#RSRSeesTheUSA Day 8: AR-OK
I’ve hit a week on the road!
Spent about 6 hours today on my first visit to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, meeting with colleagues and wandering art galleries and appreciating good wall text that doesn’t shy away from social issues. And even taking a quiz that determined my time traveler name is Colonel Louise Wiley (based on Louise Nevelson and Kehinde Wiley works in the collection). Into it!
Today was such a good reminder that I do truly love so much about museums. Not only the artwork in them, but also the interactions they foster and how they use their space and thinking about what messages they choose to share.
This was—like many of my favorite museum visits—a time to see some old friends and to make some new ones. To look at beautifully and thoughtfully made objects and examine what stories they have to tell and what stories the museum is telling by putting them together just so.
I don’t want to be working in one museum full-time right now, but neither do I want nothing to do with museums ever again. They still inspire me, and I still believe in their ability to inspire others. I’m trying to make communal-minded choices about where I can apply my skills and energies, and I want some of that to be in service of the ways art can spark things in people’s minds.
There was a group of high school students visiting the temporary exhibition, The Dirty South, and the snippets of their conversations I heard them having with each other and the museum staff (and with me, when a couple of them approached me) were astute and clever and attentive. They stopped and looked and talked and took their time. They discussed composition and context and emotion.
The kids are all right. And I’m hopeful that museums—the ones that are Doing The Work of acknowledging the good, the bad, and the responsibility of their role in society—may be all right too.
Cloud of the day: So many good clouds today! It’s a tie between the endless reflections of the scudding gray puffs over Crystal Bridges in Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden (beautifully installed with clinking floating grace in a spring fed outdoor pond) and the sunset radiance of light through the clouds over the plains of old Route 66.
