Mary 2

Caravaggio, "Rest on the flight to Egypt"

This is a large painting, 53 x 65 inches, and was a central painting of the Picturing Mary exhibit. The packed, busy, composition, and the slightly wonky perspective at the bottom--as if the painting is tipped up towards you--captures the frantic, unsettled feeling of flight in an otherwise placid scene. The right half of the painting has more space in it than the left, which draws the eye, as does Mary's red dress. An exhausted Mary and baby Jesus rest on the flight to egypt, framed by the angel and his wing on the left. They are touchingly real. I love Jesus' swaddling, and his little feet. 

The next thing that drew my eye was a mostly naked angel with black wings. I can't decide why all the black--wings and blanket. Perhaps having all white would be too bright for an otherwise muted color palette?  The angel is playing the violin for mother and child as they rest--God's reassurance that he is with them. Joseph, his face shadowed as it is turned away from the bright, raking light, is looking into the angel's face with an expression that might be resigned or tiredness . And again, the feet--Joseph looks like his feet are hurting him! 

Then I noticed the eye of the donkey--hidden as if he's in a where's waldo book--staring right at you. Usually this would be a way to include the viewer in the scene, but this time it felt like the donkey's hiddenness was to emphasize the privateness of the scene.

Mary 1

The snowdrops are up and the tree buds are swelling next to the Sackler Gallery, an area slightly protected from the wind. The sun shone several times this week, and the wall behind and the pathway just in front of this bed must have soaked it in, raising the temperatures in the soil in just this spot. It's beautiful!

 This is the entrance stairway to the Sackler museum, which is below ground. It takes up a lot of space, and lots of people have remarked that they are thinking of somehow changing it to take up less, but I think it is beautiful. The black sculpture in the middle hangs from the sky light down three floors, hovering just above the surface of a low fountain. The sculpture is called "Monkeys grasping for the moon". It is a traditional asian subject, where monkeys will hang in a line from a tree to touch the reflection of the moon in the water. The sculpture is made up of 21 pieces, each a monkey formed out of the word for money in 21 different languages. It's really cool.

And now to Mary. My time in DC started with a visit to a museum with an exhibition featuring Mary. Below is one of the paintings that is featured in that exhibit. There are several more that I'd like to share as I have time, both from the Mary exhibition, and from the National Gallery, because I found them particularly interesting or happened to need a rest and studied them longer :-).

Lorenzo di Credis, "The Annunciation and three stories from Genesis"

Mary is in a contemporary setting and clothing, and has a gentlewoman's face. Her posture and hands convey surprise. However, I also think her face has an element of imperiousness about it, noticeable because of the angel. The angel's obsequious expression and humble posture make Mary seem like a great lady giving orders, rather than a humble vessel receiving God's message. Perhaps I'm being fanciful, but I don't think I am. This is not a traditional annunciation scene--the typical representation of the holy spirit/shaft of light/humunculus (little man) coming down to impregnate Mary is missing. Also, there are the three scenes from Genesis below the annunciation to take into account. Juxtaposing Mary's and Eve's stories brings their very different reactions to God's word to our attention, shifting the focus of the painting. Mary is Eve's successor, through her obedience is the door to heaven opened and the path to God revealed.

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Hirshorn, first visit

Hirshorn, lunchtime

The Hirshorn could be a showroom for the latter half of a traditional modern art class: Rothko, Rauschenberg, Johns, Oldenburg, Freud, Moore, Warhol, as well as a host of lesser knowns and current artists--all speaking to each other.

In the establishing documents for the museum, Hirshorn made provision for the periodic de-accessioning of art (selling off) so that the museum can remain a contemporary art museum. The Hirshorn is a 3-story, doughnut-shaped museum which sort of reminds me of a building from the Jetsons.

Around the outside and across the street are sculpture gardens. Would have loved to really study these, but it is too cold to be out for long, and the snow has covered all of the signs! There is also a cafe outside for the summer--looks like a fun place for coffee.

The main floor feels a bit like a waste of space to me. It is approx 90 degrees of the circle, and it has one large sculpture, windows looking outside at the entrance to the museum, the lobby desk and escalators. That's it. Below is a gift show, coat check, bathroom, and one contemporary art installation. Second floor has 15 video installations, and the top floor is their permanent collection.

