Tag: museum

Norman Simon Museum

One of my old friends, with whom we unintentionally fell out of touch about ten years ago, lives very close to Pasadena, and I messaged her on my way to the conference. To my delight, she immediately responded, and we agreed to meet. We ended up meeting twice: on Friday night, when we mostly talked, and on Saturday night, when we went to the Norton Simon Art Museum.

The museum is incredible – the whole collection was put together by one person, and although relatively small, it contains an amazing selection of the finest works of world art. I also quite enjoyed reading the annotations to the artworks: detailed, clever, thought-provoking. I didn’t even notice the time when we were informed that museum was about to close.

Just a couple of artworks to illustrate my point: in an hour and a half, a complete history of European art from 13th to 20th century is unfolding in front of you, and each major trend and style is covered. I recall this visit and smile 🙂

National Art Gallery

To say the weather in DC was bad is not enough. It was the worst you could imagine! There was pouring rain all Saturday, so we had to change our plans and head to the museums. Unfortunately, we were not alone: everybody who came to DC for a weekend, did the same, so there were crowds everywhere.

Boris and I headed to the National Gallery of Arts. The first thing we saw there was an exhibit of German Expressionism.

“Sorrow” by Egon Schiele
“In God’s Hands”
Gramatte “Self-pportrait with wife”. It took me a while to see “a couple”

We stopped by Cauguin an Van Gogh, because you can’t pass them, and then we saw the Flemish collection.

“An Old WOman Dozing over a Book” seems very familiar 🙂

Unfortunately, the side effect of all museums in DC being free is the requirement to get passes in advance, and since we didn’t plan for it, we couldn’t get into many of them. Once again, something for the next time!

Titanic Exhibit

Last Sunday was a very special day for me – I had a reunion with my very special friend, with whom we hadn’t met in person since the start of the pandemic.

It was never easy for N. and I to meet even before that due to our insane work schedules and living far away from each other, but before the pandemic, we tried our best to meet once a month. Then, we had to isolate, and then life just took over.

I am infinitely happy and infinitely grateful to my friend for keeping our friendship alive through almost four years, and even more grateful that we had a chance to spend several hours together.

For our reunion, N. suggested we go to see the Titanic exhibit in Skokie, and I was happy to do that. The exhibit was totally worth it, presenting a wide range of historical facts, lots of artifacts, photographs presenting how life on Titanic looked like, and even a recreation of some ship’s cabins. I didn’t take that many photos, because I was absorbed in the experience, but I still ended up with a lot of them!

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Musical Instruments Museum

Boris and I visited this museum when we were in Brussels for the first time. It was our favorite then, and this time, Boris voted to spend as much time in this museum as we could. The best part of this museum is that you can listen to the recordings of almost all of the instruments that are on display. It’s overwhelming :). At some point, you simply can’t take in more, but you also can’t stop.

The thing that impressed me most is how many different kinds of music and musical instruments exist in the world and how little we know outside of our European experience.

Since there is no way to reproduce all the sounds we heard, tons of pictures.

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Radical Clay Exhibit

My friend, who moved from Chicago to Boston last year, was in town last week, and we went to the Art Institute for the Thursday evening hours. We saw an exhibit I hadn’t seen yet – “Radical Clay,” which presented the works of Japanese contemporary female sculptors made of clay/porcelain. 

The exhibit is small, but all the artworks are extraordinary! Here are some pictures that I took and some from the official webpage. 

This one is called “Looking for a crush”
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Open House in Shedd Aquarium

What they did this yea was the best. They didn’t have a sit-down dinner with fishes staring at you from all sides. They didn’t have speeches in the Oceanarium theater and they didn’t have performances. Instead, they just let people come and enjoy the museum without big crowds. It was amazing how close you could get to everything! I loved it!

Mom forgot that she had been to the Aquarium before, and she forgot what corals are, but she liked everything she saw, which was the most important thing.

I am inserting my Instagram posts just so that I won’t need to save videos one more time 🙂

I am really happy we made it, even though it was a very long Uber ride home (it was Friday night, and everybody was out, and both Columbus Drive and Lake Shore Drive were jammed)

More From Greenfield Village

I still wanted to post more photos from our last weekend’s visit to Greenfield Village. We saw more houses than we had seen last year with Lena. Boris said he didn’t care that much about famous people’s houses, but as for me, 1) I do if I know something about this person, 2) there were a lot of houses which showed in great detail how people had lived two hundred years ago, and unlike many other museums of that kind, they had not just “some artifacts,” but a very detailed reconstruction of how people actually lived. For example, not just a washing pitch, but a complete set of teeth hygiene pieces, chamber pots under each bed, and so on.

Dugget Farmhouse

Henry Fords’ house, Wright’s house or boarding house – does not really matter 🙂

Greenfield Village

Last year, when I visited Lena in Ann Arbor, she took me to Greenfield Village. We spent the whole day there but didn’t get enough, and I wanted to do it again, see more things, and show Boris what we saw last year.

Still, it was not enough :). Your mind gets overloaded with information, and you want to take in more but can’t 🙂

See the moving train on the third card!
Old diesel train ride
Wright brothers bike shop
Somebody thought of aesthetics!

I tried not to repeat the pictures I took last year… and still took them again, and still it is not enough!

To be continued 🙂

Helsinki Day 3

We were so scared of the rain the day before that we ended up spending most of the day indoors visiting different museums.

The first one was a Burger House showing how well-off people in Helsinki lived in the second half of the 19th century.

With Anna at the Senat Square

Then we visited Aethenium Museum and then – The Helsinki City Museum.

Both of them had activities for kids, which made everybody happy. In fact, Nadia was so fascinated with the “classroom” exhibit in the Helsinki City Museum, she didn’t want to go anywhere else and stayed there almost until the museum closed 🙂

Anna at the classroom piano

All these exhibits plus more ice cream made the day, and we were glad we didn’t plan anything else!

Art Institute With ODS

Last Thursday, I took a group of youth from the Open Door Shelter to the Art Institute. We used to go there on Thursday nights relatively regularly, but it didn’t happen for a while, and I was very excited to resume this activity.

Yes, as usual, they were delayed to the point that we only had an hour and fifteen minutes left for the museum, and yes, as usual, people got lost on the way (this time, things were complicated by the fact that one person from our group had a double stroller, which meant that we had to search for elevators, which is not an easy task, especially in the older part of the museum.

But with all that being said, and with the fact that nobody except for our volunteer coordinator had been to the Art Institute before, it was a smashing success. At least, that’s what I think. I enjoyed every minute of this outing. Each time I take a group from the shelter to the museum, they surprise me with how they interpret art, how attentive they are to details, and how the art makes them feel. One young man answering my questions about whether he saw that it’s spring in the picture answered with a three-minute monologue telling me about all the things he saw (and I didn’t!) about this landscape. I was listening with my jar dropped!

Also, all of them realized how gigantic the place was and how many things one could see, and everybody resented coming so late. I was glad that I had a chance to spend some “one-on-one” time with three people from the group and listen to their perspectives. One of them replied to my question whether did she know who Van Gough was, replied: I received a very good education! My mother is an artist. But honestly, it didn’t matter: some of them didn’t hear Van Gough’s name before, some knew his works, but no matter what, their insights were amazing.

I hope we can go one more time when I am back form Finland!