State Occasion

The Maryland State House in Annapolis is the longest running show in US state capitol history. Begun in 1772 it is located on the site of the first Maryland state house built in 1695 ( burned down in 1704 ) and the second from 1709 (outgrown by 1769 and razed) This one started its run in 1779 and hasn't looked back since, even serving as the location of the Nation's Capital as the home of the Continental Congress from November 1783 to August 1784 .Today MAD visited her son-in-law who is a Member of the Maryland House of Delegates and she and Mr. MAD were introduced from the visitor's gallery at the end of the session.

This building is like a museum where stuff is still happening. The walls are soaked in history. The famous painting of Washington resigning his commission keeps you company as you go up the stairs. The original senate chamber has been restored - the spot on the floor where Washington stood to make his resignation speech is marked with a bronze plaque. We poked our heads into the Old Delagates Chamber where restoration to the original of the 19th Century is about to begin. Even the dome and the lightning rod on top of it have historical significance.

Other art has both historical value and content. Imagine being surrounded by all these centuries of significance while debating, considering and legislating - and reading e-mail , texting and surfing.

And don't forget the art of politics which happens in committee, in legislators' offices, in the hallway and in legislative session.

Lush Life

So many museums and galleries here - it's hard to choose. For this beautiful beautiful spring day MAD got a taste of tropical flowers at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

The description of Orchids through Darwin's Eyes invited me to explore "... the alluring world of orchids from the perspective of Charles Darwin and those he influenced. This orchid display is a collaboration of the United States Botanic Garden and the Smithsonian Horticulture Services Division. And it is a knockout.

With over 25,000 species, orchids are the most complex, advanced and successful family of flowers on earth. And orchids have captured the hearts and imaginations of people over many years. Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief tells a story of this obsession.

Amid the lushness of these living flowers and foliage was an extinct bee caught in amber with the earliest orchid fossil.

Only problem for MAD was that the text of the exhibit referred to the adaptations made by certain varieties and those varieties were nowhere in sight. Visualizing the specimens that played a role in Darwin's work would have helped in my limited understanding.

Guess I'll have to spend some more time with orchids.

Czeching It Out

Gloomy skies in the District today prompted MAD to seek some light. Glass sculpture seemed like it might satisfy that need so I took myself to the Geoffrey Diner Gallery near DuPont Circle to see the exhibit Touch of Bohemian Glass.

Here's what I love: eleven (11) glass sculptures on one floor of a townhouse - enough to be able to spend some time with, but not enough to overwhelm.

Amanda, the assistant who opened the door for me, is a graduate student at the Smithsonian. While her area of interest lies in 18th and 19th Century objects, she told me that these contemporary glass sculptures look different all day long, depending on the light at any given time. Because of the nature of glass, the effect of light becomes part of the sculptures themselves.

Because of the interplay of light with the glass Gates, by Richard Cermak and Lenka Cermakova, appeared as two distinct colors depending on whether you looked at it from the side (black) or front (azure). Looking closely at the whispers of bubbles and wisps in Insomnia by Rony Plesel, reminded me of two loudspeakers, broadcasting its two-sided massage in golden green which I was told is uranium glass. Now I would have not picked these pieces out to be interested in, but stopping to pay attention and bothering to observe the details shed a new kind of light on my appreciation of the combination of elements.

These Bohemian glass artists are only part of CZ in DC a celebration of Czech culture presented by the Czech Embassy through this June.

Guardians

Spotted some photographs so stopped serendipitously into Blue Sky - the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts and was blown away by Andy Freeberg's Guardians, photos of the women who sit in Russian art museums superintending works of art. The photos were tacked unframed to the walls which added to their appeal for MAD. It sort of felt as if each of these women was opening her personal space to me.


Downtown Portland was packed on Saturday morning. Nowhere to eat breakfast without a big long line - something for which MAD has no patience. Firebird Cafe's food trailer was open at the Saturday Market. Breakfast was available there with wonderful coffee - a special blend created and roasted for them. The market stalls were a combination of Berkeley and Adams -Morgan with a little Buffalo thrown in.


Back in the Rose Garden Arena, Purdue beat Washington much to the disappointment of one of the best crowds MAD and MR. MAD have experienced at the NCAA first weekend games. Then Gonzaga beat Western Kentucky with a great ending.

More games tonight. MAD has to go watch.