I started on the top floor. On stepping off the elevator I was swooped up by a gallery guide. That was cool as one of the internships I applied for was to be a gallery guide. Gallery guides aren't docents, but rather hang out by the art and get visitors thinking and talking about the art they are looking at. Here is a sampling of the art that drew my attention:

Jan Dibbets Conceptual Art, "Tide", 1969 was really interesting. It was a series of 10 photographs from left to right. The art work drew my attention from across the room. The first picture just looks like a line on a patterned background. With each successive photo the artwork is less abstract as the line on a sandy beach going out to the ocean is slowly erased as the tide comes in. I love the strong vertical line juxtaposed to the horizontal lines of the tide.

It was hard to walk by Yinka Shonibare's sculpture, "The age of enlightenment -- Antoine Lavoisier" 2008, because of the tools on the desk and the colorful clothes. Yinka Shonibare's art deals with race and class issues around colonialism and post-colonialism. This particular sculpture is based on a painting of Antoine Lavoisier. The original painting points to the great age of enlightenment--with reason, mankind can solve all problems. The picture emphasizes western and white, but the sculpture's skin color is ambiguous.  An interesting fact about the fabric. I didn't know that traditional Western/Central African fabric designs originated with the Dutch. The Dutch were trying to mass-produce Indonesian batik cloth to flood the Indonesian market, but their initial attempts produced cloth with flaws--no two bolts alike. The Indonesian market rejected it so the Dutch took it to West Africa. West Africans loved it for the design flaws, and their tastes started to change the designs. Here's an article from Slate about it: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/design/2012/03/african_fabric_where_do_tribal_prints_really_come_from_.html
The headlessness of the person, the wheelchair and the giant cage pattern on the front of the shirt seem to point to the fact that there are limits to our reason and consequences to our enlightenment.

Anselm Kiefer's "The Book", 1979-85 is a show stopper. The key to the painting is an unreadable book. Kiefer hasn't revealed what book "the Book" is based on, but Kiefer was born just after WWII in Germany. He noticed lots of devastation in the world around him--buildings, cities, land--and no one would talk about what had happened. Many think the book is "Mein Kampf". Before I knew anything about the painting I wondered if it could be the moment of creation. It looked like the separation of heaven and earth, when the earth is "formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." It is rather a bleak, dark painting, but there are elements of hope in it.

Museums continued

 Sunday, Jan 4 -- Museums continued

My first Sunday I went to a few other museums: Natural History Museum, Air & Space, and National Gallery Sculpture Garden. The Smithsonian museums only have a small portion of their permanent collection on display at any one time, and we were told that the remainder of their collections aren't stored anywhere in or under the museums, but in pods in the surrounding areas.

I thought the museums did a great job of having something for everyone--interest and age-level. The Natural History exhibit of my youth--the exhibition case stuffed with fifty birds from the region is still on display downstairs, but it is no longer the norm. In the Natural History museum, a lot of the displays reminded me of zoo exhibits with the appropriate habitat surrounding the specimens on view. They also pared down the number of examples within exhibits. For example: here is a photo of the insects.

 Each of those circles had a small selection of insects. The circular windows lit up for a short period of time drawing attention to 1-3 circles at a time.




Selfie with the T-Rex















I thought this was cool. "Once There Were Billions": the museums display of U.S. birds that are now extinct. They included stuffed examples and old natural history books to drive home the point.

I also enjoyed the gem collection. Yes, the Hope diamond was cool, but my favorite is this butterfly broach, which had slices of semi-precious stones, and was encrusted with jewels. It looked sort of earthy rather than sparkly. It was gorgeous! 

Here's my favorite photo from the wildlife photographer of the year exhibition:

The winter plantings around the Smithsonian museums are awesome. Notice the kale--they have lots of different varieties, and they looked beautiful amidst the other plants and bushes.

Here is my favorite sculpture in the National Gallery sculpture garden--so cool:

The Federal Triangle building is amazing--love the architecture:

Sunset...

First day and snow

Monday, January 5

All five of us from Whitworth had an orientation with the Smithsonian's internship office this morning, and then I had a meeting with one of my supervisors (J). She brought along someone key to the project I would be working on. We got on really well. They normally wouldn't have considered bringing someone on for a 3-week internship, but because I am a "non-traditional" student they took a chance. I'm working on a database project for the two Asian art museums. The database will facilitate research dealing with provenance issues. Currently I'm working on the database itself, but I will also be doing some research in the archives.

