A Night at the Museums

Okay, the special sleepover program at the American Museum of Natural History is sold out. So that option is closed at least until mid-August for those who think it would be fun to sleep on a floor, surrounded by vast amounts of taxidermied animals. But there are plenty of other NYC museums with late access and evening events, even if they can't boast a T-Rex.

To be fair, the American Museum of Natural History does have some good evening programs that don't involve sleepovers. The Rose Center is open until 8:45pm the First Friday of every month. There's a Spanish Tapas bar where you can enjoy sangria, wines and soft drinks while listening to jazz. Starts at 5:30. Here's the menu. There are also great lecture and movie programs. One coming soon: "The Upside of Down," Thursday at 7, at the Kaufmann Theater. It's $15, $12 for members. Here's the writeup; buy tickets here: "Author and conservationist Thomas Homer-Dixon suggests that the pressures we are putting on our planet are likely leading to an imminent breakdown in the economic, political, and ecological systems that sustain us. By examining the intertwined causes of these systemic crises—from growing energy shortages to yawning economic inequalities—his latest book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, shows what we can learn from them and how we can mitigate them."

The American Folk Art Museum (45 W. 53rd Street): Open Fridays until 7:30. Normally, entrance is $9, but there are Free Music Fridays, says the site: "Each Friday, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, the museum trustees and staff invite the public to explore our galleries free of charge, have a drink in the cafe, and enjoy live music in the stunning atrium."

Asia Society and Museum (725 Park Ave., at 70th St.; 212 288-6400): Open from 6:00-9:00 on Fridays (except July 4-Labor Day). Lots of cultural programs and talks like the one this week, on Jan. 24 (during the day, though, from 12-2), a "CEO Forum featuring Scott Bayman, President and CEO, GE India." (It's pricey, at $75.) Bayman "will speak on "Thirteen Years on the Inside: A Perspective on India"."
UPDATE: Turns out there are "Second Fridays" and "Third Fridays." Second Fridays are about corporate diversity networking at the Asia Society's Leo Bar. It's from 6-9 this Feb. 9 and invites people to "join fellow Asian and Asian American professionals for some art and ambiance...Exhibition tours at 7:15 and 7:45; $5 martinis from 6-7. Cash bar." On Third Fridays, its LGBT Night. Says the site: "February's event [for the lesbian, gay, and transgender community] is cohosted by the leading global networking and professional services organization specifically for gay and lesbian financial services professionals," the Financial Services Industry Exchange.
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (2 East 91st Street; 212 849-8400) Open Fridays until 9:00; $12.
Dahesh Museum (580 Madison Ave. (between 56th and 57th Sts.; 212 759-0606)
Open until 9:00 on the first Thursday of every month; free from 6-9 on First Thursdays. Here’s an upcoming event (March 1, 6:30 pm) that sounds fun:
"Daily Life & Feasting in Ancient Egypt: Talk & Tasting
Join Francine Segan, food historian and cookbook author, for a foray into the delicious foods and dining customs of ancient Egypt, which includes a slide presentation and tasting of modern-day Egyptian delicacies. Discover fascinating tidbits about Cleopatra’s dinner parties; why Egyptians kneaded dough with their feet; and the must-serve foods for pyramid builders. Learn the recipes from the fertile Nile Valley...and also the centuries old health secrets and remedies of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, including their long list of aphrodisiacs and the food stuffs that accompanied them in their tombs."
The Guggenheim Museum (Fifth Ave. at 89th St.): On First Fridays, "enjoy a drink with friends, explore the galleries, and listen to some of the best DJs in town, all in the spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. From 9 PM to 1 AM, admission is $25. Free for members. " Next up on Feb. 2: "Composor [sic??], producer, and inventor of the mutanttrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument, Ben Neill presents a short solo set of new and unreleased tracks. He is accompanied by an eclectic sonic stew of space rock, house, and downtempo spun by past Guggenheim partner DJ Ben Butler."
International Center for Photography (1133 Ave. of the Americas at 43rd St.; 212 857-0000) Open Fridays until 8:00; admission from 5:00-8:00 on Fridays is a voluntary contribution. Otherwise, it's $12.
Jewish Museum (Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.;212 423-3200): Just saw--in the ads on my blog!--that the museum is free on Saturdays (and closes at 5:45 on Sats.) Normally the entrance fee is $12. It's open until 8:00 on Thursdays.
Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth Aves.; 212 708-9400): Open Fridays until 8:00; right now the sculpture garden is open until 9:00 for the video installation by Doug Aitken (plays from 5:00-10:00), and entrance is free on 54th Street. For the museum's film schedule, look here.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.; 212 535-7710): Open Friday and Saturday nights until 9:00; enjoy drinks and appetizers on the Great Hall Balcony (sample menu here) while listening to live classical music. The MET also has subscription lectures and events, some of which are at night. You can learn more here.
Museum of Art and Design (40 West 53rd Street; 212 956-3535) Open Thursdays until 8:00; pay what you wish from 6-8. Pop in and then head over the MOMA's 54th Street entrance to the sculpture garden at 8:00 and check out the Aitken installation--or just admire it from in front the the Museum of Art and Design, since it's right across from MOMA and the Aitken video is projected on both the front and back of the MOMA building.
Rubin Museum of Tibetan Art (150 W. 17th Street; 212 620-5000): Open Fridays until 10:00; gallery admission free from 7:00-10:00. Visit here to find out more about a Friday night jazz program; there's also one on Jan. 24--"Harlem in the Himalayas Special: Wycliffe Gordon performs a new score to accompany D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. Introduced by New Yorker humorist Patricia Marx; 7:00 - 11:00." For a calendar of events, which include films, go to this link. UPDATE: A friend notes that the snack bar has great healthy stuff, like edamame--and that you can access their very clean bathrooms without having to pay the entrance fee.

Tiffany's Home at the MET

Incredible. That is the only way to describe the lush, luxurious, intricately detailed home that artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany created in Laurelton Hall, his 84-room, 60-acre-gardened Oyster Bay, Long Island, home. That home is now the basis of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's not just those incredible stained glass windows and panels and the beautiful, flowing glass vases. We've all seen those countless times, in countless museums. It's the massive, deeply and intricately carved teak Indian doors on display from his home on 72nd Street in New York City, the Islamic-style alcoves in a picture of the fountain room, the long iron chains with elephants that he hung in his atmospheric studio, the Indonesian wood block panels he assembled as their own sort of canvases on the wall. It's the gleaming, fantastical peacock headdress a young girl once wore for a party he had, when she walked in as Juno leading a real peacock, with friends behind her dressed in grecian robes and bearing stuffed peacocks on platters. The MET website on the exhibit describes his country home perfectly in saying that Tiffany created "a total aesthetic environment."

