Kondo-ing

Sean has been largely amused by my efforts to "Kondo" the house during my down time this month. I read her book a couple of years ago, and did find it helpful to conceptualize "sparking joy" as a reason to keep or discard something. I have little patience for the animist side of her approach, though (I will never thank my purse at the end of a day) and at the time had no interest in folding all of my clothes according to her system.

This new effort started not with Kondo's book, but rather with the basement clean-out that was underway when I arrived home. Over the years, our side of the basement, together with the "back basement," has functioned as an unfortunate dumping ground for Sean's brother, cousin, and aunt. It's always irritated me, but while his aunt lived on the other side there was very little I could do about it. Now, with his aunt moved out to a house with her own damn basement to store things in, the side next door  is about to be converted into a rental, complete with -- finally! -- a locking door separating the two basements. It was a perfect opportunity. Linda and I emptied the back basement as much as we could, with the help of a Dumpster and repeated trips to Goodwill. Then I pushed everything that belonged to Sean's aunt and cousin that had been on our side into the "back basement" for them to pick up or discard at their leisure. Sean's cousin appears to never have gotten rid of any clothing since, like, high school. I packed up two trashbags just of shoes - one bag for sneakers and one bag for monster stilettos. She had more shoes chilling in our basement than Sean and I collectively own!

We might not be minimalists, but we strive not to be over-consumers either. The presence of unused, unwanted crap in the house sets my teeth on edge. I admit to getting pleasure from the act of donating or discarding things we don't need. As Sean was recounting his dad last night, occasionally this leads me into a certain...over-exuberance of discarding, as when I allegedly got rid of the reusable plastic straws that fit with the caps for his shake container. In general, though, I follow Kondo's point that you can't discard other people's belongings. Well, not unless they've been abandoned in your basement for five years, anyway.

I discovered only after my repeated trips to Goodwill that the Vietnam Veterans Association would have actually picked everything up at the house after Jordy pointed out that Goodwill isn't exactly the best place to donate to. After that big purge, though, the most I usually have at one time is just a box or a bag that's not worth calling someone for. Said box, for example, is currently occupied by a decorative glass jar thing that had been on top of our fridge since Linda lived here, and a Scrabble dictionary Sean would never let me use. I admit it: Goodwill is what's most convenient when I want something gone now.

After the basement had been cleared, I was able to move a big bookcase that used to be in the boiler room on the other side into Daniel's old room. One of our big problems has always been a lack of storage for two significantly-sized book collections, and roughly half of our books had been sitting in either plastic bins or cardboard boxes from my Philadelphia move in 2012. One of my goals, which we accomplished in stages, was going through all of our books, removing them from the shelves and deciding which ones to keep and which ones to donate or, in the case of fancy scholarly books, bring to the Book Trader. Sean was able to discard plenty of books from grad school, and I cleaned out the nest of art history survey tomes under my bed. In the end, three boxes went to Goodwill and two to the Book Trader. The freed shelf space combined with the new bookcase means we now only have two clear plastic bins in storage, with a single layer of books in each; everything else has a home on a shelf! [edit: it turns out I didn't need to do so much sleuthing to find that Dinosaur Story book I mentioned in the previous post, because I had saved the actual book! It, along with a bunch of others, like the Snoopy book my grandparents had sent me one Valentine's Day, went to Jen for future nibling use]

The Kondo-ing of the clothes really only took the form of the folding, which I did in one huge go at the start of the month while Sean was on his ND retreat. It's long been annoying to us that our larger dresser gives the clothes stored in it - well, anything cotton, anyway - a musty smell that reminds me of my grandfather. I emptied it out, let the drawers sit overnight with baking soda, then wiped them with vinegar and water (this is why it was good for Sean to be away) and rewashed all the clothes that had been in them. Then I Kondo-folded them so that everything is folded on its side and you can see everything at a glance when you open each drawer. I was inspired to try this in part by Anna, who had mentioned a few months ago that she does the Kondo fold method. If a working woman with two kids can keep that system rolling, I have no excuse, right? As I discovered, the folding itself is quite meditative. It also requires you to handle each piece of clothing, which helps you notice things - socks with threadbare heels, yellowed undershirts - that you might more easily overlook if you were just hastily tossing things in a drawer. And, if you were looking to downsize things you don't wear, it sort of forces you to confront the materiality of your clothes as you fold them, giving you more time to think about whether you really need that umpteenth soft shirt for sleeping in. It's quite clever, that way! Now, according to Kondo, pretty much everything that's not a dress would be happier folded, but I have neither time nor space for that; nor am I going to purchase separators or boxes to keep things even more orderly within the drawers. Overall, though, it's space-saving and very easy to spot what you want to grab.

One of our last Kondos was the cabinet with our DVDs, CDs, and games. I found the two CD holders I had shoved in there: a faux-leather one purchased at an FYE-type store on Cottage Grove Road before my trip to Europe sophomore year of high school, one sleeve of which had the label from my dad's garage-door opener with the code on it in my mom's pretty handwriting, and a fabric one purchased sometime in college, one sleeve of which had a pressed edible violet from a meal Meredith, Carla, Anna and I shared in Ravenna when we studied abroad. The CDs themselves were a mishmash, dating all the way back to middle school. I own not one, but two Creed CDs, thank you 8th grade! Some of them I threw out (Nickelback, Dave Matthews Band) and then whittled the nostalgia-factor ones (Britney Spears, Staind) down into the smaller CD holder, which I brought along in the car yesterday when I drove to visit my sister. And wow, had I forgotten how hard it is to jam a disc back into those little sleeves while you're on the highway! Some of the CDs really brought me back in time, like my horribly-scratched-up Perfect Circle, while others (Eve 6) were pretty meh and are getting trashed. I will save the holder, though, for the continued embarrassing reminder of the crap I spent actually money on in times past!

Conclusion

This last week was a marathon, intellectually speaking. Monday through Wednesday were our presentations, organized into three-hour colloquia. It's unfortunate that only at the end was I able to fully understand what everyone had been working on! A two-minute introduction on Day 1 simply wasn't as helpful. I voiced to someone else that this past month has been so packed and so compressed, imagine if we now had another month to work together more casually, building on the new knowledge that we've all shared? Alas, the grace of the NEH only extends so far. Also, I really want to go home.

Thursday we were visited by the NEH chairman and then had a final three-hour wrap-up session in the afternoon before adjourning for a final happy hour and a closing dinner. Without quite intending to, I Irish-goodbyed everyone when I went outside to talk to Linda and came back to find that some people had headed off to a bar and others were headed back to the dorm. Oh well!

Yesterday was my last day of Doing Stuff. I went to Natural History when it opened, had another deeply visceral encounter with the megalodon model hanging in the cafe (literally all my muscles clench when I look at it, ahhhhh), which I returned to because they pull quite a nice espresso, and then went upstairs to the gems and minerals section. The Hope diamond room was basically empty, which is a far cry from what I remember from 1998, when you filed in a line past a sort of alcove in the wall and were vaguely disappointed to see that it was blue. Now it's in the center of a room in a glass case where it slowly rotates every few seconds, not only guaranteeing greater visual access, but showing off the sparkling fire of the gem and its elaborate necklace setting. In the same room was this incredible natural sheet of copper, which formed between layers of shale in Michigan:

There was another room of jewelry, much of it donated by Harry Winston (the didactic text kept emphasizing "and now these belong to the people of the United States," as if we were going to accuse them of something), and then the proper galleries full of crystals and minerals. It was absolutely gorgeous, and again largely unoccupied, which is key. I still have trouble believing that this is a natural mineral and not Cubist sculpture:

From there I went to the "Last Dinosaurs in America" gallery, which turned out to have way cooler fossils than the crowded dino hall downstairs--a triceratops and a T-rex! This gallery announced itself as being more experimental and open-ended, and I really appreciated how much effort went into explaining how paleontologists' understanding of dinosaurs has changed in the last century and how it's likely to change in the future. There was a display exploring how an artist works with both data and his imagination to create renderings of dinosaurs, next to a display comparing the Field Museum's early 20thc mural of a triceratops facing off against a T-rex with a 2014 version, highlighting differences, like the more active stance given to the triceratops, the angle at which the T-rex is holding its tail, and their skin colors (once uniformly grey-green and now much more distinctive). The Field mural indeed looked like the cover of the dinosaur book I loved so much as a kid, the one with the audiotape for you to read along, complete with ominous music. I remember being so afraid when they would tell you that the T-Rex was "as tall as a two-story house," because my house was a two-story house!

