12 museum visits in 2005

I was in the Peace Corps in Antigua and

Worked at the
1. Nelson Dockyard, National Park Authority. Awesome.

Web page for the Museum. This picture is on the Caribbean five dollar bill

http://www.antiguamuseums.org/dockyardmuseum.htm

Got a life membership in the
2. Antigua and Barbados historical museum in St. Jonh’s and volunteered for youth archaeology summer camp
3. Visited the Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta
4. Visited the country museum in Dominica
5. Visited the country museum in St. Kitts
6. Visited the museum in Grenada
7. Joined the Fernmank National History Museum, Atlanta
8. Visited the Fernmank Science Center, which has an extensive exhibit, Atlanta
9. Joined the High Museum, Atlanta
10. Joined the DeKalb Historical Soeicty, which has a nusem collection Decatur Georgia
11. Joined the Center for Puppetry Arts, which has a museum, Atlanta Georgia
12. Joined the Atlanta Historical Society, which has a museum, Atlanta Georgia
13. Visited the Coca Cola Museum, Underground Atlanta

I had never realized how many I had seen. I am interested in starting my own museum in Underground Atlanta, an International Doll Museum.

Maybe I was just too ambitious. Maybe I started too late.

Anyway, I’m going to make a new goal for 2006 and make it considerably less than 12, but more than I managed last year.

I have actually discovered a lot of museums that I’d like to visit. Guess I should use 43Places to remind me of them.

I would have visited the museums and galleries in America and Manchester anyway, but this goal made me take a fresh look at what I have available in my own city.

Built 1709 In Duchess County NY, and lived in by 7 generations of the same family.

She was the first white woman to get this far but my vision of a stalwart pioneer woman faded somewhat when I saw the charter from James II granting herself and her husband (he died early on) the land… something like 85 thousand acres of it!!

The house itself is wonderful, there are crumbling lace caps on the hatstand, umbrellas propped underneath, spinning wheels, luggage stored in the back room, delf on the dresser, huge iron pot in the massie kitchen fire place – a real sense of a lived life!

The house belonging to the artist Fredrick Church, not a church house (rather confusing!).

It’s beautiful, perched high on a mountain commanding a view over 60 miles of the Hudson Valley! Built in the Persian style (as you do…..), all mosaics and sloping roofs and little gold tiles glinting in the sun outside – inside is dark and Victorian, very ornate.

Our guide was terrible! I visited with a group of artists and she almost had a heart attack every time one of them peered too closely at a painting – afraid we would brush against a wall and do untold damage. She had hundreds of facts and figures about the construction of the house and the social life of Church (or MR Church, as she corrected us) but knew very little about his work or the context in which he painted and what she did know had to be dragged out of her question by question.

However, the house was well worth a visit, and one can only admire the decadence which allows a handwoven Persian rug to be used as a spill mat under an easel!!!

My mother and I had a terrific time at the LA County Museum of Art. We spent a lot of time in the Mayan exhibit, but we weren’t allowed to take photographs there. It was okay to take photos in the permanent collection, so we had a field day. No flashes, though, so a lot of them came out a bit blurred.

I was really thrilled with the pre-Columbian Western Mexican art. Some of the figures were actually grinning. Some looked almost like modern cartoons. I think I have to figure out how to use Flickr so I can post more photos.

We also enjoyed a small collection of tea cups. I admit it, I have a thing for tea cups and for small pitchers. I actually use them.

We had hot chocolate in the courtyard after perusing some of the paintings in the permanent collection. All in all, a lovely day.

Photo is an actual smiling pre-Columbian figure. It’s about 1 1/2 feet tall.

