Katie is Famous!

Ok, not really.  Not even close.  But I would like to take a moment and brag about myself…Check this out, I’m in a library catalog:

click click!

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Houston.  That post will come sometime soon!

Katie Does Dallas…and Houston

Hmm.  Sorry about that title.  Anyway, about a week before I moved out of my apartment in Austin (that’s right, I no longer live in the lone star state), I decided to check out some of the art museums in Texas.  Austin is not known for having the best art scene (or, not in my book).  Music, yes.  Visual art, not so much.  So even though I completed my master’s in art history in Austin, there weren’t very many places in the city where I could see great works of art.  There are two “Austin Museums of Art”: one downtown and one on W 38^th Street.  I never actually got around to visiting the museum on 38^th, and I went to the one downtown all of once in my entire two years of living in Austin.  And that one time was during a visit prior even to moving to the city.  The downtown AMoA is a very small space that is used mainly for traveling exhibitions rather than art that is part of the permanent collection.  When I visited, a Christo and Jeanne-Claude show was up.  Unfortunately, they had not covered the museum.  Or any Austin landmark.  How great would it be if they covered UT’s football stadium??  Now that would take a lot of burnt orange fabric.

 

There are other places that display art in Austin.  West 6^th is a decent gallery district.  Right off Barton Springs there is an outdoor sculpture garden (Umlauf Sculpture Garden) that also has different exhibits in the indoor section.  The university has the Blanton Museum of Art, which is actually a pretty great museum but somewhat on the small side.  South Congress has a few galleries, although I quit going to one of them after the woman working in it asked me if I was lost.  Uh, no.  I’m looking at art, lady.  Don’t talk to potential customers that way!  Jeez.  There is also a gallery/museum near the downtown AMoA called MexicArte or something like that.  I have been in it.  That’s about all I have to say about that.  I guess, now that I’m thinking about it, it’s not so much that Austin doesn’t have great art to look at, it’s more like the city doesn’t have art that I want to look at.  (Feel free to argue against my point of view, all you Austinites out there.)

 

As a result of Austin’s lack of visual art resources, I decided to travel to two other cities in Texas that have much better museums: Dallas and Houston.  Both of these cities are about a three-hour drive from Austin, so I was able to do them each in a longish one-day journey.  One Tuesday, I woke up early and hit the road for Dallas.  What are the highlights of a road trip from Austin to Dallas you might ask.  Well, you get to see Waco!  Now that is exciting.  Besides that, there are a lot of doughnut shops.  Not your commercial-variety doughnut shops, either, but homemade(-ish), Mom & Pop doughnut shops.  I didn’t actually eat any, though, so I can’t tell you what they’re like.  I’m guessing large and fatty.  And therefore delicious.

 

I had been to Dallas one other time, for the annual College Art Association conference in February.  During that weekend, I did get a chance to go to the Dallas Museum of Art to see a Turner exhibit (really great), but I had to cut my time short and rush back to hear Yoko Ono speak.  That’s right, Yoko Ono.  It was awesome.  But since I hadn’t really gotten to spend as much time in the museum as I would have liked, I decided that it would be my first stop in my Texas museum tour. 

 

The Dallas Museum of Art gives the impression of being a really huge museum, and then you start exploring it and you think “Hey, it’s not that big.”  And then you don’t finish exploring it until three and a half hours later (that includes speed-walking through the boring art, i.e. portraiture…sorry, just my opinion, people) and you think “Uh, no, it really is that big.”  There’s something about the floor plan that leads you to believe that each gallery is relatively small, but that’s not actually the case.  You can wander for hours and see art that encompasses all time periods and locations.  They had some nice Mondrians on display when I was there, and the Wendy and Emery Reeves Collection was both intriguing and frustrating.  Intriguing because it was laid out so as to look like the donors’ French Riviera villa, and frustrating because this meant that the really wonderful van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, etc. that they owned was placed in a recreation of a living room or bedroom blocked off so you couldn’t get close enough to really look at the paintings.  While I found some parts of the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection more interesting than others, I do think that there is something for everyone.  Plus, the museum has some of the friendliest museum guards I’ve ever talked to.  They were very helpful, knowing a lot about the rooms they were walking through and what was displayed within them and also seemed really to care about making sure the art was protected.  I definitely respect that.