Unfortunately, the home in Oyster Bay burned down a long time ago. Many bits and pieces of it were sold before the fire, and some stained glass windows in the show were found mud-covered and just propped against a tree on the property after the fire. The exhibit includes items from, and pictures of, the Tiffany home on Madison Ave. and 72nd street. (Alas, also gone now.) Items that had been sold at auctions, such as a beautifully beaded Native American buckskin dress that Tiffany used to display above intricately woven Indian baskets, as well as amazing Japanese, Chinese, and Islamic artifacts, have been assembled into an beautiful, awe-inspiring (the money to collect this stuff!) exhibit. New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith has a great opening line in her review of the show: "“Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist’s Country Estate” is the rare exhibition that comes with its own porch." (Yes, a gorgeous restored "daffodil" porch from the house has been transported to the museum.)

The exhibit displays a lot of works lent by The Morse Museum in Winter Park, Fla., which has an incredible collection of Tiffany items. The founder of The Morse was Jeannette Genius (great name, eh?), who came from a wealthy family in Florida that collected Tiffany glass. Around 1960, Jeannette, with her husband Hugh McKean, paid $10,000 for what they could salvage of the burnt-down Laurelton estate. Tiffany was considered passe at the time--his glass panels and lamps were pretty, but not intense, not abstract, not modern. McKean, a painter--as was his eventual wife--actually studied at Laurelton around 1930 in Tiffany's artist-in-residence program. You can read about the Morse's Laurelton Hall collection here and see some of the incredible things they have, such as the recreation of the 800-square-foot chapel Tiffany built for the 1893 World Columbian Expedition in Chicago.

There's quite a tale behind that chapel, and you can find the full story here. In a nutshell, Carol Whipple Wallace bought it and donated it to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine here in NYC. But it was relegated to a cramped space in the basement and it deteriorated. So Tiffany offered to take it back at his own expense and installed and refurbished it at Laurelton. But after he died, it fell into disrepair, parts of it were sold off by the Tiffany Foundation, and then Laurelton burned down in 1957. The McKeans assembled many bits and pieces of it that had been sold at auction and now it's on display again in sunny Fla. Here's another Tiffany room at the Morse Museum.















"Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall: An Artist's Country Estate" (at the MET 'til May 20) is the perfect exhibit to see before grabbing a glass of wine and a bite on the MET balcony on a Friday or Saturday night. I wish, though, that the MET balcony operation took names for a waiting list, because you feel creepy lurking around the tables, trying to unobtrusively check out how close people are to leaving and then staking your claim by waiting in the four feet or so between the tables and the gallery walls. But when I was there this past Saturday the service was great, the appetizers and wine were fine, and the music was wonderful. It's a nice way to start a night.

My one complaint with the Tiffany exhibit, since I'm addicted to museum stores (so shoot me, I sometimes like commerce with my culture): The merchandise sold at the end of the exhibit is not that great. There is a pretty purple velvet scarf, but the supposed "fine jewelry" looks cheesy and I feel like the MET lost a real opportunity there. The only thing I saw that I'd want in my home (okay, there were some purple and deep, almost-teal blue leather embossed jewelry boxes that were very pretty, but the smaller round one was $55 and I couldn't stomach the price) was a $175 decorated gold cross, and since I'm not particularly religious, it would be a little odd for me to have that hanging on my wall. Ah well. The aesthetic experience petered out at the gift shop, but the exhibit itself is gorgeous.

Morphing MOMA

The MOMA is getting ever more creative with its use of space. In an exhibit that starts this Jan. 16 and ends on Feb. 12 the MOMA paired up with New York public arts group Creative Time and commisioned artist Doug Aitken (here's his deal, courtesy of artfacts.net) "to create the artist's first large-scale public artwork in the United States," according to an article on MOMA's web site. "The project is also the first to bring art to MOMA's exterior walls.

Continuous sequences of film scenes will be projected onto eight facades, including those on West Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth streets and those overlooking The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden (photo). Inspired by the densely built environment of New York's midtown, the artist will create a cinematic art experience that directly integrates with the architectural fabric of the city while simultaneously enhancing and challenging viewers' perceptions of public space. The project, filmed in New York City, will be shown daily from 5:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m., and is intended to be visible from many public vantage points adjacent to the Museum."

Aitken has exhibited in the past with video artist Pipilotti Rist, who is mentioned in the previous post (and, by the way, I'm not positive the photo in that earlier post is actually her, but it's just so perfect that I'm choosing to believe it is right now). Here's a picture of Aitken with another artist mentioned in the previous post, Jeff Koons (Aitken's on the right). Aitken's Sleepwalker features Tilda Swinton, Donald Sutherland, Chan Marshall (Cat Power), Seu Jorge, and Ryan Donowho. Read MOMA's full description of the upcoming exhibit on their site here), where you can also see the online Sleepwalkers exhbition.

Very cool. (And such a shame, she wrote selfishly, that my friend Glenn sold his apartment overlooking the MOMA.) And on top of using its existing vertical acreage in innovative ways, the MOMA is lining up some net new space. Having New York mega real estate power broker Jerry I. Speyer as a museum trustee ready to help you negotiate real estate deals must be a beautiful thing. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley are listed among the supporters of the project, so presumably that means providing money as well as influence.

Here's an AP item on MOMA that ran in the Washington Post arts pages this past Thursday:

NEW YORK, Jan. 3 -- Little more than two years after a major expansion, the Museum of Modern Art is set to grow again.

MoMA has negotiated a land deal that will yield 50,000 square feet of additional space to display paintings and sculptures, said the museum's director, Glenn Lowry.

The museum will sell a piece of vacant land for $125 million to Houston-based development company Hines, adding an estimated $65 million to its $650 million endowment after construction costs, Lowry said.

"This is a Christmas present," Lowry said. "It's a tremendous boon to enhancing what is already an extraordinary collection."

Hines spokesman George Lancaster confirmed the deal Wednesday and said Hines was "thrilled to be working with MoMA" but declined to comment on the sale price.

The property is one of several the midtown Manhattan museum acquired in recent years as it planned its expansion. In 2004, an addition made of glass and steel was completed.

In the latest plan, Hines will construct a mixed-use building with exhibition space connected to MoMA's main building on several floors, Lowry said. The building, part of a larger project, will include approximately 10,000 square feet of museum storage space.