Once again, a little Google sleuthing has led me to it: Joanna Cole's Dinosaur Story, first published in 1974 but made into a Scholastic cassette in the 1980s!

Oh man, good (terrifying) times. From there I went into the cabinet of curiosities galleries, which explore some of the basic questions like "where did the museum get all this stuff" and features some really interesting objects, like a set of delicate sake cups that were part of the diplomatic exchange during the Perry expedition (something I'll be talking about in my Art and Tech class in the spring!), a full-size Audubon book that was in a darkened case lit by a motion sensor, a lion shot by Teddy Roosevelt as part of a Smithsonian exhibition to obtain specimens for the new museum, and the last passenger pigeon, a bird named Martha.

While I appreciated that there was an effort at transparency and honesty in this gallery in particular, this month has made me so much more attuned to language in museums. For example, that monumental painted house front from an Alaskan tribe "was collected" for a World's Fair in the 19th century. "Collected" is a wonderfully flexible word that can conceal all manner of sins; they put people on display in human zoos at those fairs, after all. That's not to say that there was anything more involved than a financial transaction in this particular instance, but the part reminds you of the dirty whole. And, linked to that, the whole question of whose culture goes on view in "Natural History" and whose goes on view in the art museum. There was a panel addressing that question. It explained that human artifacts are included because we're part of nature, etc. etc.--but they're not going to put a Raphael painting or a Roman sculpture in this gallery, are they? But they'll put a Hawaiian feather cape and a Japanese samurai suit steps away from the example of what dinosaur fossils look like when they're freshly excavated.

Speaking of excavation, I'm also more disturbed by the casual display of bodies in museums. Thanks to NAGPRA, none of these can be Native Americans anymore, but Egyptian mummies always seem to get a pass. Why? Because of their greater antiquity? I'm not saying they shouldn't be studied, but do the bodies have to remain on display? Is it important to always have "the thing itself" when the "thing" was a person? In the cabinet gallery, there was a skeleton of an American who helped obtain specimens for the museum; his descendants donated his body for study and display because they felt that's what he would have wanted. I heard someone commenting on his very fine teeth. An accompanying photograph shows the initial evaluation of the skeleton, still in its opened coffin, looking very much like a mummy picture.  In the picture it's clear that his jaws were gaping wide when they opened it, but on display they've been very decorously wired shut into an eternal smile.

From Natural History I popped briefly into American History and then I walked up to Woodward Table to meet Sarah and David. She wanted to go there not only because it's her favorite but because it's shutting down in a matter of weeks. The food was excellent; I had beef short ribs, a protein feast for the subsequent afternoon's march! After lunch I went back to American History, but didn't spend too much time there. Seeing the 1812 Star Spangled Banner was cool, but I have zero interest in Dorothy's ruby slippers or the Batmobile (which they light conspicuously with these neon pink and blue lights, which I suspect is intended to prevent you from perceiving that it doesn't look like it does in the movie--it looks much cheaper and plastic-ier!)

By this point it was 3:30, my feet were tired, and I had two more hours before museums closed. There are only a handful of museums I've not seen, and they're all the more commercial ones: Newseum, Spy Museum, Museum of the Bible. I'm kind of museumed-out, honestly. I caught the circulator bus to the Jefferson Memorial, which is currently undergoing a cleaning of the dome. It's so strange to see an imitation Pantheon dome with no oculus! Then I walked the path that leads you to FDR's memorial, and MLK's. It was really fucking hot, but not very humid, and the Mall's pathways are quite shaded. Nevertheless, I was sweating like a beast! I walked up to the Korean Veterans Memorial, crossed in front of the Lincoln (which was absolutely swarmed with tourists) and walked through the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. At some point this month it came up (maybe Jamie's presentation?) that just as all avant-garde art gets normalized in time, Maya Lin's deeply-controversial black marble has become a de facto element of "monument syntax," though the original meaning (mourning, yes, but also self-implication, as you look at your reflection amid the names) gets subsumed into patriotic and nationalistic messages that were starkly absent in her work.

From the mall I walked north to catch the free circulator that would return me to Georgetown, and picked up some junk food for dinner. Just as I was slowly making my way back to campus, I got an email inviting me to dinner with those who were still around. I had to be honest--after a sweaty day on the mall, I was all about a cold shower, AC, and Netflix! Today, too, I decided not to bother doing anything. I'm going to pack, I can work more on my syllabi, and I'm going to get drinks later with some people who were on the victorious "Destination Curation" trivia team that was earned itself a $25 gift certificate to a Georgetown pub on Tuesday. But I'm not Doing Things. That time has ended. I'm going hoooooome!

Baltimore

Yesterday I left Georgetown at 9am. With the rush hour traffic (we're on the opposite side of the city from Union Station) and MARC train delays, I got into Baltimore at 12pm and it was already blazing hot. I walked the 15 minutes from the station to the Walters Museum, staying in the shade of the buildings along Charles Street, and still had to take a time-out, dry-off break in the ladies room when I arrived. Charming.

I've heard the Walters recommended by so many people, and it absolutely lived up to the hype. What a fantastic collection. One gallery is reinstalled to mimic the ca. 1884 installation in the family's home:

A nearby gallery displays Faberge eggs and Lalique jewelry in the context of the Walters men's collecting activities at various World's Fairs. A monitor displayed four early videos created around the time of the World's Fair in Paris in 1900, three of them by Edison including a video ascending the Eiffel Tower's elevator.

One of the great strengths of the collection is Academic art. So many of the names on view - Fortuny, Madrazo, Bonnat, Gerome - brought me back to Dr. Braddock's Eakins class, for which I wrote a paper entitled "Patterns of Influence: Mariano Fortuny, Raimundo Madrazo, and Thomas Eakins" (thank you search function). In the "salon-hang" room above, Alma-Tadema's exquisite Sappho and Alcaeus stuck out, not least because it often crops up as the background in my Google Arts & Culture add-on.

They have a number of pictures by him, all on a relatively small scale. I particularly liked the Triumph of Titus and the humorous My Sister is Not In. Other favorites (I'm a sucker for Academic recreations of antiquity, what can I say?) include Gerome's Death of Caesar and Ingres' Oedipus and the Sphinx, the latter of which was tickling my brain because it was familiar and yet not. It turns out that I was remembering Moreau's version, which appeared in that encyclopedia set my dad had, in the volume on fable and mythology that I read over and over as a kid. My mom got rid of the whole set in an abrupt clean-out and some point, and I was so disappointed! I've never been able to figure out what it was; all I remember was that it had red binding, and was also probably not a true encyclopedia given that it was organized thematically. 

[ETA: I found it! Turns out the key was putting in "thematic" encyclopedia, and I discovered Richards Topical Enyclopedia, with several people commenting about how they learned mythology from Volume 14. Thanks to Archive.org, I just skimmed through a few pages to see if the artwork matched up...and there it is, Moreau's Odysseus and the Sphinx, on page 444! I can't believe I just solved one of the great lingering mysteries of my childhood! Thank you, internet. Also amusing is noting that there is no caption information for any of the artwork used to illustrate, only photo credits! I guess that's why I only took away the half-remembered images themselves. I just emailed my sister about this, I can't believe I found the damned thing after all this time!]

