#hirshorn

[pointandshooter]

photos: David Castenson

On Thanksgiving Day I drove into Washington, DC to visit the Hirshhorn Museum. I usually take the train to DC, but with the holiday, trains were infrequent, traffic was light, and parking was free on DC streets. I had not been to the Hirshhorn since the pre-pandemic month of February in 2020. I was pleasantly surprised to find an exhibit of Contemporary Chinese Photography. The photos were amazing. It reminded me that what I do is take pictures, where artists use photography as a means of self-expression. I am looking forward to the exhibition’s catalogue when it is published.

When I left the museum I walked over to the dining area and snapped the top picture I have posted above. I then wandered around the sculpture garden and then over to the National Gallery of Art. I returned to the Hirshhorn about an hour later to buy a chocolate cupcake and a caffè latte. I used to drink lattes daily. Since the pandemic we have been drinking mostly instant coffee or the occasional pour over coffee at home. It was wonderful to sit and enjoy the treat on a pleasant November afternoon. As I sat at the table, I picked up my camera a snapped another photo of the gallery’s courtyard. The bottom photo I posted above is the one I just described.

When I looked at my photos when I got home, I was surprised that the two unedited photos, taken an hour apart, were so similar. Maybe I’ve gotten into a rut on how I compose a photo.

[aureumrose]

a tuesday

[secretglovecompartment]

Thoughts about the design of the Hirshorn Museum (Washington, D.C.)

I get that windows aren't great for museum works so I won't fault the Hirshorn too much for lacking them. In fact, there are many windows on the interior side of the building facing the courtyard. The unadorned exterior is simple; this is better than the chaos of adding too many unconnected pieces, such as in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts . I'm not sure if I'd want it to have some sort of ornamentation on the exterior, as the side facing the National Mall has a balcony, and I can't decide if it fits in with the rest of the building.

Overall, The round, unadorned, shape of the building makes the concrete used seem smooth, which was certainly the goal. Additionally, the legs suspending it off the ground don't give it the appearance of floating, but it prevents it from looking like a huge bollard. I think it is fine as a museum, but that this design only works because none of the surrounding buildings resemble it at all. It also benefits from the presence of nearby green space. (If this was just in the middle of skyscrapers and such, I do not believe that I would like it at all) I'm not a fan of the art in the collection, which may affect my opinion. Ultimately, the plain design is both a strength and weakness as the design, simultaneously tame and bold, allows the building to stand out from other museums on the National Mall. (I think what I am getting at is that the design is kinda dumb, but I don't hate it.)

N.B. I'm not a student of architecture, and I didn't read about these buildings. I only used the wikipedia page to view photos.

[usoferica]

More exhibits from Hirshorn. #Art #artporn #artwork #painting #paintings #multimedia #photography #photographs #yarn #fabric #shells #wood #hirshorn #modernart #museum #artworks #tourist #tourism #washingtondc #dc #dmv (at Hirshorn Museum of Art) https://www.instagram.com/p/ClxDrAZOz3r/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[yz]

YAYOI KUSAMA IN THE HIRSHHORN COLLECTION, Washington, DC.

[felagund-fiollaigean]

GNOMES OF ALL TIME

ID: three gnomes arranged on park benches in a garden. their bodies are made entirely of evergreen boughs, with red and green cone-shaped hats and red mittens where their hands should be. They have no faces except perfectly round noses below their hats. End ID

[concretecrisiscompatible]

06/24/2024

Kodak DC4800

[catherine-white]

Simone Leigh

Cowrie

Terracotta porcelain steel.

Hirshorn museum

[alexcontextualyr2]

Yayoi Kusama- Artist Essay

Yayoi Kusama’s work heavily relates to the theme of bodies and identities. In a lot of her older art, she uses the physical body as part of the performances. In these artworks, Kusama covered the performers in polka dots, which is a theme throughout her career. In her the documentary, ‘Kusama – Infinity’, Kusama decorates herself and mannikins in colourful polka dots. Her physical presence in this performance could relate to how her personal life and experiences are intertwined with her artwork. Her performances and art are largely influenced by her mental health struggles, using her hallucinations of polka dots in her artwork. In an essay by Bree Richards, Kusama’s physical artwork is explored. “The presence of the artist’s body, and an embrace of the performative, however, connect this seminal artist's divergent practice and continue to colour her art today.” (Richards, B). This quote shows how Kusama’s physical presence in her work links her personal life to her creative inspiration. One of her installations, ‘Infinity Mirror Room: Phalli’s Field’ uses parts of the physical body. This installation uses mirrors to reflect a part of the body. Hirshhorn Museum explores this artwork in an article. “The reflective surfaces allowed her vision to transcend the physical limitations of her own productivity.” (Hirshhorn). This explores how Kusama uses mirrors in her artwork to expand her creativity and push her physical limits. This artwork could relate to personal reflection looking into a person’s physical self. The artist is influenced by her own struggles and experiences. Juliet Mitchell explores the background and influence behind Kusama’s artwork in an essay, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Flower’. “Kusama has always put her ability to hallucinate at the centre of what she is trying to depict.” (Mitchell, J). This quote outlines that Kusama’s ability to hallucinate inspires her creative ideas portrayed through her art. Yayoi Kusa ma also explores this idea in her autobiography. She talks about how her dark past and previous troubles inspire her artwork. “wrung from the scars left on my heart during the hopeless darkness of my adolescence, are fundamentally what keep me creating art” (Kusama, Y). This illustrates how an artist’s struggles and traumas can inspire a creative journey and self-expression through art. I think that Yayoi Kusama’s artwork explores an interesting point of using a person’s own experiences to create art.

