Being a photographer affords me one of my greatest joys: looking back at photos to relive the the journeys I've taken. I thought I'd share a few of my favorite art-filled moments from this summer. In June I was fortunate to travel to Ann Arbor and Detroit Michigan. Despite what you've heard about Detroit, it is actually a city trying very hard to rebound and re-invent itself. The arts have been at the forefront of this rebirth.
During my stay I went to a Detroit Tigers game and although that doesn't directly have anything to do with art, it was an art-filled experience as the stadium is rich in historical sculptures, photographs and architecture that celebrates the storied Detroit Tigers franchise. While in Detroit I also visited the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) and specifically the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibit that was there in June. It was an awe-inspiring exhibit that took the visitor through the artists experiences during the months they lived in Detroit while Diego was designing and creating the now famous Rivera Court murals at DIA. The exhibit included a glimpse into the personal sketchbooks of both Frida and Diego. It showed how Diego was this a major established artist with a well-developed voice, while Frida was just coming into her own and discovering who she was both artistically and as a woman. In addition to being in Detroit
I also stayed in Ann Arbor, the home of the University of Michigan campus. Ann Arbor is a fantastically creative city with so many wonderful old buildings, an ever-evolving graffiti alley, numerous galleries and much more. This trip we decided to see a movie in the Michigan Theatre, a grand old place that opened in 1928. It includes many of the original items including a pipe organ that rises up out of the floor in the at the front stage of the theatre and a beautiful gold plated drinking fountain. They usually show artsy movies, which I love! We saw A Little Chaos, which was about a garden designer in the 1600s, beautiful movie!
In July I traveled to Massachusetts and New York. While in MA I got to visit Concord, Boston, Plymouth. In New York I visited the town near Albany, called Troy. I saw so many wonderful things while there. The two standouts would have to be touring Fenway Park and going to a Boston Red Sox game and visiting the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. I am a huge baseball fan and the Red Sox have been my favorite team along with the Brewers so finally getting to see Fenway and a game there was a life long dream come true. The ambience of the park and surrounding neighborhood was all I'd imagined, but my most favorite were the stories and the people I got to interact with at the game. So many characters!! I shot a lot of photos of total strangers because they were really enjoyable. At the MFA I saw the work of Katsushika Hokusai the Japanese illustrator and printmaker, John Singer Sargent's drawings and paintings and the amazing Impressionist collection, featuring Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt. I also greatly enjoyed the contemporary wing of the MFA including the Herb Ritts photography exhibit. It was a richly diverse museum that I could have spent a whole week exploring.
My last stop for the summer was Minneapolis. I visit there often and always marvel at the fantastic amount of art to be seen and experienced throughout the Twin Cities. No matter how long I visit it is never enough time! This trip I was helping my daughter move so there wasn't a lot of time to play, but I did squeeze in a visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Art to see the Leonardo da Vinci Codex of Leicester exhibit. Anytime one has the opportunity to visit with Leonardo it's a great thing. This exhibit was especially inspiring because it explored some of the sketchbook pages where da Vinci developed many of his theories and ideas for inventions, philosophies and more. It felt as if you were inside his mind a bit. It was incredible to see the vast curiosity of da Vinci. The exhibit truly illustrated the creative process of design thinking and problem solving. One of my favorite aspects of the exhibit was the inclusion of modern day designers and their inventions and sketches. It showed how far ahead of the times Leonardo really was. I also loved the surprise at the end of the exhibit when they connected his works in mathematics and nature studies to the works of The Institute for Figuring. This last part of the exhibit was a wonderful, weird surprise with gigantic crochet sculptures depicting The Coral Reef. Many of these were crocheted with unusual recycled materials including garbage, video tape and more. The connections to math, nature, physics and more was mind boggling. It was stupendous exhibit!