It's the Spring of Museums!

The Spring semester has started and so far I love both of my classes - Museums as Media and Social Media: Content, Community, and Culture.

In my Museums as Media class someone mentioned an exhibit that was as the Museum of the American Indian. There's a blog post on the Smithsonian website that talks about the exhibit and interviews a Native American skateboarder and filmmaker. This video was contained in the blog:

4wheelwarpony from Dustinn Craig on Vimeo.

The first project in my Museums class is to write a paper on a visit to a museum, and so I visited the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art yesterday. The exhibits were all based on a portraiture theme. The works were not in the form of traditional portraits and caused me to consider the many ways that we as humans can be represented in art.




There's an awesome sculpture outside of the MCA.



At the first exhibit I viewed I asked this docent, who was giving a tour, the museum's policy on photography. He told me, "We encourage photography" and that they request that photographers cite the Museum.

The MCA has a great Open Library where artists who have exhibited here can leave items on a shelf for visitors to check out.

Erica and Heather ChanSchatz have created incredible, complex works using a set of symbols that they have created. Each symbol represents an individual who they have worked with in order to "divine the spirit of their subjects".



A.G. Rizzoli rendered beautiful architectural drawings that represent people.


William Stockman's large drawings amazed me not only with their scale but their vagueness. Mike, a docent who I spoke with at the ChanSchatz exhibit, and I had discussed that the viewer may tell more about themselves than the work when they describe an artwork. Mike had said that the drawing below has been described by viewers as a man grabbing for dead fish but he did not see the fish as dead. Rather, Mike saw spawning fish. I love that art provokes a conversation of ideas.


The impression I felt from the drawing below was that the dark lines represented aura. We're not seen for who we are but rather that which surrounds us. Our selves hover above and around us.

One of my favorite parts of the MCA. I've some wonderful memories of visiting the MCA with friends and hanging out in the beanbag chairs discussing the art we just viewed and figuring out what we wanted to do next.

A self-portrait of sorts.