Let There Be Art!

Note: This post may break the record for most pictures ever, but there were so many amazing ones and so many more that I didn't include!

One of my absolute favorite field trips as a kid was to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.  We went every few years, and we went there as a family once or twice, too.  I just loved it every single time.  I think I liked the sculptures better, or maybe paintings that had content that somehow resonated with me (like the Warhol Campbell's Soup cans or almost anything recognizably modern), but I just found it to be such a cool place.  When I was 19, I went there over Thanksgiving break with my extended family to see some exhibit from this glass artist I'd never heard of...hahaha.  Clearly that Chihuly exhibit was life-changing on its own, but I had also been in an art history class that semester, and the gallery included SO many works of art from artists I had learned about.  I was a total dork running around and correctly guessing artists by sight and style, and it just solidified everything I had been learning.  Back in 2014 I was able to go back again for the first time in years--this time to an exhibit specifically featuring most of the classics I remembered as a child--and once again, it reinforced how much I loved it there.

Fast-forward a few years and it was announced that the museum would be closing for a few years because a donor had stepped forward and they would be building a new wing, doing some other renovations, and renaming the whole museum to include this new donor.  I was a little sad that it would be off-limits for a while, especially since I had fallen in love with the Memorial Art Gallery here in Rochester in the meantime, but I was super excited for it to reopen better than ever!  The Buffalo AKG Art Museum reopened earlier this summer, but then a few more tweaks were needed so the new stuff closed again for a bit and I decided to wait longer until everything was in the clear.  However, I knew I needed to go soon because one of the big things that I had to see, the Mirrored Room, would be leaving again in January.  It turned out that our art gallery here had a different sort of mirrored room coming in and I was excited to take Carter to see that.  But what's the fun in seeing one if we couldn't see the original, so that meant I had to get Carter to Buffalo to see that one before it left!

After our bazaar morning last Saturday, we grabbed a quick lunch (Anderson's--yum!) and headed to the museum.  Everything is different now and it took me a second to figure out where the parking was.  It's underground where the old surface lot used to be...and turned out to be super expensive because I didn't see when we were there that I needed some special QR code to get the visitor rate (ugh).  You enter from a sort of hidden entrance in a circle in front of the gallery, and you come upstairs from the garage into the new building.  This was the mural on the way up.  It was sort of like carpet.  But it looked really cool--almost like it was in motion!

The new building has this crazy spiral staircase.  It was rather dramatic.

From upstairs we had a look over the lawn where the parking lot used to be and what's on top of the garage now.  There was something happening out there, and it turned out I guessed right from a distance--people were recreating works of art!  More on that later, but that's a cool public space.  

The new wing reminded me a bit of the newer wing on the Corning Museum of Glass--all white, big windows, dramatic modern art.  This piece was made out of wood.  It was interesting, but the more interesting part was seeing it from a little window above.  More on that later, too.

There was a winding elevated walkway from the new wing to the old wing and it had mirrored glass on the outside.  When we walked past it in the new wing, we could see ourselves across the way!

The new wing was full of very interesting modern art.  A lot of it seemed to represent a diverse set of cultures and races, which is probably much needed since a lot of classic art in the older part of the museum is pretty darn white and male.  I can't say all of it was up my alley, but it was really interesting.  

This painting of Niagara Falls was really cool.  The frame is made of copper pipe and faucets.  If you zoom in you'll see a bunch of chemistry stuff overlaid on the falls--element abbreviations, molecule diagrams--that represent the chemicals in the water in Niagara Falls.  It was inspired by the creepy foam that's always at the base of the falls that the artist saw when he rode the Maid of the Mist and did some research.  Great painting, though, especially because we were just down the river from there the previous day.

This piece was interesting.  It was a like a big piece of rock on the sides but a bit more formed with the giant eyes on the front.  

If you look in the background of that picture, there's something that looks like a white block on the floor.  It's actually a pile of paper.  Each sheet has two circles on it, and is considered to be infinite.  People are encouraged to take a piece for themselves, to the point they even have rubber bands in a box on the wall.  We grabbed one on our way out and I haven't figured out what we do with it yet.  Add it to Carter's art wall?

Carter really liked this one for some reason.  It was inspired by the HIV epidemic and featured images of birds in different positions.  I should have taken a pic of the description, but this really doesn't do it justice.  It was large and very striking in person.