The lot has about 200,000 square feet of building space, the director said.

Hines has developed other buildings in New York, including the 34-story office tower known as the Lipstick Building.

There is no architect or timetable yet, but the project is expected to take at least five years.

The museum closed during the last expansion and showcased its art in a temporary space in Queens, but it will stay open this time, Lowry said.

A museum trustee and real estate developer who helped negotiate the sale, Jerry Speyer, said the board agreed readily to the deal.

"Everyone felt great about the decision," he said. "There were no issues in anyone's mind."

Quick Culture Hit...

...or, as I described it to a colleague as I was leaving my office at lunch, "I've decided that I have to start going out and taking a half hour at lunchtime to get some nuggets of culture." Which is a strange way to phrase a desire to pack a little more culture into my everyday life. Hard as I try to think of nuggets of culture as burnished gold pebbles, my mind's eye inevitably settles on....Chicken McNuggets. Chicken McNuggets that somehow have the Mona Lisa's image imprinted on them, or Munch's "The Scream," or Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Or, ugh, Monet's "Water Lilies." It's kind of revolting. And an art project, I guess.

But I did get my...dollop...of culture today. (Much better. Makes me think of whipped cream.) Since my employer is a corporate member of the MOMA I get in free, so I took a half hour to go into the Contemporary Galleries. Note to people whose companies are corporate members--the MOMA is curbing corporate member benefits. Instead of being allowed to bring in four people, now you can bring in two (I usually don't go to musums in packs of five, anyway) and there's some other restriction with the passes to films, which I wasn't even aware we got a discount on. If anyone's interested in the changed terms, leave a post and I'll send the info. Or if you go get a ticket as a corporate member, they'll give you a slip of paper that lays it out.

ANYWAY, to get to the Contemporary Galleries you have to go up the stairs and through some Cy Twombly paintings, and past an enormous, bronze pencil-sculpture-thing. I perhaps need to gain a better appreciation for Cy Twombly. His "Leda and the Swan"? (pictured) And "The Italians"? Are they really great art? They kind of look like...bad art. Like, "I'm trying too hard to be cryptic" art, so I'm going to squiggle here, scratch there, slop a glop of ugly-colored paint here, and then I'm going to write random words on a canvas--yeah, in pencil!--and then...I'm a genius! Now decipher me! Okay, I'm showing a philistine side and it may just've been my mood on the first day back at work since Dec. 23. But it's an honest philistine side, if that counts for anything. (P.S. After writing that I read on wikipedia.org that Twombly "served in the army as a cryptologist, which influenced his work." Who knew?)

So, a discovery. The show in the Contemporary Galleries is "Out of Time/A Contemplation," and while I could do without the three basketballs half covered with water in a fishtank, by Jeff Koons, there were two items in the second room that I thought were very cool and/or interesting.

No. 1 interesting thing: Janine Antoni's "Butterfly Kisses 1996-99." Her medium: Cover Girl mascara on paper. Uh huh. The tag tells the tale: "The artist applied many coats of Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara to her eyelashes and then fluttered them against the paper. She averaged 60 winks per day and completed the drawing after approximately 2,124 winks, and over many months."

It's pretty cool-looking. (And any woman knows that applying mascara can be messy--I wish she'd taken pictures of herself after 40 winks.) It reminded me of Florentine swirly paper sold at Il Papiro, but in black and cream as opposed to greens and blues. The only other way I can think of to describe the effect of her eye-fluttering on paper was that it looks like a pelt, like fur--as if a polar bear rolled around in slush or had been covered with a light coating of soot.

You can read some good PBS articles on her. It's worth checking out--she does some very out-there stuff, as in Gnaw (2002), which involved 600 pounds of chocolate gnawed by her, 600 pounds of lard gnawed by her, a display with 130 lipsticks made with pigments and beeswax, and chewed by her...you get the idea. She also directed a 4-minute film inspired by the Shaker tradition of ecstatic dancing. The MOMA also has a learning page on her. And here's "Lick and Lather," self-portraits in soap and chocolate, that, of course, she either licked or lathered with.









The other piece I liked, just for its out-there-ness, was by a Swiss artist born in 1962, Pipiliotti Rist (yes, a nickname--you know, Pippi Longstocking; she was born Elisabeth Charlotte). It's called "Ever is Over All," whatever that means, and was executed in 1997. Her website is here. "Ever is Over All" is a video project and it involves two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. One focuses on lush flowers in a field, and the other focuses on this attractive, ethereal-looking, blissed-out woman, dressed in a flowing baby blue chiffon dress and red shoes, as she strolls down a sidewalk.

All seems normal, except that she is carrying a large metal stalk with a red/yellow/orange flower on top similar to the real flowers you see in the other projection. She's meandering along happily on a sidewalk, and then she cheerfully and gracefully slams the stalk into the window of a parked car, which only seems to increase her bliss. She goes on to do it again and again, never losing her poise. It is bizarre. A red-lipsticked, hatted policewoman walks behind her for a bit, not seeming to think anything is amiss, and smiles at her in passing after she smashes her third or so car window. The tag summed it up well as a "whimsical and anarchistic scene."

So it was two cultural nuggets. And you know what? I really enjoyed them.

The Blanton Museum/Austin, TX

Nothing like a bomb threat to liven up a museum visit.

There we were, at 12:30 pm, passing the Attic pottery and entering Modern and Contemporary Art in the new home of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Tex., when a young polo-shirted, chino'd musem guard asked us to calmly exit the building. Most of the guards were, or professed to be, clueless about why the museum was suddenly closing, but one guard said there'd been a bomb threat that had apparently been found to not be credible. I guess protocol had to be followed. So out we went and across the street, vouchers for a return visit in hand. Happily nothing came of the threat that I could tell.

After years of controversy, the museum has emerged to be a good looking, but not very remarkable addition to the UT campus. (The photo above, by the way, shows a lamppost outside the Blanton where everyone seems to deposit their entrance stickers, as well as those from the Texas State History Museum.) The design of the museum doesn't make much of a statement, but its limestone facade and white, open interior with diagonal skylights is pleasant, if not wildly interesting. It was supposed to be designed by modernist architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, whose projects include the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in London, but the UT System Board of Regents didn't think the design fit with the surrounding architecture--too bold, accounts have said.

