in one place, and it starts to feel very homelike."
[...]
The neighborhood angle also appeals to Ms. Cash, a 16-year resident of Chelsea who sells
"Zone C" T-shirts on her Web site. (After Hurricane Irene, the city designated Chelsea a high-ground, or C, zone.) A prolific user of Twitter, Ms. Cash made it a mock-survival riff -- as in, "Here in Zone C, all we need are cupcakes, good music and a full deck of cards to survive anything" -- and it stuck.
(She proudly modeled a black shirt.)
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