This one was far from my favorite, but it was definitely one of the most bizarre of the day.  I had to take video to truly capture its full strangeness.  You can't really hear it, but it was talking.

This one sort of cracked me up.  It featured images of Monet's house that were colored and bedazzled.  Hard to tell but half of it was sparkly!

This is one I'd love to have in my super modern house of my dreams.  Hard to capture it, but it was a giant, sparkly red bowl mounted to the wall.  You can see how it refracted the image of us and the gallery behind us.  It was so pretty and shiny!

This was in the hallway and I just loved it.  The subtle blue lights looked so peaceful and pretty against the white, and the fall colors outside made the view even prettier.

This was a giant tire!

This is the view of that giant wood piece from above.  It's a big 3-D version of a random woman's handwriting.  We're still not sure what it says, but it's pretty amazing how it was built up like that.  There was a perfect little glass window box popped out of the third floor wall to overlook it.  

This might have been my favorite new piece of the day.  I have lots of old favorites, of course, but I had never seen this one before and it was so lovely and so striking.  The blues were so soft and peaceful.  It was done with pastels, which I always had such a hard time using, but the lines were perfect and the colors bold.  Someone else was standing there obsessed with it, too.  I wish I could find a print of it, but no luck yet.  Note to self: The artist is Nicolas Party and the name is Landscape (2019).

I was intrigued to see this one, for reasons you'll see in a bit.  This one was about being vocal, and the outfits were made out of thousands of buttons and had these megaphone-type heads.  Quite the centerpiece of the room.

This painting was in another room, and suddenly I was like, wait, I remember this one.  There was another one across the way that was equally familiar, and I realized that these were on special exhibit the last time I was there.  They were huge and use a ton of thick paint.  I didn't really like them all that much the first time--although a couple of them then were pretty dreary so that's probably not surprising.  But this time I actually really liked this one.   

Here's a close view of the paint.  It had to take forever to dry!

This was the dramatic walkway above one of the galleries.  We actually missed it at first because it was on the first floor where we came in but in the opposite direction of the stairway.  These paintings were very colorful...except for the one you can only see a corner of in the bottom right--that one literally had two or three small spots of paint along the edges and endlessly confused Carter.  He said, "How is that art?" many times as we walked.  Sometimes he was right.

The adjacent gallery had a ton of giant canvases across four rooms from an artist whose work I vaguely remember seeing there as a kid, who gifted his collection to the gallery years ago.  I couldn't capture them all individually, so I took panoramas of the rooms like this.

At this point we were done with the new building and we decided to head outside.  It wasn't raining, at least, but it was a solid 15 degrees colder than the previous day.  We left our coats in the car so it was a little cool, but pretty tolerable.  As I mentioned, there were a bunch of displays featuring groups recreating works of art.  Many did works that were at this museum, but imagine my delight that my hometown's intermediate school did a Chihuly!  They used the pool noodle technique I've seen used for Halloween costumes, and it was so cute!  It's supposed to be one of the boats like most of his exhibits have.  This one was from Chihuly at Cheekwood in Tennessee.  I don't know if this page will stay live, but for now, if you scroll down on the page you'll see what this one was based on.  It was so cute!

The other favorite from this event was the recreation of the megaphone people!  We had seen them from afar, and suddenly it made sense when we saw the real piece!  I give this group credit for standing there in these crazy costumes, heads hidden and bodies attached to one another, for hours on end!

They did a great job.  We caught a couple of the groups taking a break and getting snacks, but they were all really fun and creative interpretations.  

This was a view of the new building from outside.  If you zoom in there's another artwork in front of it, based on a wacky, almost surrealist mural somewhere on a wall in Buffalo.  

Back inside we walked through the elevated walkway to the original building.

There's a crazy head sculpture just outside it (you can see it in my 2014 post).  I have a picture I took at the end of the visit of the front of it, but I really liked this shot from behind that was taken from one of the gallery rooms.

I think it was that room started the official path to some of the most famous paintings in the building.  The beloved Jackson Pollack, one from Piet Mondrian, and of course, this one...

This Warhol was extra cool after seeing the MAG exhibit a couple years ago.  It was always a field trip favorite, even if I never really understood why anyone would paint their soup cans!  

This sculpture hall was very striking, and I absolutely adored the colorful painting on the far wall.  I'm pretty sure the one in the foreground used to creep me out when I was a kid.

