Best Museum Exhibit You've Seen?

Cafe Society
1

I know we’ve had some discussions of museums–how about museum exhibits? I’m talking about special shows and exhibits, not the entire collection. What ones have you see that have been memorable, and why?

In December of 2000 we saw the Art Nouveau exhibit at the National Gallery in DC. It was wonderful. It was very comprehensive, covering numerous media and showing how Art Nouveau had an influence in a variety of coutries. It also had a well-done audio tour to go with it. It was so good we bought the catalog (which has been reviewed as a book in its own right, as it’s VERY comprehensive) and numerous posters which now hang in our living room.

I cannot remember the name of another exhibit that stands out for me, but it was dedicated to modern multimedia art at the Des Moines Art Museum. I’m actually not too keen on the newer “out there” stuff but this was very well done and helped me appreciate the art and the artists a lot. I also really like the museum itself, which has a philosophy of education, so I am sure that colored my approach to the exhibit.

I’m a museum junkie, so I eagerly await your responses.

2

I guess in order they would be…

  1. Van Gogh & the Impressionists/2001/St. Louis Art Museum
    Why? Because it was Vincent Van Gogh (plus a handful of Seurats, Monets and Manets) in St. Louis, MO. Our museum has 3 Van Goghs as part of their permanent collection, but seeing a larger retrospective in person was just knee-weakening.

  2. Georgia O’Keefe/1987/National Gallery of Art/Wash., DC
    I’d been in DC for a full week for a seminar that lasted each day during the entire operating time of the Gallery, so I never got to see the exhibit. On the day I was flying home, I took a cab to the airport and, on the way, paid the cabbie to keep his meter running while I ran into the Gallery and saw the entire exhibit in something like 10 minutes flat. It was a frickin’ shame not to be able to fully soak in it, but at least I DID get to see it.

  3. The National D-Day Museum/Monday, Sept. 10, 2001/New Orleans
    I don’t know if this fits the criteria of the OP, but it’s just a very well done exhibition that gives you the entire sense of the scope and history of WWII. I’m not a flag-waver in ANY sense of the word, but my father fought in the Phillipines in WWII and this exhibition put a lump in my throat more than a few times. Glad they’re adding the Pacific Theater of Operations to it. The next morning, I was due to fly back home but instead spent the next 3 days sitting in Big Easy bars watching the horrors unfold on CNN and drinking myself numb.

There are many others worth mentioning, but these are the 3 that are most vivid in my mind at the moment.

3

I forget the exact name, but it was a selection of the Royal Collection from London, it was showing at the Royal Ontaio Museum while I was on a business trip there back around 97 or 98.

It had a volume of Michelangelo’s Codex, the leaf that was made to cover David’s doodle when it was on display in London, rare Dickens prints, Paintints and a mirror made by Donatello, and many other fascinating items. I bought a huge guidebook on it.

4

At the Rose museum in New York City, there’s the outstanding exhibit on space stuff. Way cool.

-Soup

5

As I’m a science geek, most of my favorite exhibits are at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

The best out of all of them, though, has to be the big display of the various types of energy. It’s a big machine with pool balls. They’re lifted to the top of a course, and on the way down, different forms of energy are created/explained. It’s…hypnotic.

The bigass model train in the same museum is damned close, though.

6

Living between DC and Baltimore, I have 2.79 Bazillion museums within 45 minutes at my disposal (even the Air and Space Museum!!). I’m very fortunate.

Perhaps the “best” exhibit was the King Tut exhibit, but I was incredibly young (maybe 10?) and don’t recall much except that there was a lot of gold.

I recently had the opportunity to see the largest collection of Emperor Yin Zheng’s Terra Cotta army outside of China (Yin Zheng was the First Emperor and pretty much succeded at unifying China). It was at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. It was absolutely fantastic. The displays were superb and I even did the tape recorded walking tour. (I usually forego them so I can take in the pieces a bit more… I dunno, naturally?) All of the treasures were amazing.