Bibliography

Mitchell, J (2012), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Flower, Tate

Richards, B, Yayoi Kusama: Performing the Body, Available at: https://play.qagoma.qld.gov.au/looknowseeforever/essays/performing-the-body/ (Accessed 08/10/24)

Kusama, Y (2011), Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, Tate

Hirshorn, Infintiy Mirror Rooms, Available at: https://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/infinity-rooms/ (Accessed 15/08/24)

[white-throated-packrat]

I live in the DC Metro area, so I am used to the Smithsonian and its mission to be "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge".

Which means that even the Smithsonian art museum will give you a poster sized text in every room to explain the history of any art pieces in it, including the art movement the artist was a part of, the art trends they were responding against, the political climate of the place the art was made, and so forth.

So when I go elsewhere and find art museums that barely describe anything to give their art context, I'm disappointed. I know they could do better, because I see how it can be done any time I go to the Hirshorn, the Renwick, or the Portrait Gallery.

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

[pr0cell0us]

Hirshorn Museum, Washington DC USA

[thinkingcloud]

12.31.23. A review of 2023.

January-

Got to Visit the JW Marriot in the Grand Lakes and The Ritz Carlton. TWC 2023 in Orlando,FL

Visited Disney World

Epcot - During the Festival of Arts

Had Drinks and Food at the Space 220 Lounge

Rode Ratatouille Remy’s Adeventure

Rode Rise of the Resistance 2x Once during the day and at night

Had Drinks @ Oga Cantina in Star Wars Area

Had Lobster rolls a bunch of. lobster Rolls

February-

Had Dinner with Kirk @ Genki since Kyle was jet lagged

Got Yelp free Jenis Ice Cream 2/20

Made a box brownies 2/24 for the first time successfully

March

3/5 - birthday Dinner af L hermitage

3/8- Saw the Yayoi kasama exhibit for the second time at the hirshorn

April

Tried Breakfast Ramen by Cup a Noodle

May

5/7- Mother’s Day celebration @ Moon rabbit before it closed in the Warf

Tried Grimace. Birthday meal @ McDonald’s

June

Not much went on

July

7/12 Tried Uyghur food with yelp for the first time

August-

8/13 New kitchen floor since we had a roof leak.

8/21- My world Got Rocked. I had found out someone had been unfaithful for 7 months. After 7 years.

8/22 Tried Joon with Yelp… amazing. Iranian food

8/26- Pan was in town and I had Sushi cho with her and her husband told them about my life change

Sept

Not much mom’s birthday

October

10/7 visited Charlottesville VA. For Pan’s Birthday Weekend

10/13 - Summit 2023 St Louis

Bá Celebrated her 97 Birthday with the whole family

November

Dad’s Birthday

Thanksgiving Dinner Courtesy of Ted’s Bulletin

December

Got Covid… again and missed Christmas and Christmas Eve.

New Years Eve with my Parents with Snowcrab legs

2023 recap

[zahraforeal]

Hello, hello, hello! I want to share my visit to Hirshorn, The National Museum of Modern Art! My visit there was so much fun. I enjoy visuals and having conversations about what I and other people interpret from artwork. I admire digital photography and I feel like I can take away how you can get meaning from one or a series of a photos. I appreciate the art installations because I think those cause me to feel and think the most. Maybe because it’s something that’s basically in the same world that I’m in which makes it different from digital work.

[usoferica]

I have been wanting to see Yayoi Kusama's 'One with Infinity' since it had opened. I had missed the Infinity Rooms when they came last time. Since they were extended this year, I had to see them. They are... Tremendous in such a small area. The other displays were elaborate as well. I really enjoyed the Hirshorn. #Art #artporn #artwork #painting #paintings #multimedia #inifinityrooms #pumpkins #polkadots #yayoikusama #kusama #hirshorn #modernart #museum #artworks #tourist #tourism #washingtondc #dc #dmv (at Hirshorn Museum of Art) https://www.instagram.com/p/Clw_romO6ZI/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[yz]

Eye catching faux baroque art. Hilarious meets art history and technical prowess.

Flora Yukhnovich at the Hirshorn Collection in DC.

From the description:

b. Norwich, England, 1990

Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too (2022)

Oil on linen

Flora Yukhnovich's monumental paintings combine subjeots, themes, and palettes drawn from earlier artistic movements with the dynamic brushwork of postwar American painting.

In Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too, she puts elements of the eighteenth-century Rococo style, characterized by pastel colors and sensual femininity, into conversation with Abstract Expressionism, associated with the swaggering, hypermasculine stance of painters such as Jackson Pollook. The resulting composition hovers between figuration and abstraction, as Yukhnovich's broad, swirling brushwork makes the female nudes all but melt into the surrounding landscape. This fluid, all-over quality, in which landscape and figures slip in and out of focus—also seen in Lee Krasner's Siren, to the right-thwarts conventional objectification of form in favor of a more sensual or even empathetic engagement.

[lilsweett3a]

Visiting a new art exhibit at the Hirshorn museum with my fren. 🖼️

The Hirshorn always has interesting exhibits. This particular one was dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe which is why there is a giant crow. The words written on the walls almost were like spells. We didn’t stay in that room long because it felt a little satanic. My spirit said RUN. But everything else there was cool.

Edgar Allen Poe had some demons for sure.

~Stef ✨