The UT Master Plan calls for building in the Spanish Renaissance style, using red-tiled roofs and limestone (given that, why ask minimalist-minded modernist superstars to design your building?). After the architects and the board when back and forth, the architects quit in 1999. There's a very telling back and forth between one member of the Board of Regents and Herzog here. One of my favorite points Herzog makes is that "universities should be places that encourage change and that value innovation more than imitation." The member of the Board of Regents, who clearly hates the modern buildings already on UT's campus, replies, "We are not willing to turn our campus into a proving ground for experimental modern design." There's a good Austin Chronicle article on the controversy here. The Dean of the Architecture school resigned in protest over the whole mess (though he's still on the faculty, just not the dean anymore). The Board of Regents went with the Boston firm of Kallmann McKinnell and Wood instead.

While the style of the building may be conservative, it has some very cool and very thought-provoking art installations. There's an amazing one by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles, called "Missao/Missoes (How to Build a Cathedral)." (His other work is worth checking out on google images.)













It is composed of a black-veiled area that you enter to look up at a ceiling of 2000 hanging cow bones with a string of 800 communion wafers stretching down from the middle and connecting the bones with 600,000 bright copper pennies.

A fascinating bit of information found on the web (you can find the post here, but this is basically it): "Built in 1987...the artwork is unique in the fact that it changes wherever it goes. The artwork is a floating piece and the coins are the smallest denomination that the country it is shown in has. In the Blanton, where the piece is currently showing, pennies are used for the coins. In another country, however, the coins may be silver or gold colored instead of copper. Cildo Meireles illustrates this cathedral as a combination of the coins representing wealth, agriculture represented by the bones, and religion represented by the wafers. "The installation draws attention to the fact that the conquest of the Americas was as much about economics as it was about religion or saving souls" (Blanton)."

Another very cool installation is one called "From Texas with love 2002." It's by Emily Jacir, who was born in Amman, Jordan. (Good article about her recent project on a very interesting blog here.) She asked Palestinians living in Israel what they would choose to listen to if they could get into a car and drive for an hour without being stopped at checkpoints (what seems so easy to us is such an impossibility for them). There's a monitor showing video footage of a vast expanse of West Texas desert through a car's windshield, and a few iPods at the monitor play the songs the Palestinians chose. These are some of them; I focused on the Western songs, which made up a decent chunk of the choices:
-"Freedom," by Jimi Hendrix
-"The Thrill is Gone," by B.B. King
-"Ishta tellak" (sorry, can't get the right accents in there) by Fairuz (Fairuz was very popular)
-"Wild World," by Cat Stevens
-"Fly Me to the Moon," by Frank Sinatra
-"Patria," by Ruben Blades
-"Autumn Leaves," by Tony Bennett
-"Get Out The Map," Indigo Girls
-"I Can See Clearly Now," Drifters
-"Message to Love," Hendrix
-"Biladi Biladi" by Sayed Darwish
-"Material Girl," by Madonna

Both of these installations are part of the museum's great Modern and Contemporary Art collection, which features a lot of paintings from the Suida-Manning collection (formed by a family of art historians). The Blanton takes a very interesting approach in mixing its Americas in an "exploration of the frontier and historic notions of what 'American' means." (Interesting article on that here.)

Here's how they do that, in a nutshell: After a gallery of works depicting the American West, complete with Frederick Remington paintings and sculptures, and some incredibly realistic paintings by Henry F. Farny, like "Council of the Chiefs" (which is not the one shown here, by the way) you move into the America/Americas permanent exhibit, which examines "how Latin American and American artists responded to and incorporated European strains of modernism in the early 20th Century." It presents a work by Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia near a work by Arshile Gorky, and a Mark Rothko work (I had no idea that he was born in Dvinsk, Russia) by a David Alfaro Siqueiros painting of the torture of Cuauhtemoc (sp??), with the red and yellow fire painted in thick industrial paint that reaches out of the canvas. The painting tags tell you when and where the person was born, where they lived and worked for what period, when they died and where. My only wish: I'd like to know what the museum paid for each piece.

My wonderful 12-year-old nephew, Liam, had a favorite at the show, this painting by Kazuya Sakai, called "Filles de Kilimanjaro III (Miles Davis)". (I have to check with my equally wonderful niece, Jessie, to find out her favorite.) The painting is mentioned in this article, which notes that "It’s hard to get more international than Sakai, who was born to Japanese parents in Buenos Aires and lived in Mexico for a decade before the university invited him to teach as a visiting artist. He never returned to Argentina and died in Dallas. He is a Latin American artist of Japanese heritage painting a piece for an American jazz musician."

One quirky thing the museum does in its free audio guide is have Austin business owners (as well as UT professors, who make insightful comments) comment on paintings. So while you're looking at Domenico Paola's "Allegory of Youth" you're hearing the owner of Austin hair salon Anew comment on the woman in the painting and the symbolism of the hourglass. For him, the hairstyling client is the canvas, we learn, and God's gift to us is that he lets our eyesight get worse as we grow older so we can't see our decay so clearly, ha ha ha. He shows up again later, commenting on the subject's dress in "Portrait of a Man," by Nicolas de Largilliere. His focus here is on the "incredible center part" in the man's hair, and how it centers you, the viewer, with the person's body and face. O-kay. Thanks for that.

We also get a local landscape designer commenting on the flowers in Sebastiano Ricci's "Flora." "That's a yadda yadda flower, native to yadda yadda," etc. I like the attempt to connect the local community with the art in such a direct way, but the comments were not enlightening. Maybe a better idea would be to have a two-tier audio, where pressing No. 1 gets you the curator/expert's comments and then pressing No. 1a gets you the local businessperson's additional comments. Of course, here I am, blathering on about my views on art and I'm no expert, but people who are reading this have actively chosen to read it (perhaps with my prodding, but nevertheless!).

Additional stray Blanton info:

Right across the street is the Bob Bullock (yes, Sandra is related to him, or so someone told me) Texas State History Museum. You can also walk to the Ransom Center, which is another good UT art collection. And the State Capital is nearby.

There will be more Blanton to love soon: Once an adjoining building that will house a museum store, cafe, auditorium, classrooms and office space is completed in 2007, the Blanton complex will top Harvard as the largest university art complex, at some 180,000 square feet. Right now, it has more than 17,000 works of art in its collection. The museum site tells us that "In 1988, the Blanton established the first full-time curatorship in Latin American art in the country. The move solidified the role of the art of Latin America in the collection, and the collection continues to draw significant gifts to this day." The writer James Michener and his wife Mari have been big art contributors and financial supporters of the museum for decades.

Happy Goldsworthy

The perfect Goldsworthian holiday picture!*












*You might not want to break the ethereal mood by sharing the title: "Icicles, joined by saliva."