7

What bums me is that you probably got a more in-depth experience with the crackerjack curating at the Walters than I did viewing the terra-cotta army * in situ* at Xi’an, where the Chinese had very little information or historical context displays for English-speakers.

The best museum exhibits I’ve seen:

  1. The Paul Klee retrospective at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the summer of 1987

  2. The Art Nouveau exhibit at the National Gallery in DC

  3. Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, also at the National Gallery

  4. Pretty much everything at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, from Shang bronzes to Qing ceramics. It’s one of the few museums I visited in Asia which had insightful and detailed information posted in English.

  5. The Alexander Calder display I saw at the Tate Gallery

8

First, this thread made me realize how few exhibit titles I can actually remember, which is unsettling, because I feel like I spend a lot of time mocking them (you know, how the trend recently is to name everything “Artist Colon Something Vague”).

The absolute best was an exhibit of altars (I don’t want to call them voodoo altars, because it’s much more complex than that, but that gives a general idea of what I’m talking about) at the Museum for African Art in New York. The installation started with a traditional Yoruba altar from Nigeria, and then sort of followed the geographic slave trade routes and showed altars from Haiti, South Carolina, New Orleans, Martinique, etc. I was extremely impressed with this show because it A. was presented in a way that kept the spiritual tone of the pieces intact, and B. communicated a lot of factual information about the religion, history, culture, and current practices associated with the altars.

Second place is a Cezanne exhibit that I saw at d’Orsay in the mid-90s. I want to say it was called something like “Cezanne: Painter of Light” but I’m sure that couldn’t possibly be true. This show was very memorable because I went into it being rather ho-hum on the issue of Cezanne, and so I was overwhelmed by seeing his work in person. As I recall, this was the first major showing of some of his work after a deep cleaning and restoration. It was also memorable because I realized that Parisians think nothing of crowding hundreds of people into a small, hot room to gaze at fine art. I couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or impressed that a Cezanne show would draw such crowds.

Runners Up
An exhibit called something like … rats, I don’t know WHAT it was called but the basic gist was that it featured Greek art from the Golden Age of Athens and the word “democracy” was in the title of it somewhere. It was at the Met.

An exhibit of crime photography from about 1860 - 1930. This was really gruesome, but gruesomely cool, in a way. It was very chilling and haunting, and I now regret not buying the book. I almost always regret not buying the book, so I should learn just to fork over the cash for the damn overpriced book.

9

These are the first three that popped into my mind. In chronological order:

Albert Pinkham Ryder; The Brooklyn Museum, 1990. I grew up with Ryder’s most famous painting, “The Race Track,” which is owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art. Seeing a lot of his stuff in one place was wild. Ryder (1847-1917) was called America’s last great Romantic and first modern expressionist…his nocturnal marines and idyllic landscapes are spooky and dreamy at the same time. And “Jonah” is just plain weird, in the best possible way.

The Victorians: British Painting 1837-1901; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1997. This was a treasure trove of Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists, and just plain ol’ 19th century storytelling art. Millais’ “Isabella” and “Ophelia,” Hunt’s “Awakening Conscience” and “Lady of Shalott,” Wallis’ “Death of Chatterton,” Brown’s “Work,” Dadd’s “Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke,” Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix,” Sargent’s “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,” Leighton’s “Flaming June.” And that’s just a TASTE of what was hauled overseas for the show. Better than a trip to the Tate in London.

Celebrity Caricature in America; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, 1998. For huge fun, this one was hard to beat. They had Will Cotton’s famous 1929 portrayal of the Algonquin Round Tablers, “The Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club,” for starters, and a number of Miguel Covarrubias’ hilarious celebrity juxtapositions, particularly “Sally Rand and Martha Graham,” from a 1934 Vanity Fair. The show ended up with Hollywood caricatures from the 30s and 40s, and a small theater just off the gallery floor was running old Warner Bros. animated shorts like “The Coo Coo Nut Grove” and “Hollywood Steps Out” in a continuous loop.

10

The best museum exhibit that I didn’t see: the Star Trek exhibit at the National Air & Space Museum in DC.