Following the Tournament with MAD

No museum today or this week. Well maybe not any museums at all. Sorry about that.

But lots of good stuff.

In Portland, Oregon for the Round One and Two of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. Since we've never been in Portland before we got here a few days early to see the sights.

Arrived on Monday and headed straight to Powell's City of Books which was in the nature of a pilgrimage for MAD. I would have liked to stay there overnight, but a room was waiting at the Hotel Monaco and Powell's doesn't take overnight guests.

Tuesday we rented a car to drive east to the Columbia River Gorge. Got to see Multnomah Falls and 70 year old Herman the Sturgeon who lives at the 100 year old Bonneville Fish Hatchery. Saw a lot of rain too.

Kept the car on Wednesday and drove west to the coast where we visited Allie Evans and her children. Allie is the daughter of MAD's dear friend Dede and it was a thrill for MAD to meet Dede's grandchildren. We walked to the Pacific Ocean from Allie's house and enjoyed the freshness of the air and calmness of the beach on a weekday in March.



Thursday the games started.
Pudue beat Northern Iowa.
Washington beat Mississippi State
Gonzaga beat Akron
Western Kentucky beat Illinois.

The Illinois team and hangers-on were staying at our hotel, so we saw a lot of sad faces when we got back after a detour to Voodoo Doughnuts.

Maybe a museum tomorrow but in the meantime I gotta go watch basketball.

Fill out your own brackets.

The More Things Change...

In the dead of the Great Depression winter of 1933, FDR was inspired by his friend George Biddle who saw the need for artists to have work. As part of his New Deal he created the Public Works of Art Project - the artists benefited. So do we.

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum's 1934: A New Deal for Artists we get to relive the year of 1934 through the expression of over 3000 artists who were part of this project. Destined for public spaces, some of these works have hung in the White House and have been residing in the archive of the Luce Foundation for American Art.

The project lasted the 6 months from mid-December 1933 to June 1934 ; it resulted in over 15,000 works of art. The selected artists were instructed to depict "the American Scene" but it was okay if this theme was sometimes loosely interpreted. This exhibit is divided into several categories along the lines of Country, City, Industry, People, Leisure, and I forget the rest. A Flickr slide show gives us the chance to see all of the paintings online but the colors and the magnitude aren't nearly as good as what you see in person.


Which is too bad since the bright colors in many of them convey a feeling of optimism despite the difficult circumstances that existed at that time. MAD's personal favorite is Baseball at Night by Morris Kantor - it seems to beckon us to take a seat in the stands at what can only be a minor league or semi-professional game. Several years ago, Mr. MAD gave her a print of this painting; it's on the living room wall at the MAD cabin at Rushford Lake. This is the first time I've seen it full size and it's great.

It's good to know that the recently enacted stimulus bill contains $50 million in emergency funding for the National Endowment for the Arts . Hope some of it results in art like this for all of us to see.

"My Heart is Glad"

Each of the quilts on display at the Historical Society of Washington's Quilts for Obama exhibit was striking in its own right. Put them together and they filled up my heart. Looking at the combination of colors and textures in quilts is always engaging for MAD. This exhibit, curated by Roland L. Freeman, added the component of emotion. Judy, a quilter herself, had told me about the exhibit. Having her with me helped me notice and understand more of the work than I would have on my own. Thanks, Judy.

Freeman, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and CulturalHeritage , created this exhibit in celebration of the election of Barack Obama. The HSW and Women of Color Quilters Network partnered with The Group for Cultural Documentation to get this exhibit ready in 7 weeks, instead of the typical 6 months. And think of how fast the quilters themselves were!

A call for quilts went out and responses came back from all over the US as well as Ghana, Liberia, two parts of South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. Each quilt responded to the election in a different way. Geraldine Nash, of Port Gibson, MS, calls her quilt "The hands that picked the cotton, now help pick presidents". Nash says "...how far we have come in my life time - from the cotton fields to the White House. It was dark when we came to the fields and dark when we came back home. With Obama as president, I see light ahead."

A quilter from South Africa called her quilt "My Heart is Glad". So is mine.

Art/History

Whew! A busy week. Good thing MAD will be out of the District long enough to catch her breath.

Which is a good thing since my breath caught in my throat looking at the Road to Freedom exhibit presented by the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the International Gallery in the S. Dillon Ripley Center of the Smithsonian. A mouthful, eh? And a lotta links.