The Fabulous Frick

For high-quality art in a beautiful setting, the Frick Museum in New York (between 70th and 71st Streets, and Madison and Fifth Ave.) cannot be beat (that's Henry Clay Frick at the left, with granddaughter Adelaide, in 1918). Right now, you can enjoy a tiny (size of a modest walk-in closet) but wonderful Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting mini-exhibit (closes Dec. 31), a Tiepolo exhibit (downstairs) and Masterpieces of European Painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which has closed its permanent exhibit while it undergoes an extensive renovation (it has loaned the Frick 14 works; exhibit closes Jan. 28).

CIMABUE. The exhibit has to be tiny, since there is very little work remaining by Cenni di Pepo, better known as Cimabue (roughly translates to “Ox’s Head”--umm, possibly not a highly complimentary moniker?) There’s something like only four portable works attributed to Cimabue. The Frick exhibit unites one panel from its collection with one discovered in a private collection in 2000 (it is now owned by the National Gallery in London). The image below is not one from the Frick--it's an earlier Cimabue and far more stylized, and you can't get the full sense of it from this image--but it's a striking painting nonetheless.

Wikipedia says the Frick's Cimabue panel, “The Flagellation of Jesus," was purchased in 1950 and long considered to be of uncertain authorship. But in 2000, the National Gallery in London acquired a Virgin and Child with many similarities (size, materials, red borders, incised margins, etc.) The two pictures are now thought to be parts of a single work, a diptych or triptych altarpiece, and their attribution to Cimabue is fairly secure.

While the Flagllation is owned by the Frick (and is the only Cimabue in the United States), the Virgin and Child is in the U.S. temporarily. For a short time, the two works can be viewed side-by-side. The pair are believed to date from 1280.”

The Cimabue exhibit is a jewel. It's an example of the Frick's incredible attention to detail that on the two Cimabue panels, the small clasps that jut a few centimeters onto the painting are painted to track with what is beneath them, so don't interrupt your visual experience at all. (Although since I noticed them, maybe they do.) But it's a very thoughtful touch. The museum also provides clipboards with a catalogue covering Cimabue works (and others), which lets you indulge your curiosity right while you're looking at the paintings. Another thing I love about the Frick is that your $15 admission fee gets you a free audio guide to their permanent collection--and, if you ask, you can get a list of local eateries from the gift shop if you're not familiar with the neighborhood. My sister and I opted to walk up to the Whitney Museum on Madison and 74th and eat at the restaurant there, Sarabeth's, which is good--and located right next to one of the Whitney's gift shops (a convenient stocking-stuffer shopping stop).

CLEVELAND MUSEM OF ART EXHIBIT. One of my favorite games is trying to decode the symbolism in paintings and the Frick's tags for its paintings are always interesting and informative. So there's The Cleveland Museum of Art's Nicolas Poussin's "The Holy Family on the Steps" (1648), with Joseph off to the side, studying a compass--an allusion, the Frick tells us, to the carpenter's trade and a traditional symbol of God the universal architect. (The writeup on the Cleveland Museum's web site says that "The representation of Saint Joseph is unusual, for he is depicted more as an architect than a carpenter.")

Another Cleveland pic on loan to the Frick is Jacques Louis-David's "Cupid and Psyche." Cupid has an incredibly mischievous smile, and the model was James Gallatin, the 19-year-old son of the American envoy in Paris.

And then there's Valentin de Boulogne's "Samson" (c. 1630; another of the loans from the Cleveland Museum of Art). In that painting, a detail like the bee on the clasp of Samson's garment alludes to the "fabled swarm of bees that gathered on the slaughtered lion's carcass and produced honey." The painting's tag notes that the bee is also the heraldic device of Cardinal Francisco Barberini, who commissioned the painting.

That reminded me of a visit to the Barberini Palace in Rome, where you can find the bee-laden heraldic devices carved in stone on the walls. I love the Barberini because it provided one of those unexpected moments of discovery when I wandered back behind the museum and came upon a gated field. Inside the field were dozens of grazing rabbits, and cats wandering around them. It was sort of surreal. I noticed a kindly-looking white-bearded old man in a hut next to the iron gate, who indicated that it was fine for me to look around. So sweet, I thought. What a cute old man. Then I noticed what lined the walls of the little wooden hut--hard-core porn torn from magazines. The little old man didn't seem quite as cute after that...

Anyway, even if you miss these exhibits--and I'm skipping Tiepolo, because we'd been at the Frick for about four hours and had reached museum burnout--a visit to the Frick is always time well spent. Top Ten items there: Its Vermeers. The Hans Holbein painting of Sir Thomas More. The Sargents. The Rembrandt self-portrait. The incredibly rich, gilded icons. Jean-Antoine Houdon's La Grive Morte (The Dead Thrush), dated 1782. (A press release a while back noted that it was on loan from a gallery in Boston until August 2006, but it's still there, so I guess the loan has been extended?) If you love the whimsy of trompe l'oil, you'll love this marble relief. It is a small slab of white marble with the upside-down body of a thrush carved out of it, and it rests in a deep gold frame. The frame can't contain the volume of the bird; Houdon has one of its wings juts over the frame, leaving a shadow. It's a very arresting image and makes the work so much more intesting than it it were simply mounted in an alcove as a marble sculpture.

At the Frick, it's hard to pick your favorite, because there are so many wonderful things there. They also have a really great website, with MP3 audio guides you can download. There are also very good virtual tours of rooms.

Prague Museums: Part II (Picassos in Prague)

Here's a name that provokes a jarring mental image: The Trade Fair Palace. To a New Yorker, it seems akin to calling our convention center "The Javits Center Mansion."

Just like Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy, the Trade Fair Palace is no regal residence.

When you approach the building, you have a moment of confusion--is this an office building? Is it a sales office for work furniture, as the ground floor salesroom suggests, with its row of red, green and blue Knoll chair knockoffs waiting to be filled by budding-capitalist behinds? And what is that big, ungainly metal....thing....in front of the building? It is sculpture, my friends. Art. Kind of...ugly art.

As is, to some extent, the Trade Fair Palace, which was built in the functionalist style and originally designed in 1926-28 to hold 10,000 visitors and 4,000 exhibitors. According to "art/shop/eat Prague" Le Corbusier was one of the first visitors, and "claimed that the building showed him how Functionalism could be applied on a pioneeringly vast scale." And the vast white space, which centers around an atrium from which you can see works of art on all four Gallery floors, is appealing, though I wouldn't rhapsodize about it to the extent that "art/shop/eat Prague" does.