The Walters also has one of the most stunning and comprehensive medieval galleries I've ever seen, and perhaps most significant, the display isn't weighted toward Western Europe, but includes everything from Russia to Ethiopia and everywhere in between. I actually felt overwhelmed. It was a surfeit of beauty, and I just wandered through the gallery, my eyes sort of sliding over the objects in gold, silver, and ivory. Those galleries slide seamlessly into the Moorish and Islamic spaces, and then in a mezzanine you find yourself in a 15th-century Venetian palace, with three massive, recently-restored panels from Ca' Corner in Venice depicting the Abduction of Helen:

The table in the middle is for visitors to sit at or play checkers if they wish, but the furniture, the style of the fireplace and the roof beams, combine with the art objects to effectively evoke elite domestic space while still managing to avoid the "period room" effect. I mean, I personally kind of like period rooms, but as someone here pointed out, they are literally frozen in time and never change.

From the Walters, I took an Uber to the Baltimore Museum of Art, near Johns Hopkins' campus on the northern side of the city. Right near the museum, I saw a blank pedestal, which some Googling revealed had been a statue of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, one of four statues removed in 2017. The BMA was another awesome space, and I'm so glad I saw it. The atrium of the central courtyard is presided over by the great, gloomy Thinker (and now that I know he was once intended to be Dante, I can't miss the lappet of his cap), while the walls are covered in mosaics unearthed in Antioch in the 1930s. The collection of the Cone sisters includes a huge collection of work by Matisse (including the Blue Nude that was burned in effigy by art students in Chicago after it appeared at the 1913 Armory Show), and a marvelous Mother and Child by Picasso from what is apparently called his Neoclassical period: 

So many of the pieces I've seen would be excellent for teaching, in some context, so I'm writing it here to remind myself: Remington's Bronco-buster, cast more than 300 times in 20 years, and what it encapsulates about American myth; Kara Walker's Terrible Vacation, a return to Turner's Slave Ship in gouache; Mickalene Thomas' Dejeneur sur l'herbe: les trois femmes noires, a photograph of a restaged Manet in MoMA's sculpture garden.

From the BMA, another Uber whisked me back to the station, where the MARC trains were, ironically, the only thing on the board not significantly delayed. Back in DC at rush hour, I decided to be economical and take the free circulator back to Georgetown, but just my luck, it was running 30 minutes behind schedule! Even standing in the shade, with a slight breeze, with a bottle of water, it was pretty unpleasant. I had dinner at Sweetgreen and then walked back to Georgetown, and even though it was just around 8pm by the time I got back the heat was ridiculous. Today and tomorrow the heat index is going to be around 110-112, so I have no plans besides working from indoors--the door, the library, whatever. I'm glad I have one more weekend here! I still haven't been to the American History museum, and I'd like to pop back into the NGA to see if the Bellini's been returned yet, and maybe see the gems at the Natural History Museum. Happily next weekend looks much more manageable!

Special Collections

Yesterday was our final, marathon day of seminar. The afternoon was long, but kicked off in an awesome way thanks to Gretchen's husband, who works in Georgetown's Special Collections. They brought out some of their treasures and laid them not for us to not only see, but handle (being librarians, they were very proud to note that everything in the room was still meant to be used, even the mystery item insured for $25 million). The treasures included a Shakespeare First Folio, and a copy of the Federalist papers which was signed by Hamilton, Monroe, and John Jay after each article that they'd each written, yearbook-style (so now I know that Hamilton wrote most of them). There was Georg Braun's 1617 book of world maps and city views, an early edition of Vesalius, a one-of-a-kind, massive pressed herbarium put together at Georgetown in the 19th century, and even fragments of demotic and hieroglyphic.

The kicker, though, was spread out innocently on a back table: the first few pages of the autograph manuscript of Tom Sawyer, together with Twain's letter to "Friend Bliss," his manager Elisha Bliss, reminding him to have a dedicatory inscription to Twain's wife added to the book:

 The Preface pages were written smoothly enough (though there was one word that I couldn't read, which turned out to have been "combination"), but the first page had scratch-outs and superscript additions and just reminds you of all the work that went into producing a final copy, back before you could just hit the delete button, over and over. We debated, later, whether the First Folio or the Twain was likely to have been the $25 million policy. I checked and there's more than 200 First Folios still in circulation, but you only get one original manuscript, so my money's on Twain.

Hildreth Meiere Interlude

Shortly after I arrived here, it occurred to me to reach out to Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, which oddly enough is in D.C. and not in Cambridge. They have two mosaics by Hildreth Meiere which were originally part of an ensemble created to go above the elevators in the Prudential building in Newark in the 1960s, one of the artist's last commissions before her death. Our exhibition has the scale model for the composition, as well as a huge preparatory study of Hercules on his skiff, surrounded by leaping dolphins, a motif that Meiere copied from an ancient Greek kylix. Happily, they were willing to let me come check them out.

The path to the CHS takes you through an offshoot of "Diplomats Row," so it's all embassies, which is fun to look at from out the window of a car! I wonder how they determine who gets which mansion--if a new country is recognized, where do they put them? Oh, and Turkey's embassy has a statue of Ataturk on the street corner, naturally. The CHS "campus" is at the top of a dead-end street. On the map, the property abuts other side of the Dumbarton Woods from Georgetown, and so Google suggested a half-hour walking route that took you through one of the trails. It was 98 degrees, so no thanks!

Past the gate, you walk up a drive to see a cluster of a half-dozen small houses, all painted pure white like houses on a Greek isle, and at the top a low building with a rounded Doric temple-front.

Through the broad glass door, you could see directly through to the interior, where one of the massive mosaic panels is installed in the courtyard. I asked the woman who met me how they wound up with the mosaic panels, Meiere having had nothing to do with Harvard, and it was apparently an architect who was friends with Hilly who put them in contact. I wonder if the Doric columns at the entrance made him think these panels would be especially consonant in that environment.

It's installed back-to-back with the second piece, which is inside in a conference room. I was impressed not only by the sheer size (despite the inclusion of a human figure for scale on our preparatory model) but by the colors of the stones used, which is much varied than it appears in the model.

Today was our second-to-last day of seminars. Chris Celenza, dean of humanities and one-time director of AAR, had lunch with us to tell us about Georgetown's efforts to launch a Humanities Institute, and after the afternoon session, a member of the English faculty told us about their new master's program in public humanities and engagement. Between the two was the most boring three-hour "talk" (I use the term advisedly) on museums and the digital. It was rough; I admit to spending a lot of time not-too-subtly on my phone. Turns out my determination to take notes by hand has some drawbacks, in that everyone else could look attentive while checking their emails! Tomorrow--blessedly our last day, but all with this woman--I might bring it with me.

I scoffed a bit at "mandatory fun" at the outset, but now that I've gotten to know everyone it's much more fun. We're planning a champagne blowout for next Wednesday, our penultimate evening together, to honor our directors, Karen and Gretchen, and their fabulous assistant Claire. Jennifer, a exceedingly dry-humored public historian from Kennesaw State, commented that she would miss these social events when everything ends, which is surely a sign of the community that's formed. I do wish I had more time just to think and process, but this weekend should be good for that. I'm going to Baltimore on Friday, but plan to stay indoors on Saturday, when the "feels-like" temperature is likely to hit 112 in DC. A group of us plan to go down to the Mall Saturday night to see the Apollo 11 50th anniversary commemoration at the National Monument, so hopefully it's cooled a bit by then!

More Mall Adventures

Monday was our last off-campus field trip. We went to the Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries, which primarily hold Asian art. The Freer also has some American art, notably the largest collection of Whistler in the US, including his famed Peacock Room. We were there to meet with artist Darren Waterston, who "remixed" the Peacock Room in 2014, first at Mass MoCA and later at the Freer itself, in an immersive installation called "Filthy Lucre."

Whistler isn't an artist I know well: I think of Arrangement in Grey and Black (The Artist's Mother), mostly for the Billy Collins poem about it, and his nearly-abstract Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), which led to his famous libel suit against the fairly conservative art critic John Ruskin, who had accused him of "flinging a pot of paint in the face of the public." Whistler won the trial, but was bankrupted by it; additionally, he had just lost the support of his major patron, Frederick Leyland, over the Peacock Affair. Whistler had been invited to contribute some minimal ideas for color scheme and ornament to a room in Leyland's London mansion that housed his collection of blue-and-white porcelain as well as one of Whistler's own paintings. During Leyland's absence from home, Whistler went well beyond his brief and created Harmony in Blue and Gold, covering everything in the room from the baseboards to the shutters to the ceiling with shades of blue, green, and gold. Even the fireplace is tricked out with luscious blue mosaic. It's an extraordinary environment, indeed almost "excessively beautiful," as the former curator of American art at the Freer told us.