Kahlo, Dalí, Miró, Monet, Picasso (before and during his Cubist era), Seurat, Degas, Gauguin, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec...just name after name after name.  Oh, and it's far from my favorite, but at least they have this one from my favorite, Rene Magritte...

I'd have preferred blue sky and clouds, but...

I learned about pointillism in my art class and I always liked Seurat, but for some reason the detail on this one was so striking to me.  

I think I've mentioned before that Gauguin holds a special place in my family history for being told by my mom's cultured boss that we needed to visit the Gauguin exhibit at the art gallery in Washington DC when we went there when I was a kid.  It definitely wasn't our thing, but it was an interesting experience for a few reasons.  I vaguely remember us being excited about the Yellow Christ because it was an Albright-Knox piece, and here it is...

There were so many amazing pieces.  It was hard to give them all the time they deserved and explain their significance to Carter, but I tried.  I was extra thrilled when we came across this painting:

It's called The Marvelous Sauce, and it was my dad's favorite dating back to one of those aforementioned family visits when I was a kid.  It truly is amazing.  The colors are so bright and bold and the detail is so crisp and amazing.  It's so incredibly close to photograph quality.  It's stunning.  And it turns out it's the favorite of an old friend of mine, too, who asked if we saw it.  I bought a magnet of it for my dad the last time I was there to give him for Christmas, and it is still proudly displayed on their fridge.

We couldn't help but take a picture of Carter with this work, for obvious reasons...
 

There was gallery after gallery of amazing art, and eventually we had covered all of the rooms in the original building.  We walked down the stairs at one end of the building to go down to the last part of the gallery.  What used to be a hallway near an outside courtyard is now part of an amazing indoor space.  I'll show a better pic of this in a bit, but this is a reflection of us in the ceiling of the former courtyard space.

At one side of the courtyard was this amazing children's area.  It had a bunch of Legos to build with and all sort of other artistic activities.  I liked these funky triangle mirrors on the wall.

These plants appeared to go on forever with mirrors.

There were giant building blocks and we managed to build this guy!

They also had video screens to draw separately but together, as well as these neat kaleidoscope things where you could change out pictures at one end (generally a bunch of the museum works) and look at it through a tube of mirrors.  It was such a fun space, way cooler than anything they had for kids when I was little!  I still loved art anyway, but it was fun.  

After that we went outside because there's a bunch of cool sculptures outside.  Most I had seen, but some I had not.  I loved this one last time and took delight in using my then-brand-new camera's zoom to capture the mosaics.  This time I liked the fall tree in the background.

This one is so jarring and strange but it is quite the view with the grand museum entrance in the background.

You gotta love the canoes.

This was a new one to me.  It was a giant concrete room with colored windows.  There were some art books on the window sill, so my silly kid apparently decided to make some art himself.

This is what the side window looked like, with different colors on different sides.  

Back inside, we went to the pièce de résistance...the Mirrored Room!  It was the highlight of every field trip.  We'd take off our shoes, get one walk around, and come back out--but it was still the best thing ever.  When I was there in 2014, we were lucky enough for it to be on exhibit, but Heather and I were both wearing sandals and you can't go in in bare feet.  We didn't feel like buying pricey socks in the store just to walk in, so we looked from the entrance.  This time, because it's a special exhibit, there were socks to use, but I obviously came prepared--as if the weather didn't already make that decision for me.  We had to be relatively quick, but we did our best to figure out how to take photos.  It just never does it justice!

I should add it was really hard to take good pictures because they make you put your phone on a rubber lanyard that hangs on your neck so there's less risk of you dropping your phone and breaking the glass.  You just don't have a lot of angles to take different shots when you have about a foot of slack!

I was trying to explain to Carter last week that there was a table and chair in the room, but that it wasn't actually real.  There's no seat and no top (that I can tell anyway).  He couldn't figure out until he saw it why I never tried to sit down!

It was a short walk around, but we loved it!

We wrapped up and walked back out to decide if we were done, and while we sat for a couple minutes, I was like, "Shoot, we didn't take a selfie!"  Because it wasn't busy, we went back and did a second walk-through!  The selfies honestly didn't work out very well, because of that darn short lanyard, but I did take this picture trying to capture just how endless it was!

Back outside, we took this picture on the mirrored outside wall.  Behind us is a mural of photos from the history of the room--photos from people walking through in the 60s, 80s school kids like me, current selfies and so on.  It brought back a lot of memories.  