The fact that I didn't particularly warm up to the Trade Fair Palace is partly because I'm used to lavish Western museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick, the MOMA. I'm spoiled by being surrounded by well-funded museums with well-paid curators who have actual budgets to work with and pay great attention to how the works are displayed. The Frick, one of my favorites, even has a full-time horticulturalist on staff, who has been with it for 30 years and arranges gorgeous flower displays, which currently include red peonies worked into Christmas wreaths. (He may be the subject of a future posting.)

The Trade Fair Palace is officially called the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art 0f the National Gallery in Prague. The lighting is basic, the partitions are basic, the floor is speckled linoleum. But it does have something on Western museums--you can pay just for the floors you want to visit. And the 3rd floor has some very good 19th and 20th-Century French Art. Favorites from a number of the floors: the van Gogh; the small Moore sculptures; the stylized paintings of Jan Zrzavy; the two Munchs; Klimt's "The Virgins," and the collection of Picassos, especially the one with the cubist frame by architect and leading theorist of the Czech cubist movement Pavel Janak. Here are a few of his designs you'll probably recognize (and can learn more about and even perhaps buy (well, some of them!) here).



Much of the collection was acquired by the Czechoslovak State in 1923, and a big chunk of good stuff (many of the Picassos and Braques) came from Vincenc Kramar, the director of the National Gallery in the 1920s. He was "encouraged" by the Communists to "donate" his extensive collection to the National Gallery before his death--I think that's how a tag at the Gallery phrased it. "art/shop/eat Prague" puts it like this: "He was forced to donate his collection to the Gallery in 1960, a few months before his death at age 83."

The logistics: A 15-minute or so tram ride from the New Town area of Prague takes you close to the Palace--you just have a 10-minute walk up a mild hill and a jog to the right. It's pretty easy to find. There is a great creperie with a painted red front to the left a block or so from where you exit the tram. (The actual name of the place--yeah, that would be kind of helpful!--will be added to this post soon.)

Prague Museum Reviews: Part I

I can highly recommend spending Thanksgiving in Prague. Thanks perhaps (agh) to global warming, it wasn’t nearly as cold as I’d thought it would be, and rain wasn’t a problem. A cashmere sweater, wool coat, warm scarf and gloves did the trick. There are more people there than you’d expect in an “off time” and especially on the weekend, but I can’t even imagine the crush of people that would be there in the summer months all cramming onto the Charles Bridge. The only real negative, and it wasn’t a big deal as long as you plan, are the reduced hours at certain museums that go into effect in November. Oh--and this can be a plus or a minus, depending on how economical you're feeling: The souveniers are, to be blunt but accurate, overpriced crap. Truly. While the notion of one of those Russian nesting dolls housing various Simpsons-Bart, Lisa, etc., or a set of George Bush or Berlusconi nesting dolls is amusing, it's not something you're (or I'm, at least) going to fork over too many Czech crowns for.

My frustrated consumerism aside, it’s a beautiful city to wander around—you’re always finding cool little (or big) architectural elements to admire, like this door, this synagogue, which I haven't yet been able to identify (it's not in the Jewish quarter--it's closer to the State Opera), and the Hogwartsesque twin spires of the Tyn Church.









One new high-profile architectural element I did not particularly admire: Frank Gehry’s so-called “Fred and Ginger” building that is often described as "dancing along the banks of the Vltava river." Nothing was knocked down in order to make room for it; the lot stood empty for 35-40 years after the original building was hit by one of the few light air raids in the war. It’s very mod, and, in my opinion, doesn’t fit and doesn’t add anything by not fitting. You know how sometimes buildings that don’t fit can make a really great statement and you just admire them for what they are, and they make you think? The Gehry building didn’t do that for me. Here’s a picture of it and you can make your own judgment--I actually didn't view it from this vantage point--it's the building bulging out in the middle--and this actually looks better than I thought, from a distance, at least.











The museums? A mixed bag, from what I saw and I couldn’t possibly see them all in six days, because, much as I’d like to see everything, this is after all vacation, so involves taking time to really enjoy the things you’re seeing. Some of the collections, like the one at Convent of St. Agnes, which houses the National Gallery’s Museum of Medieval Art, are very well displayed, with informative writeups for every picture. I’ll start with a description of that, and in following posts, move on to impressions/info on the National Gallery pictures at the Trade Fair Palace (Veletrzni Palac), the National Museum (that’ll be brief; for me, the big thrill, so to speak, was taking pictures of Woolly Mammoths to send to my nephew. This is what happens when your last name is Woolley, although, thankfully, none of us are mammoths), the Mucha Museum, and the synagogues in the Jewish Quarter, particularly the Spanish Synagogue, which is in a (yes, you could guess this) Moorish style and is just gorgeous, and has a good, heart-wrenching museum on its second floor/gallery.

Convent of St. Agnes: Housed in what "The Rough Guide to Prague" tells me is the city's oldest surviving Gothic building, founded in 1233, are some truly great Madonna/Madonna and child sculptures. An in-depth art guide I took along, “Art for Travellers/Prague,” by Deanne MacDonald, notes that “In the 12th and 13th centuries a popular cult of the Virgin developed partially in response to the church’s traditional hostility toward women, an attitude exemplified by the vilification of the figure of Eve.” Here’s a picture of a statue that caught my eye—if I could find what I wrote about it in my notes and tell you more about it, that would be great, but…I can’t find them yet. When looking at the blue in some of the panel paintings of Madonnas, I’d think back to that great Victoria Finlay book mentioned in an earlier post on this site and the use of the very precious royal blue lapis lazuli stone that was ground up and used as paint and or a dye.

After the Madonna statues, in the main part of the gallery, the pictures were displayed on gunmetal gray metal sheets bolted onto the wooden floor—this is in an old stone and brick convent that’s in the Gothic style, so high vaulted ceilings—and somehow this very contemporary treatment really works. It allows the Convent to show many more paintings in the space than they could with thicker regular walls, too, I imagine, and keeps the feeling of the room light. There are all sorts of gorgeous rich paintings of saints and such and you can play your own little private parlor game of picking out symbolic details (goldfinch=”ancient motif that was a pagan symbol of the soul later adopted by Christianity. A legend grew that the goldfinch acquired its red spot when it flew down to remove a thorn from Christ’s crown on the way to Calvary, and so it was seen as symbolizing Christ’s role as savior and martyr and became a popular attribute in Italian art” (thank you, Deanne MacDonald), a window frame ”symbolizing [in the painting of the Madonna of Most] that through devotion to the Virgin, the faithful would see into the Kingdom of Heaven,” etc., etc.)