I got to see these Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968, with just one or two
people around me. Frequently at an exhibit you need to see the labels to know who and what are in pix; these resonate with my memories of the times and my gratitude for what the people in them did to help create the country I hope we are becoming. Among them are Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Floyd McKissick and Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. From the burning of a Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama to the culmination of the Selma-Montgomery March as well as the March on Washington and the Poor People's Campaign, they are indelibly imprinted in our history. The images are iconic and arrestingly (npi) lovely.


After 1968 - Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy is a smaller exhibit of photographs, digital video, prints and site-specific installations in the next gallery. Interesting to see these works by artists whose sensibilities were engendered by the work done by the people who led us on the Road to Freedom - in some cases years before the younger artists were even born. Nadine Robinson's sound sculpture Coronation Theme: Organon is composed of audio speakers arranged (in what appeared to me) in the form of an altar playing many kinds of sounds: choral, organ, shouting, water - you could hear it throughout the exhibit of photographs, adding a totally appropriate dimension that intensified the experience of both exhibits.

And so did a totally unanticipated interaction on the way out of the little gazebo-like ground level entrance to the Ripley Center. Well, maybe not so unanticipated; you know - MAD loves to talk to everyone. Saying good-bye to the security guard, I asked if she had seen the photos. Nodding yes she said, "And I lived them." A middle-schooler in Meridian, Mississippi during the Freedom Rider years she remembers the fear and the burning of the buses in the early 60s."What does it feel like to see those pictures now?" "Well", she said, "It's sad, but it doesn't do any good to look back - we just need to look ahead and do the best we can for each other. God loves me and if God can love the people who do evil in this world, I can love them too."

Thank you, Sarah Ashely. Thank you, everone who walked the Road to Freedom.

Join the Navy

Good thing today was warm and sunny. It was kind of a hike from the Eastern Market Metro Station to the Washington Navy Yard where Alexandre Sheldon- Duplaix was speaking at the U.S. Navy Museum about his book Hide and Seek - The Untold Story of Cold War Naval Espionage.

Not being part of the military, MAD did not have the necessary military ID to get in the gate but managed to be approved and given a temporary pass. Being a military groupie, and reader of military fiction MAD thought that was pretty cool.

There are 14 Navy Museums located around the US. The one in DC is the only one to show the full history of the US Navy during war and peace times. It shows it with artifacts, photos, art and recreations and tells a story that you can approach in great detail or for an overview. That means big planes, big guns and lots of other stuff. MAD got to sit in an anti-aircraft gun and was accompanied by sound effects (I bet there is a way to add audio to this post but I have no idea of how to do it. I don't even know how to spell them. Use your imaginations).

The Navy Museum is part of the Naval Historical Center which includes a library, archives, photographs and other areas for research. It's located in the Washington Navy Yard which has been around since 1791 and feels like a museum itself. And it is as good as any of the Smithsonians.

Slow Art

Even before I got to DC I became a member of the Phillips Collection. For me, it's the perfect size; not so big that I get lost and overwhelmed by the art - not so small that I can't feel the range of stuff in a particular exhibit. Also it costs $ to go but is free to members. Today was my first visit as a member and I knew right away that I belonged.

Today being a Wednesday I stayed away from the permanent collection and went in search of the Morandi exhibit which runs through May 24. I'm glad that didn't wait until it was almost done because I intend to go back again and again.

The brochure for the show calls Giorgio Morandi The Master of Modern Still Life. How interesting could that be? But think about both of those words. His work is certainly still and it is also certainly informed by life. Besides the visual loveliness of the colors and shapes that created the framework of the experience there is a whole way of looking that is at the heart of Morandi's work.

A tour of the exhibit was scheduled for a little while after I arrived and I had no interest in it. But when I walked through the room where it was taking place I guess I was sufficiently opened up by the paintings and etchings - I decided to listen as well as look. Amanda Jiron-Murphy, In-Gallery Interpretation and Public Programs Coordinator, took me one step further into Morandi with the work required by her tour. Stopping in front of two very similar looking paintings (Morandi painted the same objects in differing combinations, over and over again, for many years) she gently demanded that the group go directly into the art by looking real hard at the differences bewteen them. The specific categories she outlined helped us with this personal exploration.

Morandi spent a lifetime looking hard, seeing deep and using his art to express what he saw; the viewer can appreciate his work and our added perception of it becomes part of what's been created.

