Fun ruled yesterday’s opening of a mid-career retrospective of artist Quisqueya Henriquez at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. It started at the pushcart in the lobby, where Moses Ros offered visitors teaspoonfuls of “Caribbean Sea Ice,” colored green-blue. This was not just an ethnic food offering catering to visitors from the neighborhood. It is an artwork created by the 41-year-old Ms. Henriquez and, as long as the supply lasts, it will be served every weekend throughout the exhibition, which ends January 27, 2008.

“It’s her idea. The whole show is based on stereotypes about Caribbean and tropical life,” the director of the museum, Holly Block, said.

To make the ice, Ms. Henriquez took a boat far offshore and bottled six gallons of water from the Caribbean Sea. The water was sent to the museum. Assistant curator Erin Riley-Lopez took it around the corner to a frozen dessert maker, Delicioso Coco Helado, who pasteurized the water and created the ice using Ms. Henriquez’s recipe.

Other objects on view in the exhibit include a soccer ball turned into a hat, complete with a cut-out for a woman’s ponytail; baseballs turned into bracelets; and an imploded basketball that serves as a wine bottle holder.

“I like destroying and rebuilding things in a new context,” Ms. Henriquez said. The museum has asked her to consider turning some of these objects into multiples that might be sold in the gift shop.

Ms. Henriquez’s works explore “perception, inventiveness, power, self-determination, and tenderness,” the show’s curator, Amy Rosenblum Martin, said.

Ms. Henriquez would also like the exhibit to show New Yorkers what the Dominican Republic is actually like. The museum has set up a computer screen to display a digital photograph she will send daily from the city where she lives, Santo Domingo.

Born in Cuba, Ms. Henriquez moved to the Dominican Republic at the age of 7, returned to Cuba to attend art school in Havana, then went to Mexico City to escape the government censorship brought down upon her fellow “Cuban Renaissance” artists. She lived in Miami in the mid-1990s before returning to the Dominican Republic.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts exhibition is the most comprehensive show of her work in America to date.

NYPL Council Waxes Presidential

The highest-level donors at the New York Public Library are the members of the President’s Council. Library trustees Gayfryd Steinberg and Louise Grunwald formed the group 11 years ago; since then it has raised $20 million for the library. Members “have access to anything the library does,” Ms. Grunwald said Monday night at one of the council’s two annual dinners.

Near her was a case of Presidential letters and books from the library’s archives, put on display just for the event, including a manuscript of President Washington’s farewell address, dated 1796, and a letter from President Reagan to the publisher of the New York Times that complains he was being portrayed as too right wing.

“We always have some intellectual content,” Ms. Grunwald said as the 100 or so guests began to arrive, among them a successor to the position held by Ms. Grunwald’s late husband, Henry Grunwald, Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel, an aunt of the chairman of the New York Times, Marian Sulzberger, and a newly elected trustee, Sila Calderón, a former governor of Puerto Rico.

Waiters carried silver trays of shrimp, potato pancakes with caviar, and deviled eggs during the cocktail hour, which was followed by a presentation in the Trustee’s Room by author Michael Beschloss, a graduate of Williams College who earned an MBA at Harvard and currently serves as the Presidential historian for NBC News.

Mr. Beschloss spoke about the influence books have had on American Presidents. He noted that President Truman took inspiration in a book his mother purchased from a traveling salesman entitled “Great Men, Famous Women,” and that during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy reflected on the military and diplomatic history depicted in the just published “The Guns of August,” Barbara Tuchman’s account of the first month of World War I. (The library’s president, Paul LeClerc, noted that the book had been written in the flagship building’s reading room.)

Reading is good preparation for being president, Mr. Beschloss, whose most recent book is “Presidential Courage,” said. But what counts as presidential reading material varies, he added: When Reagan was asked how he knew about Iceland during his second summit with Gorbachev in October 1986, Mr. Beschloss recounted, the 40th President replied, “Well, I just finished that Tom Clancy book,” referring to “Red Storm Rising” which had been published in August of that year.

agordon@nysun.com