Leyland was furious, on his return, not only that Whistler had overstepped, but that he'd been publicizing his work to the press to drum up business for himself. He refused to pay Whistler at all, and later sued to recover what he'd already advanced. Whistler, in turn, insisted he be allowed to complete the room, which he considered his legacy. His final touch was the gold painting of the two fighting male peacocks (which gave the room its name). One of these, its feathers dripping with coin and depicted with a ruffled front, is clearly identifiable as the wealthy Leyland (who apparently favored ruffled shirts), while the other sports a forelock mimicking Whistler's own. Whistler called the scene the "Art and Money, or The Story of the Room," which is about the most meta thing you can possibly imagine! Interestingly, despite the controversy over its creation, Leyland didn't change a thing about the Peacock Room--not even his own caricature--and used it for the rest of his life as his dining room. After his death, the American magnate Charles Freer bought the room for his home in Detroit, and later moved it to D.C. when he donated his collection to the nation.

Darren Waterston said that he found it fascinating how aware Whistler was of the uneven dynamics of power between artist and patron, even those who were on some level friends, and even more fascinating how willing he was to talk about it during the Gilded Age. His installation involved basically making another Peacock Room, using traditional methods and high-quality materials, but it was a Peacock Room deformed and decaying in its own beauty--broken pottery on distorted shelves, creeping stalagmites of gold clinging to surfaces, hellfire glowing from behind the shutters, and the peacocks disemboweling each other:

It took him eighteen months to complete! I wish we could have seen it alongside the original room, but it's currently installed at the V&A in London.

I stuck around during the lunch break to explore the rest of the museum. The Ming/Qing porcelain was extraordinary! My spring "art and technology" survey just grew to incorporate the technique of porcelain, which, while not invented during the 1400-modern period, conveniently assumed its most prized form during that time. The galleries on Buddhist art had really clear, helpful information about Buddhism, the Historical Buddha, and the thirty-two "body marks" of a buddha, including (in addition to straight white teeth, blue eyes, and the torso of a lion) a tuft of hair between the eyebrows and a skull protuberance, features which translate, in depictions of the Buddha, into the dot between his eyebrows and his topknot. If I knew that, from Kathy's Buddhist art seminar, I've long since forgotten. The special exhibition "Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia," was also really cool, especially the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, a fully immersive environment, complete with recorded chanting. 

The Freer is above ground, while the Sackler is several layers underground. It also rather confusingly intersects with the Museum of African Art, where I looked at some Benin bronzes. They will be the "paradigm monument" for a section on bronze casting in my spring course, not least because they will let me bring in the contemporary discourse on repatriation. The Benin bronze, which number in the several hundred, were looted by the British in a punitive raid on the palace of the oba of Benin in 1897. The museum had an interactive with a proposed reconstruction of how the plaques adorned the doors and columns of the palace, which the British burned. The bronzes can be found in museums all over the world, including, as I mentioned in an earlier entry, at the NMAAHC. If I get really enthusiastic, I can assign the Sarr-Savoy report from France, which recommended returning all African objects in French museums to museums on the continent. 

After the museums, I walked down the street to the USDA, which has the one of the few cafeterias in a federal agency that's also open to the public. You get a visitor sticker from security and everything! It's just a regular cafeteria, albeit one with excellent food at low prices. There's one check-out lane reserved for the actual USDA employees, and one for all of us tourists. The walls were covered with historical USDA posters, including a WWI-era poster urging Americans to "save the products of the land" and eat fish instead, since they "feed themselves." Not anymore, really!

Indians, Archives, Friends, Oh My!

Yesterday morning we were off to the Cultural Resource Center of the NMAI in Suitland, MD, where all the Native American items or belongings (they purposefully do not use object, much less artifact, since most tribes consider their important possessions to have life and agency in some form) are kept. Repatriation is a part of NMAI's mission, but as we've learned, not all tribes are interested in taking their stuff back, for reasons ranging from lack of money to the sheer pride that their items are in Washington. What the CRC provides is space for tribes to visit their items and perform any ceremonies that they might wish to, including ritually "feeding" ancestor statues with pollen, smudging with sage, etc. They have both an outdoor ritual space and an indoor one, and then an airplane-hangar-sized facility that is designed in the shape of a spiral. They explained that their Native architects were looking for a symbol that would speak best to all Indians in the hemisphere (NMAI includes native peoples from North and South American, not just the US), and the spiral was the one that was shared most broadly.

The largest piece they have in storage is a 45-foot totem pole:

In the conservation lab, we talked to the conservators about their process of working with tribal members to learn their best practices for conservation, which might not always match the industry standard. They showed us two 16th-century pieces from Mexico that they're studying the materials of. The thin one to the right is a chronicle of sorts, covering roughly 1430 to 1530, and is on a kind of paper.  A series of blue dots along the right edge each indicate a year, and there's pictographic recording of information along with some Nahuatl inscriptions. At the top is a depiction of the first encounter with the Europeans (identifiable because they have swords). The bigger piece is a kind of map recording the migration of various tribes. It's on a woven support, and they were explaining how among their investigations was analyzing the pigments to see if the blues of the hills was in fact indigo, which it was. 

We looked at some items, including a Lakota war shirt and a eagle-feather headdress, that will sub in for items currently on display in the "Americans" exhibit once those need to rest in five years or so, and talked with the collections manager about the difficult process of building relationships and trust with tribes like the Lakota who had viewed the Smithsonian with great suspicion. We also talked to the archivist, who had laid out a selection of documents and photographs, including a very moving letter from 1941 from a Native woman and civil rights activist to the governor of Alaska protesting the "no Natives allowed" signs on shops. She mentioned how horrified they were at similar treatment of Jews in Germany, another reminder that people in the US, even all the way in Alaska, had a sense that something terrible was happening in Europe. Finally, we went into the "stacks," which are organized by tribe and by region rather than by type of object. In the "northern woodlands" section I saw the stacks housing items belonging to the Connecticut tribes, which was cool.

From there the bus stopped at the Mall for anyone who wanted to get off, so I went to have lunch at the NGA cafe and spent some time admiring van Eyck's Annunciation, which is temporarily housed on the lower level.

The level of detail is just extraordinary--and it's flanked by two other roughly contemporaneous Flemish artists as if to show that van Eyck was a cut above his fellows. Also on the lower level was a small exhibition dedicated to images of the moon from the time photography was invented through the most recent images. They had a small screen showing the launch of Apollo 11, the landing, and the return of the astronauts, and I realized I've never seen anything more than the iconic "first step" clip. Sara told me that there will apparently be another moon mission in NASA's future called Artemis. I wonder what they're still hoping to learn from the moon after all this time, as opposed to Mars or other destinations?

From the NGA, I tried to visit the Sculpture Garden, but it was just too freaking hot, so I went into the National Archives instead, another visit I remember from 1998. It was afternoon, so there was no line in the Rotonda where the foundation documents are, but I was disappointed to realize that they're so faded as to be entirely illegible! From the "Public Archives" gallery, I learned that that happened within a couple of decades, which led to the commissioning of an engraved copperplate copy that printed an initial run of 200 copies for federal offices and the families of the still-living signers. I'd be interested to know what ink they had available here then, because you can read medieval and Renaissance documents that are still perfectly readable on vellum or paper. It's like the Founders used invisible ink!

