Senior Citizens Day Out

The CoG and I have decided to have an outing one day each week.  So, last week we went to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.  It was a great day.  I really love contemporary art. I think what I love is that good contemporary art somehow bypasses my logical thinking brain and connects with my illogical, feeling, creative brain.  When I leave a good museum or exhibition, my head just feels like it's bursting with ideas and nothing in the world looks quite the same as it did.

Plus, we had lunch out and I always enjoy that.

 I have some random images for you from the day.

My favorite work from the museum: Hanging Fire (suspected arson) by Cornelia Parker.  This is constructed of salvaged bits of wood/charcoal from a suspicious fire in a woodshop.  The black bits are pieces of charcoal suspended on black string.  What you can't see is the wonderful way it moves with the air currents in the room.

Here is another little vignette I snapped: I like things that make me laugh, while having a serious message.  This was from the Guerilla Girls - an anonymous feminist collective which protests gender and racial inequality in the arts.  They appear in public wearing Gorilla masks. If you can't read it, click and it should expand. 

Those are the only pieces of art I took pictures of.  But the museum itself is wonderful. It's built of glass on a pier in Boston Harbor, so the reflection of the light off the water into the building is fantastic.  And the way the windows frame vignettes on the water is almost art, itself.  That's the CoG & camera, of course.

Here's a Panorama:

There was a wonderful media lab - don't know what else to call it - lots of computers with videos of artist talking about exhibits in the museum or their art etc. It was an amazing room.  It kind of juts at a  stair-stepped downward angle from the building,  like a movie theatre. But instead of a screen, there's a huge window facing the water.  This doesn't reall capture the downward angle of the room. It was dizzyingly awesome.

As I said, once I leave a wonderful museum of contemporary art, everything looks different. Here are a few things that caught my eye:

This is from the sidewalk outside the museum. It's not art, but I like it:

The T stop for the museum is the Courthouse. I'm sorry I was too slow to get the woman walking toward me here. She was wearing a face mask because it was very very cold.  I took the picture anyway. I said that the world looks different to me, after spending time with good contemporary art.  A lot of the art was about war and civil unrest, so this vignette had a new resonance for me.

Finally, this rude but amusing grafitto from the toilet by the T.