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!