While I appreciated, in both Rotonda and the Public Archives Space, the effort given to provide context and a multiplicity of perspectives (including foregrounding how the ideals of the founding documents were denied to a broad swathe of people) the design of the Public Archives was overwhelming in a sensory way--too many different kinds of exhibits, too much information, too many threads! I found individual pieces very interesting, such as the chance to hear Teddy Roosevelt's voice off a wax cylinder recording, but it was quickly too much, and I left. From there I went to the National Building Museum, which was created to be the Pension Office and is the largest interior space in DC--it's where they hold the inaugural balls. The exterior is designed as a "brick Palazzo Farnese," with a running Parthenon-style frieze of Union soldiers, and the interior roof is supported by a row of colossal Corinthian columns inspired by Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome:

It's a cool building, but in the summer their efforts are largely focused on whatever their big "summer fun" installation is, so there aren't many exhibitions. This year's is called LAWN, and features...a giant indoor lawn with some chairs and hammocks? *shrug* I'd have been annoyed if I'd actually paid the $16 ticket, but thanks, AAM. From there I walked a few sweltering blocks to Union Station, met Meredith, and journeyed north to Sarah's house in Silver Spring. I got to meet Edie, her adorable 8-month-old daugher, and we had a lovely dinner before I headed back to DC. 

This morning I woke up to discover that the spring-filled mattress had left an honest-to-god bruise from where I'd been sleeping on my side! No wonder we were all sleeping on egg-carton mattress pads in college, jeez. I talked to my sister briefly--poor Charlie had a stomach virus, and got so dehydrated Jen took him to the ER just to be safe. He was in and out in four hours (and got a popsicle!) and Leon doesn't seem to have been affected, but my poor little man! I got a reminder of why I've always discouraged Jen's grand plans to take the kids with us to a museum this morning, as we navigated the insanely-crowded Museum of Natural History with little Edie in tow. I thought the National Archives was a lot to handle, but it had nothing on the Dinosaur Hall of the NMH. Holy hell. We agreed afterward that they were just trying to do too much; the emphasis on humans affecting climate change and evolution was admirable, but it was information and sensory overload in there. The Mammals Hall was slightly more bearable. If I have time, I'll try to go back on a weekday or later in the afternoon and slip up to the upstairs galleries. I would like to see the gems and some of the items from their permanent collection, but it's also not going to make me terribly sad if I don't get there. Museums of natural history are more universal than art museums!

I was thinking of going to the Museum of American History tomorrow morning, but I'm going to table that until next week. I have to assume that it's going to be a bit of a madhouse, and frankly my brain needs some rest!

3 Days on the Mall

On Tuesday, our morning stop was to the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, which intervenes in places where cultural heritage is endangered by disaster or conflict to provide resources and training to the local professionals. The woman running things, Corine, had actually been on a panel I'd attended at AAM, and gave much the same talk. Because we arrived early, we were able to wander the garden and briefly explore the Smithsonian "castle."

I decided to stick around during our break to visit the Hirschhorn, the "Brutalist donut" of a modern/contemporary museum right next door. Celeste had raved about Manifesto: Art x Agency, a show about the various 20th-century artistic manifestos and their...manifestations, I suppose you'd say. The highlight is an installation by Julian Rosefeldt called Manifesto of a dozen or so short films, each of which features Cate Blanchett in some sort reading--and enacting--the text of various artistic manifestos. He didn't limit himself to visual art manifestos either--architecture, performance art, and film all have their own. It was wild! I didn't have enough time to watch all of them all the way through (Celeste did and said it took 2 hours or so), but at a certain point, all of the films coalesce in their rhythms, with Blanchett speaking loudly and directly to the camera in each, so that it turns into this cacophony that's also somehow a chorus, only all the words are different.

Highlights from the permanent collection include Cuban artist Reynier Levya Novo's Five Nights, for which he used a computer to calculate to exactly volume of ink needed to produce 5 political treatises and then applied that volume to the gallery wall:

Guess which one is Mein Kampf? The others are Lenin, at far left, Mao after the door, Castro, and  finally Qaddafi, who apparently wrote a treatise called The Green Book (I was initially very confused by this on the label, and had to be corrected by Antonio in the Uber back to Georgetown).

I was also caught by surprise by Gerhard Richter's Annunciation after Titian, a dreamy reinterpretation that's reads like a digitally manipulated blow-up of a postcard until you realize it's oil on canvas! There was basically no visible brushstrokes on this thing. It was incredible. 

Finally, I also really liked Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Schur's "reimagining" of Rockwell's Four Freedoms. The prominence of the Native American on the "Freedom of Religion" was a perfect segue to Wednesday's visit to the National Museum of the American Indian, where we explored their new exhibition Americans, which opens in a huge room adorned with a dazzling array of images of American Indians as they have been interwoven into American culture, appearing on everything from matchbooks to corn syrup to military vehicles to sports teams. The word "appropriation" is never used, and there's no judgment in the (limited) wall text in this room; the goal, the curators told us afterward, was simply to show visitors how deeply embedded the image of Indians are in every aspect of American culture, what one of them called "weaponized nostalgia." The show then moves you through a handful of rooms exploring three central mythic stories that Americans have told themselves about Indians: Pocahontas, The Trail of Tears, and the Battle of Little Bighorn, and explores how those myths developed and what they've meant to Americans as well as natives. 

As we subsequently heard from the exhibition's curators, one reason the exhibition succeeds so well is that the design itself is amazing; they hired a New York firm that doesn't generally do exhibition design, and had never done one in DC before. But the exhibition's tone is also important: it's not confrontational or judgmental, but rather focused on meeting visitors where they are, "where they think they know something," and then showing them something new. This approach, the curators told us, certainly didn't please everyone (some might have preferred a head-on approach to appropriation, racism, etc), but in the years since the NMAI opened, more native museums and cultural centers have opened, and as they've felt the easing up of the pressure of being "the only game in town" they've felt free to experiment a bit more. One of our visiting faculty, Amanda Cobb-Greetham, noted that in the Chickasaw Cultural Center she helped start in Oklahoma, they carefully trained staff on how to respond to ignorant or benignly racist commentary, with her preferred response to a question like "where are all the teepees?" being "oh, I'm so glad you asked that!" She also pointed out that if someone comes in with their heads full of incorrect knowledge, they still came in on purpose, so don't put them on the defensive.

After this, we headed down to the cafe for a lunch curated by the head chef. Corn chips and salsa to start, followed by a vegetable salad featuring hearts of palm, then a clam chowder that was apparently the ancestor of New England clam chowder, a delicate broth (we added the milk and cream!). There were two meat courses: a trout from northern NY that was as pink as salmon, and venison, sliced thinly and served with potatoes. There was also a dessert course of fry bread, which I passed on. All of it was delicious!

This morning's visit was to the Library of Congress, where I had never been. It's an incredible building designed on an Italian Renaissance model, chock full painting and sculpture and adorned with names of famous men and quotations from poetry and prose. It's a temple to America's inheritance of a European past, but also to its embrace of technology (the aluminum standing in for silver gilt! the first building in Washington built with electric power!) and its identity as a colonizing power (those putti symbolizing the four regions of the earth!) It's a true place of "imagined communities," to use Benedict Anderson's term: a monument where you can come to learn what it is to be American, the stories we tell ourselves about our history and our purpose and our relationship to each other, even though most of us will never meet in person. That the LOC is also a functioning library seems almost secondary. (There was an Amish contingent in the main hall, and I did wonder what they make of this gilded temple; then again, the first peacock I ever saw was on a farm in Amish country, so maybe they're into it).

The building is beautiful and fascinating, but unfortunately, we were doomed to experienced it via the dreaded 90-minute tourist tour. This was led by the head of Education, who boomed at us what seemed to be precisely the same tour she would give to 5th graders, complete with prompts for basic historical knowledge. Zero contextualization or critical discussion, even in the room with words like COLONIALISM, CONQUEST, and DOMINION limned in gold on the ceiling decoration! At many points, like in the Viewing Room overlooking the Reading Room, she literally just listed off what we were seeing ("in this direction you see Art, represented by the sculptures of Michelangelo and Beethoven..."). I found that deeply irritating and kept wandering off where I didn't have to listen to her. However, during our afternoon debrief, we learned that Gretchen's friend, who is a research librarian at the LOC, originally wanted to give us a cool behind-the-scenes tour, much like we've done elsewhere, but deep institutional machinery whirred to life to prevent this from happening. We decided it was likely because the "NEH" prefix made them very concerned for their image in front of "representatives" of another federal agency-- so that's how we wound up with the canned tour from the education director! Apparently the friend got her hand slapped for inviting us at all. Wheels within wheels, as they say. It made for a really fascinating discussion that lasted into the dinner hour, so all wasn't lost. 

