My best museum visit this year was to the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Huge collection of both Charles Russel and the aforementioned Remington. Great museum and it’s totally free.
I saw two great museums this year:
The first was the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS. Out in the middle of nowhere. We went to the National Air and Space museum at the Smithsonian a few months later, and the Cosmosphere knocked its socks off. I couldn’t believe their huge display of space gear. It also had a fantastic walk-through timeline of the space-race, from Nazi Germany through to Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. Fantastic. If you ever find yourself in the middle of Kansas with nothing to do, go to the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson:)
In October, we visited the Holocaust museum. I did not want to go, but my bf did. I learned a lot…and I figured I’d been so inundated by Holocaust facts I had nothing more to learn. A lot of eye-opening info about the rise of anti-semitism in Europe before WWII, and also about the birth of modern Israel after WWII. It was a downer, but I think I came out more knowledgeable, and perhaps a little more sympathetic to the trials of Israel.
The American Museum of Natural History at the New York MegaDopefest. Great museum, great company. Geobabe told us all about rocks, saw fabulous dinosaurs, and they had a fossilized coelacanth.
That was my favorite this year, but I also had an excellent time with the Dopers at the Field Museum at ChiDope. And there’s something to be said for visiting museums alone; I had a very enjoyable solitary visit to the Art Institute of Chicago this summer, too. I loved the Chagall windows in particular.
I’m something of a museum junkie so I won’t go into trips prior to 2003, I’d never shut up.
My favorite this year was my trip to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. There’s nothing like neon cow wallpaper (or watching your mom play with silver balloons) to really brighten your day.
Being less a fan of Warhol’s art and more interested in him as a person and the crowd surrounding him, I loved all of the personal information displayed. Fascinating stuff.
Two stood out this year.
The Brooklyn Museum had a special show of Pulp Art that was pretty cool.
The Museum of Natural History had an exhibit with artifacts from the lost city of Petra. (you may recall it as the city in Indy Jones and the Last Crusade when the Holy Grail rests) It was really stunning to see.
The coolest museum ever, hands-down, is the Lejre Reseach Center in Denmark. Left Hand of Dorkness and I went there on our honeymoon this summer. It’s this amazing outdoor preserve where they research and recreate life in Iron Age Scandinavia. They’ve built houses and grown crops using methods over a thousand years old. You can try making bread as they would have, starting fire with sticks or paddling a canoe-type boat on a little lake. They’ve even created a sacrificial bog–the Danish pre-Christian equivalent of a church–complete with horse skeletons. Very, very cool.
I’m going to get a job there as an English interpreter. As soon as I learn Danish. And get a visa. Yeah. Yeah.
Tragically, the Leprosy Museum in Bergen was closed when we tried to visit or I might have been able to report on that one as well.
There’s a leprosy museum!? The world is a strange and marvelous place…
I went to the Picasso exhibit which is still at the National Gallery. It’s just 60 or so pieces, all of Picasso’s lover/muse/victim, all in more or less the same pose, and you can see him inventing Cubism right in front of you, as the model slowly disintigrates. Fascinating.
Oh gosh, I forgot that my visit to the Museum of Natural History was this year. It was way back in January. That was awesome. We saw DINOSAURS! Tyrannosaurs were a little smaller than I thought, but the Triceratops and the duck-billed thing whose name I’ve forgotten were both way bigger than I’d pictured them. I was a dinosaur nut as a kid, so that was absolutely terrific.
Anybody been to the Museum of Jurassic Technology lately?
For me it was avisit to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. A great collection of art from the 12th. to the 20th. centuary which is on a scale that can be appreciated in an afternoon.Just as somebody has already remarked about the Musée D’orsey this museum is on a scale that you are not overwhelmed by the size of the collection or building.
It’s not strictly a museum, but I loved The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach. I visited with OxyMoron and his bf when they came down to visit. Highly recommended.
The Bishop Museum in Honolulu, if only for the bisected Sperm Whale that hangs from the ceiling.
The Range Rider Museum in Miles City Montana–9 buildings full of western artifacts, everything from guns and tools to buffalo skulls with bullets still lodged in them.
The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument okay, I’m not sure this place qualifies as a museum, but after seeing “About Schmidt”, I had to stop and check it out. Highly recommended!
Another I have just thought of which is not strictly a museum but is still worth seeing. This is the cathedral in Toledo , Spain. In the fairly small Sacristy the guide casually announced to us that there were over a dozen El Grecos plus the odd Titian ,Van Dyck and Goya. So much fine art in such a small space.
The California State Railroad Museum is great if you like that kind of thing. 100+ year-old locomotives and passenger cars that look like they just arrived from the factory. I attended a symposium there in August that included a presentation on the construction of an 1870’s freight car.
Do I know how to have fun, or what?
Just thought of another one. The Ellis Island Immigration Museum. Fascinating, very moving, huge collection of artifacts, and an incredible use of the space.
One of the very best shows I saw this year was the Gerhardt Richter retrospective, which I saw at the San Francisco MOMA over Thanksgiving last year and again at the National Gallery in Washington DC earlier this year. Richter is a German painter and one of the great artists of our time.
Anyone who’s in the New York City area really needs to go see the James Rosenquist retrospective, which is at the Guggenheim Museum right now. They are showing his painting F-111 for the first time in many years, this is an extremely important American painting and one that is absolutely enormous in size. At the Guggenheim they have recreated the gallery space where the painting was first shown in the 60s; its panels wrap around all four walls.