Was that last part in English? I sense some rolling eyes. Sometimes MAD does get carried away.

Throughout the gallery I had been thinking about the mindfulness generated in me by the calm direct experience of these paintings and etchings. I had seen an announcement of the upcoming A Mediation on Morandi at the Phillips to be led by Jim Goodwin and Erin Wilhelm. On paper the connection made me wonder; in person it made utter sense. MAD has been (intentionally) slowly reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's Coming to Our Senses. Looking at Morandi has given me another opportunity to get closer.

After all that

Pat Hamou has moved; MAD has the new link and wants you to have it too - no good clicking and being disappointed.
Does this make up for no museum yesterday?

Devil in the Details; Is it good for the Jews?

Snow Day - or what passes for one in DC. Being from Buffalo, MAD wasn't impressed. Still it was cold and MAD didn't feel like walking very far. Coming out of exercise a few days ago at the DC JCC I had stopped in at the Real Machers exhibit in the Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery while I was waiting. Not very interested in Jewish Gangsters, I found myself drawn in to the detailed textures in Pat Hamou's pen and ink drawings of these gangsters of the first half of the 20th Century. I still didn't think I was interested in Jewish gangsters - I just couldn't take my eyes off the art.

Pat Hamou is an illustrator and graphic artist from Montreal who is working on an ongoing blog and project Six For Five - an Illustrated History of New York's Jewish Criminal Community 1900-1945 which will tell the story of a whole bunch of these guys. Heeb Magazine included a feature article along with a selection of the drawings. At the start of the exhibit you can read his own words describing his interest in this subject.

But there's more ( I know, I told you I wasn't interested, but it just sort of grabbed me) - each drawing is accompanied by text - in a lovely font- telling about the criminal's family background, life in crime and his (yes, his) punishment and demise. How did Hamou find out the stuff to write these notes?



Many of the crooks are represented by both a full front and a side view portrait. Were these based on mug shots? What about the clothes they are wearing? There are also some photographs in the notes, often of the gangster's funeral or arrest.

Buzzing around has been some recent interest in Jewish gangsters - the Jews of Sing Sing was published by Ron Arons in 2008. Two years ago I heard Steven Silverstein, a Buffalo, NY lawyer with an evident passion for the subject speak in mesmerizing detail about Louis "Lepke" Buchalter.

That was interesting, but this was different.

Between the beauty created by the details of the portraits and the vivid information created by the detail of the text, I couldn't get enough of this stuff. I'll be attending Rapid Repsonsa at the JCC next Thursday evening when a panel consisting of Abbe Lowell, Susan Fishman Orlins and Gerry Kauvar will discuss the topic From Meyer Lansky to Bernie Madoff; Talking about Jewish Criminals.

In the meantime, excuse me while I go see if Hamou posted on his blog today.

Permanent Women

Maybe the permanent collections are the way to go - to avoid the crowds that seem to accumulate at special exhibitions. Found out on What's On City that the first Sunday of each month is a freebie at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and I just couldn't pass it up.

I met my son at the Museum; we stopped at Caribou Coffee for a bite and at Macy's to visit a winter coat that he's had his eye on. Unlike the Museum's, the coat's price wasn't right, so we moved on back to our intended destination.

A show of Mary Cassatt was finished and Isabel Bishop hadn't started yet so that left the permanent collection. Almost privately. What a way to look at art. The rooms were so quiet that we found ourselves whispering.

The permanent collection is arranged chronologically. Years back the question was asked where are there not more women artists? I have a different question: In the face of such obstacles, how were there any at all?

Fortunately for us, we get to see what those earlier heroes created. Now, while there may still be barriers, more and more artists are women and we get to see their stuff too.

The colors of Alma Woodsey Thomas' Iris, Tulips, Jonquils and Crocuses and Orion and the textures of Emily Kngwarreye's Yam Story went right through me to grab at my insides. I found two pieces of art, Louise Nevelson's Reflections of a Waterfall II and Pat Steir's Waterfall of a Misty Dawn, facing the same way on walls in adjacent rooms, juxtaposing the artists' responses to and depictions of the same stimulus in their appearance and materials.

How powerful the urge to create is and was in the early and more recent artists! How lucky are we to get to see what this urge has produced - and in the hush of the permanent collection on a grey and rainy Sunday afternoon.