Deluge and Holocaust Museum

Early yesterday morning everyone got a Flash Flood Emergency alert on their phones, warning we could get an inch of rain in the span of 30 minutes, and shortly before we were due to meet at the bus pick-up spot, the rain started coming down, hard. I decided to head over there early, since the bus has been idling and waiting for us in advance in the past. I wore my sneakers (the only closed-toe shoes I brought), but they turned out to be no help at all--the entire Georgetown campus had turned into a series of lakes and rivers, seemingly instantaneously! My socks were waterlogged before I'd made it halfway to the main gates, where I spotted a very small rat fleeing the destruction. The steps at the main gates were a literal waterfall of gushing water. I've never seen anything like it, much less something I had to walk through (cursing all the while). I made it to the bus stop to find no bus, but Celeste and Laurie perched on top of the seats in the bus shelter trying to stay out of the coursing water. By the time the bus appeared and the rest of our crew made it to the pick-up, we were all thoroughly drenched, even the people who had raincoats. The drive to the Mall was also interesting--streets were flooded everywhere, many blocked off by police cars.

We arrived to the Holocaust Memorial Museum somewhat bedraggled. We met briefly with members of the research and education departments before they sent us up for a self-guided tour. I was there only once before, in 1998 when we went on a family vacation to D.C. My dad had something to do for work, so there was one day when he wasn't with us, and that was when my mom took us to the museum. I remembered the "passports" you get on your way in, and the display of shoes from the victims, but little else. Interestingly, in my memory, the shoe display was much taller (but I was somewhat shorter back then). My mom bought a book in the gift shop in 1998, All But My Life, that was a woman's memoir of her experience of the camps and the death marches. I read Primo Levi when I was a kid, too, in a yellow paperback that had belonged to my dad. I remember borrowing a book from the Windsor Library, 1500 Days in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It's amazing how those books have stayed with me (especially given my memory).

When we met for our afternoon seminar with Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, the chief curator of the POLIN Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, she told us that while little has changed at the HMM exhibition since it opened in 1994, they did change the entrance. Originally, the tour began with a "life before the war" display, but now the elevator doors open and you're met with images of the Allies discovering the camps, with a prominent quote by Eisenhower saying he needed to see it with his own eyes to be able to testify to its horrors later--as if he had a premonition of Holocaust deniers. So the change plunged you first in media res and then returned to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. The education and research members had told us plans are in the works to revise the exhibition, in part because it's so text heavy, especially on the 4th floor where you start (and the captions are nigh-impossible to read), and in part because there's a sense that there's too much focus on the Nazis and less on the history of anti-Semitism, which they worry means that kids in particular come away thinking that the Holocaust was the fault of these evil aliens, who appeared from nowhere and then were vanquished.

What struck me the most, on this visit as an adult? Images of Jews being humiliated in public in Germany, with non-Jewish girls, linked arm in arm, laughing on the sidelines like it was a carnival. I saw that in a still photo, and then in a separate video, which zoomed in on their cheerful faces briefly. They were enjoying it. In some way that disgusted me more than the SA, SS, or what have you. There was also an enormous sense of guilt and shared responsibility--or at least I felt so--and also the awful echoes of the past in the present. Things I've heard of in the past: the Evian conference in 1938, when nations met to discuss the crisis of Jewish emigration and every nation--except the Dominican Republic!--made excuses as to why they couldn't accept them. The Saint Louis, which in 1939 sailed first to Cuba, and then to Miami, with a desperate cargo of Jewish refugees, only to be turned away at each port and forced to return to Europe, where many of them later died in the camps. The debate among the Allies, in 1944, over whether to bomb Auschwitz, and effectively deciding it wasn't a worthwhile use of resources--though they bombed some minor sites just five miles away. Overall, the horrible reminder that we knew what was happening to the Jews in Europe--not the scale, perhaps (though the Allies had aerial photographs of Auschwitz, they knew it was a prison camp, they must have seen the chimneys of the crematoria working day and night), but we knew that mass murder was going on, and did nothing. And the worst thing? There was never an apology, never an acknowledgement that the Allies could have done something more, something earlier. You watch a video of Omar Bradley, Patton, and Eisenhower visiting one of the camps, with the dead bodies on the ground in front of them, and another video where they forced local Germans to walk past the piles of the dead while lecturing them in German on how they let this happen--but so did we! It's terrible, too, to see this language of desperate refugees fleeing violence and being turned away at a safe port being replicated on our own borders again, and in the Mediterranean, and to think that we've learned so little about empathy.

There were other moving, awful moments, too, of course, like watching the faces of some kids who were looking at the plaster model showing the terrible machinery of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and the mom hugging her kids as they looked at the replica of the barracks. The most awful videos are hidden behind concrete walls, designed to keep them from the eyes of small children. Did I watch those men being lined up and shot in mass graves when I was 11 or 12? I can't remember, though I hope not. That's another thing that continues to leave me flabbergasted, that the Nazis recorded, in video and film, so much of what they did. They took close-up photographs of men right before shooting them in the head, recorded themselves beating Lithuanian Jews to death--why? And then equally fascinating, as the war wound to a close, their panicked rush to destroy the evidence, dig up and burn the masscred bodies, burn the camp records...did they possibly think they could hide it all?

No concluding thoughts, really--I'm glad of having had the chance to go back. Everyone should have to visit that museum. Today we're going to the Smithsonian's Cultural Rescue Initiative, which trains first responders on preserving cultural heritage worldwide--hopefully less emotionally fraught than yesterday. At least the sun's out!

A Quiet Sunday

I felt quite tired this morning, and my head hurt something fierce after leaving Dumbarton Oaks. Hard to believe dehydration, considering how much water I've been drinking (and plain water, ugh, people don't like carbonation in the South). Maybe a belated reaction to constantly going from heat + humidity to frigid interiors? Just fatigue? Anyway, I chased it away with a combination of espresso and ibuprofen (with a single, delicious drink of seltzer at sweetgreen, a civilized chain of salad shops that I wish would expand to CT) and a couple of hours laying in bed.

Dumbarton Oaks was a pleasant callback to my Byzantine classes with Dr. Bolman. I was there only once before, for a lecture that she suggested we attend and for which I took the train down from Philadelphia (also one of my few other NGA visits). Unfortunately, I hadn't understood that the museum would be closed during the lecture, so I never got to actually see the collection. To make matters worse, the lecture (on light in Byzantine architecture, if I recall correctly) was awful, and Dr. Bolman actually apologized for the wasted effort. It's amazing to recall now that I wrote three separate research papers for her in grad school--the first one on the Arian baptistery in Ravenna, one on gender and the Lincoln Typikon, and one on a particular iconographic depiction of the Madonna and Children from a Coptic site at Bawit. Looking at the treasures on view at DO, there were tinglings of the knowledge that I had that my brain has consigned "to the archive," not readily accessible for consultation since it's so rarely needed--but the imprint is still there, as if I know that I knew it once!

Dumbarton Oaks is only a 20-minute walk from Georgetown. The collection is much larger than what's on view, especially as the largest gallery is currently occupied by an exhibition about the use of intricate knots to convey information and record history among the Inca (spelled Inka in the exhibition, which I found pretentious). What is there is stunning, especially some of the ivory, micromosaics, and the gleaming silver altar apparatus from the Sion Hoard. They are also famous for the Pre-Columbian collection, housed in a special gallery designed separately from the main house by Philip Johnson, but I have to admit having little interest in the material. I always feel bad when there's an area of cultural production that just doesn't interest me (like early Americana, or Dutch still lifes), but there it is. The limited size of the collection meant that I was in and out in about an hour. I had lunch at sweetgreen, shopped at Safeway (cognizant that whatever I bought I'd need to haul back) and strolled back to Georgetown. I really do like the neighborhood, and its remove from downtown, atop a hill, continually puts me in mind of Monteverde.