 

After the Dallas Museum of Art, I walked across the street to the Nasher Sculpture Center.  I was pretty excited about getting to go to the center because during my last year at Duke University, the school opened its new art museum, funded by and containing some of Raymond D. Nasher’s collection of sculpture.  As a part of the celebration surrounding the unveiling of the museum, I got to hear the late Mr. Nasher talk about how he had collected art over the years, and I took a class with Dr Kristine Stiles on modern and postmodern sculpture.  That class solidified my love for sculpture.  I really prefer sculpture to painting in a lot of ways, so my trip to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas was a great opportunity.  (I should probably also mention here that the Dallas Museum of Art has a sculpture garden that was wonderful as well.)  Part of the Nasher collection is housed in a very open indoor space with plenty of natural light and hardwood floors.  A large version of Naum Gabo’s Head No. 2 sits in one corner—interesting for me because I wrote a paper about Gabo’s sculpture for an abstraction class I took during graduate school.  The basement has visiting exhibitions; on view during my visit was a Jacques Lipchitz show made up of work recently donated to the center.  The collection continues outdoors in what is now one of my favorite sculpture gardens.  The first piece I noticed was Jonathan Borofsky’s Walking to the Sky (2004).  I found this sculpture and the others by Borofsky in Dallas to be very intriguing; I wasn’t really familiar with this artist, but I think that I need to start researching his work.  Walking to the Sky consists of three figures standing on the ground, looking up a pole that points to the sky with other figures walking along it.  The figures are life-size, and every time I saw the sculpture out of the corner of my eye, I thought that the figures on the ground were real people.  Here’s what the map/brochure for the Nasher Center says about Walking to the Sky:

 

“Walking to the Sky continues Borofsky’s ongoing exploration of human ideals, dream life, and fantasy.  The sculpture was originally inspired by a story Borofsky’s father told him as a child about a friendly giant who lived in the sky.  During each tale, father and son would imagine walking into the sky to discuss with the giant what should be done to help everyone on earth.  Soaring 100 feet into the air at a 75-degree angle, this sculpture is one of the artist’s largest and most ambitious works to date.  Seven life-size figures walk briskly up the pole, while three more on the ground watch their ascent.  They are different races, ages, and genders and seem to defy gravity, ascending to new heights under their own compelling tribute to the power of our aspirations and the resilience of the human spirit.”

 

The other sculpture by Borofsky at the Nasher center is entitled Hammering Man, and its blurb mentions that it “signifies both the drudgery and heroism of labor.”  Borofsky himself states, “the Hammering Man is a worker, and I idolize the worker in myself.  At the same time, it seems that the boring, monotonous repetition of the moving arm implies the fate of the mechanistic world.”  The guide goes on to say that Borofsky’s art offers “another commentary on the fate of the individual in the world of modern technology” because the artist signs his works with sequential numbers rather than his signature.

 

Also in the Nasher Sculpture Center’s garden is the best Turrell I have ever experienced.  Turrell’s light installations can be both fun and disorienting, but Tending (Blue) in the Nasher center is calming and uplifting.  To get into the installation, you have to first talk to people working in the gift shop.  They will inform you that you completely missed a set of doors at the end of the garden and that you have to go back out there and confidently open them.  After you do that, you walk through a very short hall/tunnel that has a sort of blue light and emerge into a square room with tan, concrete-looking walls.  There are benches connected to all four walls, and above you there is a flat ceiling with a square cut into it.  Through this square, you look up into the sky, which appears much bluer than normal either because that is the way it has been all day and you haven’t noticed because you’ve had your nose stuck in art or because of the direct comparison you have between the sky and the light-washed walls.  (Apparently the interior of the “skyspace” has lighted walls, but you don’t really notice that while you’re in there.)  Be warned, however.  The guide says that this room is air conditioned “in warmer months”, but apparently this doesn’t hold true for the extremely hot months, like July, when I visited.  It was most certainly not air-conditioned, and Dallas is a muggy, hot city.  I hope they have fixed this problem since I visited.

 

All in all, I would say my Dallas trip was a success.  I got to see major works of art and a major U.S. city, although the majority of my time was spent looking at the art and not at the city.  It is so important to visit museums that are near you when you can because what is on display, both from permanent and visiting collections, is constantly changing.  You never know what you are going to get a chance to see.  Most likely something wonderful. 

 

At the moment I am very sleepy, so the Houston part of my tale will have to wait until next time.  Auf Wiedersehen!