This really is a small museum, what amounts to three rooms downstairs, and one up above, although parts of it were closed when I visited including the textile room (pity). What was there was more than enough to fill a morning though, particularly the Durer prints – I stared so long, and so closely at some that I was afraid my breath would make the protective glass foggy (embarassing). The man was a genius. Plain and simple! Felt the exhibits in the ‘Gay perspective’ were trying too hard to make connections that just weren’t there, but the paintings themselves were varied and some of them are stunning! It was really good to see so many paintings that, because they don’t hang in a mainstream gallery, have escaped the public eye to a large extent, and so were completely fresh and new to me.

Unexpected pleasure: The detailed depictions of archers in several of the Durer prints.

My only complaint is that the gift shop didn’t have copies of the prints to buy….. they are missing out on a fortune, on me alone! However, they have a really impressive book selection and I bought the only book of my trip here….. had to carry it around all day but it was worth it!

Have already made an entry on this elsewhere but can’t resist stating again that this museum is WONDERFUL…. particularly for anyone who has studied art history with the Open University – you will recognise every second painting, and discover that they are actually HUGE (Andromache at the well) when you thought they were a couple of feet high, or glowing green and pinky white (Hylas and the Nymphs) when most reproductions are murkey brown.

The colours glow like stained glass.

(the coffee shop is good too…...)

The Museum of Jurassic Technology houses a collection that explores the range fascinating and sometimes baffling scientific and artistic ideas people have pursued in recent history.

From what I gathered from the website before my visit, I thought that this was a tongue-in-cheek collection of faux exhibits. But no! These oddities and obsessions are genuine. The variety represented here makes one wonder about the thousands of ideas people have spent a good portion of their lives in pursuit of that have passed quietly from our consciousness.

When you get to the museum, you’ll find that you need to push a button in the wall next to the door to gain admission. This sets you up pretty well for the experience you’re about to have. It puts you a little off balance. The museum itself is a dark maze of rooms with sometimes dimly lit exhibits. I though it was much smaller on first entering, but it seemed to expand almost magically as I turned a corner to find a room I hadn’t seen or had missed the first time through. The last rooms I visited, with the microscopic artwork in the eyes of needles, and the one with radiograph photos of flowers were my favorites.

A visit to this museum will give you a sense of the word museum as a place in which to muse. I whiffed the scent of scientific madness and creative obsession in the dark humid galleries. I felt a true sense of mystery and astonishment. If you go with a very open mind, you may too.

The website is kind of like the museum itself. The links don’t always go where you expect them to, and the information you’re hoping to find may not be what you actually stumble across, but you’ll discover something interesting.

http://www.mjt.org/vistinfo/vistinfo.html

I was there on September 16th, 2005. Guess I’d better get a move on if I want to complete this goal!

Again, photo is from the image on the tee shirt I bought. (What can I say, we camp a lot and comfort is important.)

Went to see the King Tut exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art yesterday. It was great. A friend of mine had gone and wasn’t too impressed. She goes to a lot of museums, so maybe she needs something bigger and better.

I loved the way the items were displayed. In glass cases that you could walk all the way around and in good light. Even though some of the galleries became crowded, it didn’t seem that we had to wait long to get to see what we wanted to see.

The audio tour was well worth the extra $6. It was great to find out a little more about things, and to be able to run the auio over again if I was distracted by my husband or the fabulousness of an artifact.

Of course, it’s too bad that there were none of the big Tut items, but can you blame the Egyptians for keeping them on home ground? Not really. The sarcophagus they did have there was gorgeous. Also particularly liked the little shrine that celebrated Tut and his wife. I thought it seemed like a wedding commemoration.

Also found it very interesting to see the materials that items were made of. There was a lot more wood and gilt wood than I’d realized. Things were also different sizes that I thought. A lot of it was smaller than I realized, but that only made the delicacy and precision of the hieroglyphics more impressive.

Definitely worth a visit. Your ticket also gets you into the regular museum during the same day, or you can use the stub to get a $5 discount on another visit before December 24, 2005. I think I’ll go back for the regular museum when my Mom’s here visiting in October.

This is a photo of the logo from tee shirt my husband bought at the exhibit, because I couldn’t get any of the images from the website to post.