Now it's time to get ready for the cat cafe "experience"!

Museum Saturday

My first stop this morning was the Phillips Collection. Founded in 1921 (eight years before MoMA) it was the first museum dedicated to modern art in the US. The permanent collection is broad, but not much of it was on view, as there was a huge exhibition on immigration, The Warmth of Other Suns, taking up most of the galleries. I admit to only briefly dipping into this exhibition, but I was struck by an installation of a dozen or so illustrations from the Domenica del Corriere illustrating Italian emigration of the first half of the 20th century. Several illustrations depicted shipwrecks and other disasters befalling would-be emigrants; one illustration from December 1946 was accompanied by a long caption explaining that it showed some fifty Sicilians who had been deceived by smugglers promising to get them across the Alps to France, and then abandoned with no equipment in the snow before their rescue by carabinieri. It was the caption's use of clandestini, the same word the Italian press uses today for the North African and Arab migrants who try to reach Italy, that caught my attention; same word, same desperation, different marginalized groups. In the picture I took of it, my phone captured a nearby piece by another artist: a neon sign reading Mare Nostrum, with a flickering piece that turned it into Mare Nostrum, "Sea of Monsters."

I was there to see Renoir's Boating Party, which did not disappoint, but there were other pleasant surprises. Piet Mondrian's self-portrait put me in mind of Roman fayum portraiture. In the room with Renoir, two repentant Saint Peters, one by El Greco and one by Goya, flanked the door. On the opposite wall, van Gogh's House at Auvers is hung "in conversation with" Francis Bacon's Study with a Figure in a Landscape, with a remarkable synergy in the brushstrokes that create the blades of grass in each picture. In the van Gogh some of the brushmarks themselves look like exotic birds:

On the wall facing the Renoir are three pictures by Morris Louis, with Blue Column in the center; according to the label, Clement Greenberg wrote that Louis' canvases seemed soaked with paint, rather than painted. The distinction between that an van Gogh is pretty remarkable.

When I first went to the Phillips Collection's website and saw the Renoir, I was confused, because I couldn't believe that that picture was in the US! Maybe it's because it was featured in Amelie, but I had this idea that it was in France somewhere. Nope! Phillips snapped it up in 1923. The picture is just fantastic, and I'm thinking of using it for the first visual analysis exercise in my fall course, because there's just so much there to see, without needing any historical context at all. A party outside under a striped awning, near the water, in warm weather, with pets and wine, with laughter and conversation and the dappling effects of light--all of that can be understood without having the context to understand what else is encoded here about class and about gender. It seems like a snapshot that would go on Instagram, and like that snapshot is the artist's construction. The brushwork, too, is remarkable--some areas are soft feathery, others are impasto. The black fur of the little dog being coddled on the table is shot through with strokes of blue and yellow:

From the Phillips I walked to the Renwick Gallery, right by the White House, to see David Best's Temple installation, a ballroom-sized cathedral of intricately arranged, geometric wooden pieces:

He's apparently best known for designing temples for Burning Man, and although this installation won't be destroyed like those constructions, visitors are invited to add to it by leaving messages about mourning or grief on little plaques of wood and then tucking them somewhere into the structure. They ask you not to write on the structure itself, but of course it's covered with penciled graffiti, ranging from the usual "I was here" to deeply emotional call-outs to lost loved ones. There were also dozens upon dozens of photographs and Mass cards tucked into the structure, particularly in the areas that looked more like tabernacles. It was so touching to imagine people bringing a photo of someone they lost to the Renwick for the purpose of adding it there.

From there, my path to the National Museum of Women in the Arts led me past the White House, which I found uncomfortable. There's supposed to be a white supremacist rally this weekend, and any gathering of people in that space seemed suspect. In this case, it was a guy on a bullhorn yelling about how the Trump supporters are terrorists. Still suspect. You look up and you can see the police spotters on the roof of the White House. Maybe they've always been up there, maybe not. Another depressing reminder that I can feel no interest and no affection for the site of our nation's presidency; I hurried past as fast as I could.

The museum was impressive! Exhibits were thematic rather than by period, so a Cindy Sherman photograph hung near a painting by Lavinia Fontana. I discovered that Sarah Bernhardt, the actress, was also quite a good sculptor. There were examples of work by Rachael Ruysch, Clara Peeters, Angelica Kauffman, and a number of other early woman artists. I liked the portraits by Amy Sherald, especially They Call Me Redbone but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake, which had the most curious background, with the paint collecting in circles like bacteria under a microscope. Sherald did Michelle Obama's portrait, in which I like everything except her face!

Since I was so close by and not terribly tired (yet), I went back to SAAM to see the Presidential Portraits Gallery. I really liked the labels, and I can only imagine the amount of careful parsing that went into every word. Teddy Roosevelt was described as a "fascinating bundle of contradictions." Obama's label credited him with the ACA but mentioned the drone strike campaigns. Perhaps the missed opportunity was Bill Clinton's portrait by Chuck Close: the label mentioned his denial of sexual misconduct with an intern, but what about Close himself? Two abusers of power in one image.

The portrait of FDR, with studies of his hands and a sketch of a proposed portrait commemorating the Yalta Conference, was lovely. Elaine de Kooning's portrait of JFK was powerful, and one of the only ones before Obama's that "broke the mold." Obama's portrait did indeed have a line in front of it to take a picture. I didn't stand in it, because I would have wanted to just look at the picture up close for a long time. I hadn't been fond of the background, specifically the shades of green, in the pictures I'd seen, but in person, damn, that works. Especially with how the picture is lit, he just glows right off the canvas. Good work, Kehinde Wiley.

After that I was starting to feel it, so I made a brief tour of the rest of the building (saw Nam June Paik's installation turned on--wowza--and the guard standing by Duane Hanson's Woman Eating), visited the visible storage again (they've got seating at the end of the rows, and suggested audio tour stops, and information about what accession numbers mean--it's awesome!), and then it was time to head for the bus. My feet held up pretty well, considering I was on them for 6 hours or so! Tomorrow: Dumbarton Oaks.

National Gallery

This morning I took the free DC Circulator bus from Georgetown to the stop closest the NGA and walked down to the mall. I hadn't realized there was also a parade at 11:45am, but streets were already being closed to auto traffic. As I passed the National Archives, people were taking photographs with their new certificates of citizenship outside. It was a touching scene; then I looked up, and on the roofline of the building saw a police spotter with binoculars, which chilled the sentiment out of it for me. This was the first time I've ever been in DC for the 4th of July, and there's no joy in it. Someone on Twitter commented a while back that one of the casualties of [insert the past few decades of right-wingers here] is that seeing the US flag on something automatically makes you suspicious, and it's true! Is that flag-adorned person simply a tourist enjoying the holiday, or are they a low-key fascist? Hard to say.

Anyway, the upside of the parade for me was that the museum was basically empty when I got there a little after 10, and stayed pretty empty until around 1 or so. The Tintoretto exhibition was beautiful, and I was impressed by how little you felt the gaps of all the material that didn't travel from Venice. Like Moroni at the Frick, it wasn't revelatory as a whole (the Tintoretto show at the Quirinale in Rome in 2012 made more of an impact on me, especially the stunning, scenographic effect of being able to view The Miracle of the Slave from an elevated balcony) since most of the works were ones I had seen before. The didactics were excellent. There were some familiar friends: Venus and Vulcan, which plays not only with sight (Mars hiding under the table, Vulcan fixated on Venus' thighs) but with smell, and sound (will the dog barking give Mars away?) The ridiculousness of Venus being naked while Mars evidently not only had time to hide under the table, but put on his armor and helmet, struck me more this time. Another favorite: Louis, George, and the Princess for the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi. Again, sight lines are fascinatng: the princess admires her reflecting in George's armor, he looks down her dress, Louis sweeps his robe away from the dead dragon fastidiously, and the horse is the only (living) creature that looks at us. The Madonna of the Treasurers: why is it just the middle procurator who's constructed so sketchily? Where is there blue paint running all down his crimson velvet robe? I don't know, but I love it. Totally new to me was St. Augustine Healing the Lame from Vicenza. The purple of the saint's cloak, as he appears in a cloud of blue, was sensational--the blue tones in the whole composition are just wonderful.