My only wish there was that the writeups had occasionally gone into the materials and techniques used in the paintings; there was some heavy sort of patterning in gold paint that occasionally went all over the background of the painting and over onto the frame and I would have liked to learn more about that.

Student earthworks projects

What do the nation's students come up with when they go out into nature and emulate environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy? A project I'd like to do in my spare time is to compile examples of such work. One Christmas five or so years ago, the Austin Art Museum paired a Goldsworthy show (photos of a project he'd done for a wealthy family in Texas) with a Goldsworthy day at a park and also invited museumgoers to create their own earthwork arts and send in photos. It was a great way to draw the community into the museum.

What would emerge if NYC artists were asked to work with their native materials, whatever they considered them to be (okay, I'm thinking of the Goldsworthy faux-project I wrote about on this site earlier, using cigarette butts, metro cards, entrance tags from the MET, etc.) and then a show was built around their works? If Goldsworthy himself would work with "urban" materials it would be even more fascinating. Here's a recent story on student work from the Dallas News:

Students create art from nature at Arboretum

11:29 PM CST on Sunday, November 12, 2006

By ELIZABETH LANGTON / The Dallas Morning News

Their gallery was a secluded, wooded area of the Dallas Arboretum. Instead of clay or metal, they sculpted with leaves, flowers, branches and rocks.

They worked all day, creating more than a dozen pieces.

NATHAN HUNSINGER/DMN

Rose Martin arranged flowers around a spiral column of mud at the Arboretum on Nov. 8.

And then they left, abandoning the art for nature to reclaim.

"I prefer it that way," said student artist Laura Hall of Carrollton. "Because I know later on I won't enjoy the piece as much as the instant I made it."

Laura and 44 other students from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts participated Wednesday in an experiment.

Students enrolled in Advanced Placement 3-D design were tasked with creating site-specific art using only materials indigenous to the arboretum. Painters and photographers assisted with construction and then documented the work.

Their abstract creations hung from trees, balanced atop rock piles and sunk into the earth.

"I really liked it, getting out into nature," said junior Judge Rucker of Old East Dallas. "It helped me create pieces I thought I could never do."

The field trip culminated the students' study of the earthworks art form and artist Andy Goldsworthy, who is known for creating landscape-sensitive outdoor sculptures. Though some of these works are meant to be permanent, others last only as long as the weather conditions.

Judge said he felt no remorse about the eventual demise awaiting his sculpture of cornhusks, bamboo and flowers.

But he wonders how Mr. Goldsworthy can leave every piece he makes.

"If I did this every single day and all my pieces were like this, I wouldn't be able to do it," he said.

This was the first time the school attempted the project, which the Junior League of Dallas supported with an innovative teaching grant. Art teacher Paige Furr said they hope to make it an annual outing.

"It's a creative problem-solving experiment," she said. "It's an assignment that colleges do a lot. And they are doing work of a college level."

Once arboretum officials understood that the students had no plans to cut flowers in the garden, they got excited about the partnership, said Amy Winkelmeyer, who works in the arboretum's education program.

"It's fascinating," she said. "I was over there several times today. I'm just amazed at the ability and imagination they have to have to even come up with the ideas."

Senior Amber Campagna of Old East Dallas said she felt intrigued by the concept of making art from materials that surround her every day.

"It's not a piece of artwork that you can sell," she said. "It's something you just create for people to enjoy."

Leaving the art to nature makes creating it more interesting, said senior Alex Hamrick of Old East Dallas.

"It changes the sculpture but it doesn't change the quality," he said. "You can't take it out of the environment, so that makes it easier to let go. But if we hadn't gotten pictures of it, and I knew right now it was being washed away, I'd be thinking 'Oh, no.' "

Junior Suzanna Weeks of Old East Dallas, a painter, was intrigued by the idea of art abandonment.

"In a way, it must be really freeing to do a piece and leave it," she said. "When I do paintings, I come back later and say, 'I should have done this or that.' "

The students worked in an area off-limits to arboretum visitors. But they plan to exhibit the drawings and photos in the spring at school and next fall at ArtScape, the arboretum's fine arts show and sale.

Arboretum officials call the garden a living museum. ArtScape, held for the first time in September, draws on the link between nature and art, Ms. Winkelmeyer said.

The student project solidifies the connection, she said.

"It's a perfect marriage and it was an accident," she said. "They didn't even know we had an art show."

--end--

Director of "Rivers and Tides"

The Google Alert I have set for environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy sends me all sorts of stuff about stray Andy Goldsworthys around the world--have to work on that--but also provides some stray Goldworthy-related stuff that sends me off in unexpected Goldsworthian directions. A case in point is the item below that mentions a new and very different effort by Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of Goldsworthy's "Rivers and Tides." You can find the full writeup on this site (sorry, but you have to scroll down a bit to find it). Apparently there's a film festival in San Fran this weeekend, the 3rd I Film Festival, and the film mentioned below is just one of a host of interesting films, including a great-sounding one from Sri Lanka, that the site describes. The Riedelsheimer one (if I have to type that name again, and type it wrong five times again, I'm going to scream) is not the most interesting one described, in my opinion, but Riedelsheimer's work (AHHHHH! Sorry. It's been a long morning) on the Goldsworthy documentary was so amazing that it seems worth checking out other work he's done/does, Anyway, here's the writeup:

"Originally, I wasn't planning to see Between the Lines: India's Third Gender. Over the years I've seen a number of features and documentaries about the hijiras of India (most of them at the Frameline festival), and thus wondered if I really needed to see one more. Between the Lines, however, happens to be photographed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of the exquisite Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides. So yes, I do need to see this one, too. Praised by Variety's Jay Weissberg as representing "the best view to date into the world of the Indian eunuch," Between the Lines casts its focus upon three of these marginalized beings as they guide renowned photographer Anita Khemka through their singular world."

Belated D.U.M.B.O. Arts Festival photos

This bit of art consisted of a number of faux half crows (you know, you're rummaging through your junk drawer, finding old pennies, bent nails, old photo frames, and, oh!, there's one of those half crows I forgot about! How fortuitous!) glued onto a window so it looked as though they'd flown smack into it. Interesting, yes. The point? Don't quite know. And while the lady in pink wasn't my favorite bit of sculpture, you cannot deny that she has presence. Are you going to mess with her?!? She's pink, and she's proud!

