Of Gardens, Sculpture and Museums - Part 1

I took a little break the week of September 15th and spent a few days in Washington, DC.  I visit DC at least once a year because it is only 5 1/2 hours drive from where I live in North Carolina.  The museums, in particular, are wonderful.  Since discovering Leslie Cheung, I have met a very big fan of Leslie who lives in the DC area and we always get together to eat good food and, what else, discuss Leslie, while I'm there.

This trip, the weather was fantastic and, while we did see our share of museums and exhibitions, we also spent a lot of time outdoors enjoying the early fall weather and visiting several gardens on The Mall that are filled with flowers and sculpture. 

We stayed in Rockville, Maryland, which is a suburb of DC, in the lovely Hilton Hotel and took the metro down into the city. 

The Smithsonian has its own metro stop that opens up right on The Mall, with many of the Smithsonian's great museums lining either side.

One of our first stops is always the Sackler and Freer Museums, the Smithsonian's two Asian art museums.  In addition to impressive representative collections of Asian art, they also host important special exhibitions several times a year.  On this trip, however, there were no major exhibitions.  So we focused on Chinese art from the Tang Dynasty and before.

We crossed The Mall and stopped at the National Gallery of Art.  After the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this museum probably has the best collection of Old Masters pictures in the US.  But we spent all of our limited time in an exhibition of contemporary sculpture in wood and other natural materials by the sculpture Martin Puryear.  Photography was not allowed in the museum and the promotional materials the museum has put on-line are in Flash, so I cannot copy any of the images to place here.  If you are curious about what this large and curious sculptures looked like, you can go to this link:  http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/puryearinfo.shtm.

We also visited the recently renovated Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the National Portrait Gallery.  These adjacent buildings underwent a major multi-year renovation and just reopened a few years ago.  I had never visited them under their old guise (my husband had visited them in the 70s and said neither museum was very impressive), so I was totally unprepared for the extraordinary museum that I found on this visit.  The two buildings (that were built at different times) enclose a courtyard which, in the recent renovation, have been enclosed by covering it over with an amazing transparent roof.

The interior of the museum has also been renovated to create one of the most elegant, beautiful and inviting gallery spaces I have ever seen.  The art that is displayed in this marvelous space isn't too shabby, either.

The Smithsonian holds the world's largest collection of George Catlin paintings.  Catlin took many trips up the Missouri River in the 1830s and 1840s and painted literally hundreds of portraits and other pictures of the daily life of the last of the Native Americans who were able to live freely on the Great Plains, before the start of the final, devastating Indian Wars.  Sadly, as he was chronicling the last of these great and proud tribes, several epidemics of smallpox, influenza and measles literally wiped out entire tribes.  One year he chronicled the proud Mandan people.  The next year, when he returned to visit them again, he discovered that shortly after his departure an epidemic hit the tribe and 90% of the population had died in just a few weeks time.  The few survivors abandoned their ancestral lands and merged with nearby, but culturally and linguistically distinct groups and the Mandan as a people ceased to exist.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is especially strong in its collection of American Impressionist and Belle Epoque (1880-1912) art.

It also has representative examples of more modern styles, though only with post-War painting does the collection really shine.

This amazing installation, which must measure 20 x 40 feet, is by the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik.  The map of the United States of America is composed of neon for the outlines of the states.  Within each state are a series of television sets and each state is playing a different video loop on its televisions.  Viewers stand mesmerized before the video display, which is probably part of the message/experience of this piece.  Nam June Paik uses televisions and video in the 4 works of his that I have seen, three of them in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.  If you have the chance to see any of his work, I highly recommend it.

Finally, we spent some time in the National Portrait Gallery, which collects and displays portraits of all sorts of prominent Americans.

This is Michael Phelps. 

Or here is the dapper writer/journalist Tom Wolfe.

We were so impressed that we visited this museum on two different occasions during our stay.  This was definitely the highlight of the trip.  We make it a point to visit something new on every visit, which is not as hard as it seems with so many museums undergoing renovations or adding important new exhibits to display their permanent collection, not to mention the numerous significant special exhibits at these museums each year.