Ones I liked that I did see: the rainforest exhibit on the top floor of the National Aquarium in Baltimore and the rainforest/live butterfly exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. I had a camera with me in Houston but wasn’t aware my film was no good. :mad:

11

The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia was by far the most disturbing museum I’ve evr been to. It’s a collection of medical curiosities. Wax displays with various ailments throughout time line the walls. The remains of the Soap Lady lay in a glass case. A myriad of jars containing misshapen fetus’(feti?), from siamese twins, to kids born with multiple limbs or none at all. The two headed baby was the worst. There is a skeleton of a giant and a midget prostitiute, an 8 ft. colon, skulls and bones with various bullets in them and my personal favorite, the eye injury chart. This wonderful display had various eye maladies and injuries shown on life like models. All in all, a disturbing experiance, but one I will never forget, no matter how hard I try.

The Philadelphia Art Museum is one of my favorite Sunday spots. I don’t really dif the modern or impressionist stuff, but the medievil religious paintings and sculpture is downright creepy sometimes. I find myself drawn to Christ images, though religion plays no part in my life. I often spend hours sitting in a re-creation of a Roman villa, relaxed by the fountain. Art museums are the most comforting places.

12

(polishing my fingernails on my vest)

Yeah? You liked that one, huh? :smiley:

13

Ooh! Ooh! delphica reminded me. At the same time as that Art Nouveau exhibit, the National Archives had this fantastic show of American photography. The theme (and believe me, I never remember exhibit titles either) was, I think, images of the American people. Some were famous, some were just common folk in various settings. The photos spanned decades. Some of the images were absolutely arresting and I went back and forth looking at them (they were all displayed down a long curving hall).

You’d think I could remember more details. Well, if only that were the case.

14

I saw the Tut exhibit when it was in New Orleans way back when and it was very well done.

But my favorite was the Ramses exhibit when it was in Dallas. I was there for hours.

15

Um…I don’t know whether this qualifies or not but head over to the House On the Rock in Wisconsin(it’s the kind of museum the Clampetts would go to). There among other things you won’t find anywhere on Earth is a sculpture of a whale battling a squid that has to be seen to believed(it fills the space of a basketball court).

16

Quoth Jeff Olsen:

If it’s the same one that came to the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, then you didn’t miss much. They had a lot of props, but the presentation was lousy.

I don’t know about best, but the most memorable museum exibit I’ve seen was one of those animatronic dinosaur exhibits, at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. I was volunteering for the Museum at the time, and guess who got to re-fill the drool bucket for the salivating allosaurus?

17

Got to be the Jürgen Klauke exhibit at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der BRD in Bonn, Germany, that I saw last June. Klauke is an absolutely amazing photographer: images filled with banality and isolation mixed in with BDSM and sex toys (Jarbaby would’ve had a field day!). Yummy.

Other honorable mentions have to be the Rustkammer in the Zwinger Palace in Dresden (swords! armor! more swords! fancy guns!), the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, which is the only museum I’ve been to where I liked EVERYTHING I saw there, and the Stadtmuseum in Weimar: they have neat displays that are a “window” into typical German life at a particluar period during the past 200 or so years. The Nazi-era exhibit was particularly interesting, with old copies of “Der Stürmer” on the table and a portrait of Hitler on the wall. Creepy…

18

A couple of my favorite regular exhibits at MSI have been gone for years.

One was “Mathematica” produced by IBM. Pre-computer. Elegant, not flashy. It had[ul][li]a huge wall chart of mathematics and math-related things like architecture.[]A large Moebius strip with an electric car that ran on a track around the strip’s one side.[]A little room with “mathematical peepshows”, entertaining short animated films by Ray and Charles Eames.[]You know those funnel-type things that you roll a coin into and it takes forever to drop to the middle? This exhibit had the first version of that that I saw, enclosed in a glass dome, with steel balls fed by pressing a button.[]That thing with the pegs and balls that demonstrates a binomial distribution.[/ul]Mathematica was replaced in the early days of the PC by a dull IBM PC exhibit. [/li]
When I visited the LA County Museum some time in the 1980s, they had Mathematica there. It was great to see it again.