Reviews of art reviews

Every week, I get The Week, which describes itself as an aggregation of "The Best of the U.S. and International Media." It's basically a cheat sheet to what's been going on in the world in the past week. Their Arts page highlights three exhibits, two of which sound enticing. There's Courbet and the Modern Landscape at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD (through Jan. 7); Yayoi Kusama at Robert Miller Gallery in New York (through Nov. 25; warning: you have to click through a couple of screens to get to see images of Kusama's work); and Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005, at the Brooklyn Art Museum, NY (through Jan. 21).

The Kusama show sounds intriguing. Here's the writeup: "Lines, dots and circles have long fascinated Yayoi Kusama, says R.C. Baker in The Village Voice. The Japanese artist made her mark and people with networks of dots and dashes. Later, mental illness limited her output. But her latest works explore old preoccupations in novel ways, fusing fiber-optic cables, reflective orbs, and silk-screened canvases into 'a river of graphic energy.' The Passing of Winter, for instance, reflects the influence of her friend Joseph Cornell--literally. Look into this mirrored box and 'your reflection is bounced around a dizzying matrix of suspended and fallen reflective balls.' Geometry has rarely seemed so appealing." For some truly out-there color photos of dotted assemblages of people and things, check out some other Kusama work here.

As a less-than-stellar student of math, and I'm being kind to myself here, geometry and appealing are two words I have never before used in the same sentence. But I'm planning to take a look at this exhibit. The link in the graf above goes to the wikipedia entry on Kusama, which notes that she left Japan "at age 27 for New York City, after years of correspondence with Georgia O'Keefe" and that "she has experienced hallucations and severe obsessive thoughts since childhood, often of a suicidal nature." It also shows a photo of her work painting trees with polka dots, which looks very striking.

The other interesting exhibit noted is the Courbet one. To quote from the review of the review by New York Times critic Roberta Smith [what's next? A review of the review of reviews?]: "By taking his palette and paints outdoors, Gustave Courbet revolutionized his art form, opening the door for everyone from Claude Monet to Jackson Pollock...The secret to his lasting influence? An 'uncanny fusion of realism and absraction that derived from the muscular way he dispached paint onto canvas." Often, Courbet disposed with brushes entirely, slathering on colors with his palette knife, fingers, or scraps of fabric."

Great art-related read

Who knew that, in Rembrandt's day, steaming piles of manure were used by the Dutch to make lead for white paint? Or that Egyptian corpses were a main ingredient in a brown pigment called mommia, or "mummy"?

Anyone interested in such fascinating factoids will enjoy Color, A Natural History of the Palette, an elegant and entertaining book by Victoria Finlay. The book came out in 2003; Finlay has also come out with a book about precious gems that is in this same travelogue style.

The writer’s fascination with color began when she was a girl standing in Chartres Cathedral, when her father told her, as she watched “the blue and red lights dancing on the white stones….that the stained glass had been created nearly eight hundred years ago, and ‘today we don’t know how to make that blue.’”

Later in life, Finlay’s interest was rekindled when she picked up a book and opened it at random to read “INDIAN YELLOW: an obsolete lake of euxanthic acid made in India by heating the urine of cows fed on mango leaves” and “EMERALD GREEN: the most brilliant of greens, now universally rejected because it is a dangerous poison…Sold as an insecticide.”

That is just a small hint of the discoveries to come as Finlay travels the world to track down the origin of pigments. It’s a travel narrative, a history of paint, an education about colors and how we see them, a glimpse into the mind of artists throughout history. It will make you look at paintings with a new appreciation for the colors.

To learn more about Finlay's travels and what she missed being able to include in the book ("Had I had more time I should have loved to have met the Twareg nomads of the Sahara, (whose skin is blue with indigo dye)," read the author interview here. And for some excerpts, you can go here.

Museumgeek Mom's Top Ten*

Having a very well-traveled mother brings big advantages--like being able to corral her to submit items for your blog. Since she's been to many places farther afield than me--Russia, Morocco, South Africa--she has a much more eclectic top ten list than my earlier one. Hope you enjoy it. And, um, thanks Mom!

1. Ephesus Museum, Selcuk, Turkey, has exhibitions by
local artists in a side room. Area suffered a severe
earthquake since. (museumgeek comment: The statue of Cybele/Artemis is wild. The area may have been settled by Amazons, a tribe of female warriors.)

2. Galerie Damgaard is Essaouira, Morocco. Owner of this
"museum-shop" came here, I believe, from Denmark and
never left. Promotes work by local artists. Extremely
colorful, fanciful work. Interesting article in Travel & Leisure here.

3. Musee de Marrakech, Morocco, temporary exhibitions on
contemporary art and heritage museums. Hosts concerts,
theatre, films, etc. Musical instruments, hamman,
workshops, library, cafe.

4. Sculpture and theme gardens around back side of Table
Mountain in Stellenbosch, Cape Town, South Africa. Garden
for the blind, water pathways garden, sculpture
garden. Takes all day. Concerts held.

5. The Drostdy Museum, Swellendam, Western Cape, South
Africa. The Drostdy was built by the Dutch East India Company in 1747.

6. Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens, on a winding
street. of apartment-like housing. It may have a # on
the building, but is hard to find. A gem. Spiral
staircase goes up 5 floors, 3d is the Holocaust part.
Upstairs 4 & 5 to establishment of Israel. Very well
done, just a counter or two to shop; a prayer corner,
just so well done. tele. 47.73526568.

7. I thought I remembered a Holocaust Museum in an old
fort near the water in Oslo where you wound thru a
horrific underground museum, but all I can find on the
internet is the Jodiske Museum in Trondheim, and it
looks just like a large building. ????

8.Back to Greece, Athens - The Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry
Museum. Yes, it would be nice to link to something in order to see the jewelry, but the links are being persnickety.

9. Villa Imperiale, ancient Roman villa at Casale at
Piazza Armerina. Sicily. Incredible mosaics, room
after room. You follow a "boardwalk". Lightly visited,
but so gorgeous. Makes you feel you were right there.

10. A marvelous and refreshing modern art museum right
next door to the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia,
Palazzo Abatellis Museum, Palermo, Sicily, in a large
square. Everyone else in our group went to the big
museum; I found this jewel by the chance opening of a
door.

11. Newark Museum, NJ. Great collection of Chinese art,
beautifully painted Tibetan Temple blessed by Dali
Lama; Japanese art, American art and traveling
exhibitions, like the Aztec ball park; also the
restored Ballentine home, Victorian (just like my
Nana's house).

*Okay, like mother, like daughter. She listed 11. Now I will do my daughterly duty and try and find links for those entries!

Slide show of San Cristobal, Mexico - Intersecting Walls

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