Over the course of an exhausting 4ish hours, I did the entire museum, including the East building, which I've never visited before. I decided to change up how I would usually prioritize my time. I did the 19th-century sculpture galleries first, then Tintoretto, then 19th-century painting, then lunch, then the East building with the modern and contemporary art, and then finally 16th-17th century European. Oh, how my feet hurt by the time I hit the Renaissance! Bellini's Feast of the Gods was out on loan, and will return later this month. Rembrandt's Self-Portrait was still wonderful, Leonardo's Ginevra de'Benci was still underwhelming and yet swarmed by tourists.

I spent the most time looking at van Gogh's Roses, which fairly vibrates off the canvas in undulating strokes of so many shades of blue, green, and white (which, in the flowers, was once pink). He used a dark blue first, to lay the ground line and outline the geometric shapes of leaves; occasionally you can see this paint lying against the bare canvas, surrounded by a canyon of heavy impasto of subsequent paint. It's so rhythmic to look at! From their website I learn that "Roses was painted shortly before Van Gogh's release from the asylum at Saint–Rémy. He felt he was coming to terms with his illness—and himself. In this healing process, painting was all–important. During those final three weeks of his recovery, he wrote his brother Theo, he had "worked as in a frenzy. Great bunches of flowers, violet irises, big bouquets of roses..." Is there any other artist whose brushstrokes are so fascinating, so meditative to follow? I was looking at a Turner, shortly thereafter, and there's certainly a freedom of brushstroke that you could see as a forerunner of van Gogh, but often the paint layers seem a unified swirl of explosive color, rather than individual remnants of physical gestures that you can trace with your eyes.

By 3pm, I was toast, and called an Uber to get back to Georgetown. That turned out to have been a great idea, since the skies opened up with a downpour shortly after we got on the road! Due to road closures, we had to take the highway, cross into Virginia, go past the Pentagon (so weird that it's right there) and back across the bridge to DC. My shoes got absolutely drenched walking from the gates back to the dorm, but I suppose it's been than choking on heat!

ETA: I forgot to mention Augustus St. Gauden's Shaw Memorial. I distinctly remember being brought to tears when I entered this room the last time I was at the National Gallery, and tears rose again this time. It's a powerful piece, even if you don't know the fate of the 54th Regiment. This time, though, I was more troubled that it is called, on the label, the Shaw Memorial, and that the inscription along the base only refers to Shaw's death in the battle, not of the catastrophic loss of his soldiers, the first African-American battalion. It's in no way surprising, of course, given the time period. Honestly, I had assumed Shaw's family had pushed for the monument, but apparently it was a member of the regiment, who had become a legislator, who pushed it forward. Still, I add here the text that appears on the back of the monument itself, so that the dead, all of them, may have their due:

The White Officers taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with men of a despised race unproven in war and risked death as inciters of servile insurrection if taken prisoners besides encountering all the common perils of camp march and battle. The Black rank and file volunteered when disaster clouded the Union Cause. Served without pay for eighteen months till given that of white troops. Faced threatened enslavement if captured. Were brave in action. Patient under heavy and dangerous labors. And cheerful amid hardships and privations. Together they gave to the Nation and the World undying proof that Americans of African descent possess the pride, courage and devotion of the patriot soldier. One hundred and eighty thousand such Americans enlisted under the Union Flag in MDCCCLXIII–MDCCCLXV

SAAM

Yesterday morning our site visit was to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Like at NMAAH, we started with a tour, but our guide was the head of the Lunder Conservation Lab, a woman named Amber. She turned out to have a very interesting history as to how she became a conservator; she didn't have money to go to college after high school, so she worked while slowly going to school part-time, mostly for Motorola (to which she credits her excellent public-interfacing skills). In the 90s the company offered generous buyouts to employees to downsize, and she leaped on it, using the money to finish college as a full-time student. By that time she'd become interested in conservation, but lacking the science background she still had to take two more years of science classes before she could get into one of the 5 conservation programs that exist in the US (Buffalo, NYU, Getty, U-Del/Winterthur, and one other) that take a couple of dozen students total per year. Ultimately she did get into Wintherthur, became a paintings conservator, and has risen to run the lab at SAAM, but she came into the field in her mid-thirties as opposed to early 20s. It was pretty inspiring to hear, honestly, since my image of those who become conservators has tended toward ultra-privilege, Ivy League background, etc, simply because I know how scarce spots in those programs are.

On our way to the lab, we did stop and talk about a number of famous pieces--Nam June Paik's enormous set-up of TVs in the shape of the US, broadcasting different clips for each state, David Hockney's wall + floor painting covered with tiny wooden dowels, which we heard about from the intern helping to conserve it, and of course a stop in the room with Michelle Obama's portrait (which also had Kehinde Wiley's LL Cool J, which honestly was much more awesome). Didn't get up to see Barack's portrait, so I'll have to return. Apparently there were long lines to see his portrait for months after it was installed, and this was a topic of some of our discussion in the afternoon with Elaine Heumann Gurian, who is, somehow, 81 years old, still kicking, and has served as a consultant for, as she puts it, every major museum in the world that deals with contentious topics--the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Holocaust Museum in DC, the NMAAH, and the Native American Museum, among others. She pointed out that as a museum designer, you need to find out what's keeping people out of your museum, because often it's subtle signalling that "this is not for you." As examples, she pointed out that people who don't have the cultural competency and comfort of entering museum spaces may be turned off by a big info/ticketing desk when they walk in; they may be anxious about being able to find the bathrooms (she complained that Daniel Liebeskind, in his infinite wisdom, made the bathroom doors in Berlin perfectly flush with the wall, forcing her to ask someone to show her how to get in!), figuring out where to eat lunch, etc. Sometimes, she notes, there is a big enough attraction that will make people come in anyway, especially if they feel it's important for their children, and that's the case with Obama's portrait--families stood in line (and still do, on weekends) to show their children that a black man could be president. Steve Lubar also pointed out that SAAM made the conscious choice not to position Obama as the focal point of that room, but rather a bust of Andrew Jackson, perhaps protecting themselves from right-wing criticism. Elaine added that in a museum, the policy of inclusion must mean you include everyone, not just people you like, which means (especially in history museums) the challenge of crafting a narrative that will speak to people from many different backgrounds, education levels, and perhaps prejudices.

The visit to the conservation lab itself was really cool. To get there, you walk past their Luce Visible Storage Center (so cool), and then you're in a long hallway of floor-to-ceiling glass, because everything they do in the lab is public. They have a frame restoration space, paper conservation, object conservation, and two paintings conservation labs. On the opposite wall are didactics explaining things like "the anatomy of a frame," how IR works, and using a damaged painting to show different types of degradation on paint surfaces. Upstairs, there was Edward Hopper's People in the Sun on an easel in the final state of conservation, along with a gorgeous Alma Thomas painting. And they had a beautiful rainbow display of pigments in glass jars in a cabinet! Oh, how I want something like that for us.

Today is the 4th. I'm heading down to the Mall to go to the National Gallery and see the Tintoretto show, and then I'm coming back up here in the afternoon, and we'll be watching the fireworks from the 7th-floor balcony tonight. By the way, yesterday it was my job to "curate" the 6pm reception (which I joked to Sean is "mandatory fun") so I walked to Safeway, about 20 minutes, uphill, during our break yesterday. It wasn't bad, but it turns out that walking 20 minutes in 92-degree heat while carrying 4 bottles of wine, a liter of seltzer, and some assorted groceries is not a good time. I was pretty much dripping by the time I got back to campus, with just enough time to throw the wine in the fridge and head to the library for our afternoon session. But my work is done on that score!