The other MSI exhibit was “The Electric Theater”. It was on the west end of the museum. You sat in a small darkened theater while the demonstrator did things like shine ultraviolet light on the audience so you could see how weird everybody looked. Other things:[ul][]A machine which actually levitated a round aluminum tray placed on top of it using magnetic fields and eddy currents generated in the tray.[]An early microwave machine the size of a refrigerator. The demonstrator had an ear of popping corn on a stick. He held it near the front of the machine and the corn popped on the ear. He would also show how fluorescent lights glowed near the machine. There was a fairly sharp boundary where the glow disappeared from one end of a tube, so with his hand at that boundary he would move the tube through his hand and pretend to wipe the glow from the tube and put it in his pocket.[]Popping a balloon in front of a phosphorescent screen and using an electric eye to trigger a flash so the partially popped balloon left an eerie shadow.[]The first time I had ever seen a strobe light and how it could magically stop the motion of spinning fan blades.[/ul]Great stuff for a kid (or even an adult).

19

Oh, hell yeah. Did you really put that together? Sweet.

20

Oh my. This is one of my favorite things, and it’s hard to put them together in my mind.

China: 7,000 Years of Discovery, a massive exhibit that toured the U.S. in the mid-80s as one of the first big cultural exchanges with the PRC. Its first stop was at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, where my family was living at the time. Took over pretty much the entire PSC, as I recall, which impressed the hell out of me because it’s a several-building complex. (And the city repainted the monorails to look like dragons. ) But the susbstance still lingers: the ornate, early seismometer, shaped something like a huge samovar. At each compass point, a dragon held a ball in its mouth; upon the occurrence of an earthquake, the ball would drop into the open frog’s mouth below. It was credited with saving many lives by allowing imperial rescuers to know what line to travel in. Also huge, ornate, detailed maps, with sophisticated surveying instruments; enormously elaborate medical tools; advanced astronomical surveys. It was overwhelming.

Mondrian, at MOMA (New York), mid-90s. Mondrian is so easy to parody and even easier to misunderstand. The key is to have a lot of his work in one place at one time, arranged chronologically so you see how he distilled his art further and further, and then built it up again until his riotous last work, Broadway Boogie-Woogie. One brilliant stroke was the curators’ decision to play jazz throughout, since so much of what Mondrian was doing in his later years amounted to syncopating his art - playing intuitively with where the lines and boxes would appear, in variations similar to the contemporary jazz he listened to. The result, for me, was an AHA! in which I finally “got” him.

I actually returned at least twice - the second time, because MOMA had arranged to overlap briefly the Mondrian exhibit with a small, well-chosen Brancusi show. Viewing the two together made for an incredible experience, since it showed how each artist sought to express similar ideas through different media. Stunning.

Andreas Gursky, also at MOMA. Massive, meticulously composed, supersaturated phographs. Made me tingle. For a sample, take a look at this, only be sure to blow it up - and then imagine it at 11 feet wide by almost 7 feet tall. Jaw-droppingly intense.

Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, now touring. (It’s now at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and will move on to the High Museum-Atlanta in June and the MOFA-Houston in October.) I missed it in DC but managed to catch the last weekend at the Whitney in New York - what an amazing thing. Lawrence, who died about two years ago, was recognized early on as a prodigious talent. His most famous early work, 60 paintings on wood collectively entitled “The Migration of the Negro,” so enthralled the world that Fortune Magazine ran 26 of them in one issue, and two collectors fought over it, finally coming to a resolution in which one purchased the even-numbered paintings and the other the odd. The even-numbered immediately went to MOMA and the odd to the Phillips Collection, Washington. This show is the first time the entire series has toured, in addition to about 150 other works.

New Yorkers can also see Lawrence’s last public commission: “New York in Transit,” a 36-foot-wide glass mosaic recently dedicated at the Times Square subway station. It’s above the staircase leading down to the the N/R track from the Grand Central shuttle.