I will say, I was a little sad because that special exhibit room was located in what used to be my favorite part of the more modern building.  There was this area where you walked down a couple steps into a modern gallery space that featured a bunch of modern art and sculptures.  When I was a kid, most of my favorites were in that sort of U-shaped pit.  All the weirdest ones, including the Mirrored Room, were down there, and now that space holds just a special exhibit space and the rest is studio spaces.  I'm sure it's a better use of space, especially with a lot of modern stuff in the new building, but seeing that transformation broke my heart a little because the anticipation walking down those stairs was the best.  This is how it used to look from the top of the left bank of stairs.  As I recall, you'd go around the corner and that's where the Mirrored Room used to be.  I was glad to see the fun orange plexiglass piece on the left was in the new wing this time.

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We went back out to the courtyard area, and here's a better shot of the new ceiling.  It was breathtaking.

Across the way was the new store, which meant my beloved old store was no longer in its old spot around the corner.  I remember shopping in that store as a kid, and that's where I first saw for sale the books like our favorite book in our school library--the series of kids' foreign language books like First Thousand Words in Spanish.  I was obsessed with them and finally got one for my birthday when I was 13, I think.  I still have it.  It's such a random memory but I loved that store for so many reasons.  Down at the end of the former store hallway was another picture that had been buried in my memories, an Andy Warhol piece featuring Seymour Knox, Jr., one of the museum's namesakes.  His two sons, Seymour III and Northrup, were the first owners of the Buffalo Sabres, so clearly that family has held a special place in my heart for multiple reasons.  I remember seeing this picture before and probably not fully grasping the significance of the subject or the artist, but they have it alone in an alcove now, creating a nice little contemplation spot with a bench.

Under the stairs there were some old school egg chairs--although these were more round!

We were walking back out through the new building, not only to get Carter's artwork souvenir from that infinite stack of sheets, but also because that was the easiest way to get to the car.  Here's that picture of that creepy head I mentioned.  Doesn't it look sort of superimposed here?  It looks so strange even up close.  There's something about its dimension or coloring that looks unreal.  I have a better pic of it from outside in my 2014 post.

We snuck a few more looks at different works on our way out and took video of one whose picture didn't do it justice:

I just can't express enough how many amazing pieces there were there.  So many interesting pieces, beautiful pieces, thoughtful pieces, colorful, creative, even jarring and somewhat ugly, but all just so thought-provoking and visually stimulating.  I just loved it so much, and loved sharing it with one of my favorite people!  

We went outside one more time and took a picture with this cool sculpture outside.  Appropriate, no?

We took one more selfie on the way out because that wall was just too cool...
 

And we were off.  We had to stop in Avon to pick up Jacob's donut order (last week of the season), and I decided to go the long way.  It was such a lovely afternoon at that point, with the pleasant weather, sun, and fall leaves, that I didn't mind a little extra drive.  So, I hopped off the Thruway at Batavia and took my old route to Geneseo.  I saw the view I used to love and hate as I approached the village, where I would see the campus on the hill and get excited to go back and see my friends but also felt annoyed I had to go back and do homework.  I drove by my old dorms and worked my way back up around to Main Street, though I was disappointed to see that the College Circle where you could park near the upper quad was completely blocked off with construction.  So I went along to Main Street where we stopped at Mama Mia's.  Carter had been wanting to try their pizza so I figured I'd stop and get him a slice to make dinner a little easier.  Then we drove around the corner down to the bank parking lot adjacent to the campus.  I needed to use the ATM and I wanted to run on campus for a minute.  It turned out everything was under construction!  The entire upper quad, which was built when I was a freshman (after much contention and many delays) was being redone; the Library had asbestos removal amidst a full renovation (going on year five, I think?); and the legendary Sturges Hall had all the windows covered in plastic (which makes Mary and me nervous because it was such a classic old building before.  A little rough around the edges, maybe, but hopefully they leave the character).  It was a little sad and I can't imagine how it feels to be a student right now.  We just caught quick glimpses and hopped back in the car.  We headed from there to Avon, grabbed the donuts (and cinnamon rolls and a couple cookies), and headed to pick up Jacob at the arena, where he'd been hanging out while Craig was at training camp.  We came home and had a cobbled together dinner before a quiet evening.  But what a day it had been!