  

Tuesday, January 6

Our internship orientation crew mentioned several times that Washington DC shuts down when it snows. It snowed the next morning, but it happened during rush hour. The city looked beautiful in the snow.

I had a chance to see President Obama's bust while I was waiting for my supervisor to arrive (the metro didn't like the snow). First Presidential bust printed with a 3D printer.

Museum binge

I arrived Saturday night after 9pm, and less than 24 hours later, I had attended a new church, visited four museums and a sculpture garden, and ate pizza with a youth group. It was quite a day!

My hosts, Charley and McLane Stone, are amazing. They made me (and the other three girls) feel right at home. Charley and McLane work with the youth at The National Presbyterian Church, and I was able to join them for the early service. formal, but contemporary service. different accents.

Madison, Katie and I headed downtown to the museums mid-morning. Natural History, American History, Air & Space, sculpture garden, and my favorite, the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts is free on the first Sunday of the month and I took advantage. They have a visiting exhibition called "Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea." The collection was organized into the sub themes: each sub theme had a separate set of rooms painted the same color. Accompanying the art was thoughtful wall text and poems, as well as fairly detailed individual art descriptions linking the individual paintings to the sub theme. It was an amazing collection and very personally relevant after TAing Ren & Baroque, and doing some research into nativity images for Christmas. I couldn't believe it when I walked into the room and beheld the art I had been studying: Caravaggio, Titian, David, Michelangelo, Boticelli, Lippi, Pontormo, Vasari--the list goes on!

Accompanying this exhibition was a set of rooms set aside to introduce the exhibition as well as provide means for further exploration of the exhibition themes and art. The rooms included a digital display of where each artwork was from, images and details using a program called maphook. They also had an electronic database available on their website and on ipad-like devices in the room. Viewers could look at the artworks in the exhibit as well as additional art not displayed in the exhibition--likely images featured in the book. They also had a section with books about the topic for further research (including the book the exhibition was based on). On the walls were poster guides to the iconography tailored to the exhibit, and posters that had gigantic textbook-like pullouts/illustrations about each sub theme educating viewers about what to look for in the exhibition and in further research online, and with connect and consider thoughts.

I also had a chance to view some of their permanent collection. In the Contemporary section, I was sort of fascinated by Kiki Smith's "Mary Magdalene" (1994), a cast silicon bronze & forged steel sculpture. Smith depicts Mary Magdalene as an earthly and sensuous woman, contrasting her with Mary (mother of Jesus). I had no idea who she was depicting until I read the accompanying text. Mary doesn't look beautiful to me, and certainly not sensuous. She looks anguished, she is chained, and her body is covered in hair. But it did make me realize that I've never really given that much thought to Mary Magdalene's life before Jesus' intervention in it. About the chains that shackle us to earth without that intervention.

Nearby, was a row of seated figures with no heads or hands, made out of stiffened and sculpted burlap-like fabric made by Magdalena Abakanowicz. They looked like hunched over prisoners with their hands yanked behind their backs.  Abakanowicz explains that her figures are “naked, exposed, and vulnerable, just as we all are,” but she was also inspired by a traumatic event in her past.

The 20th Century art room was my favorite in their permanent collection. There was both a de Kooning (Bacchus #3) and a Pollock that I thought were fantastic--my favorite works by either artist. Then it struck me that these couldn't be by de Kooning or Pollock as both are men. Turns out, I really like the work of their wives. Art history needs to do a better job of including these fantastic women artists in textbooks. Bacchus by Elaine de Kooning amazed me. It looks like it is taking place in a garden, but at the same time, everything is intertwined. There is so much movement and struggle. It was just somehow satisfying. The black outlines really make it. It is HUGE and takes over your entire field of vision.

I Jonathan, I loved this. It is called Will-O'-The-Wisp by Elizabeth Adela Armstrong Forde (1900). She's Canadian I think. This painting's inspiration was a poem by Patricia Allingham Carlson, and it is a dialogue between painting and poetry. The shapes of the trees are carved into the frame, as are words form the poem. I just loved the trees and the colors.



Garbrielle Munter, Breakfast of the Birds (1934). I really loved this one as well. She is an expressionist painter. I'm still thinking this one through.

That't all for now!