On the left is Myra Siegel, my friend Penny's roommate in her freshman year at Newcomb. They've remained friends lo these many years, and I visited her and her art collection this morning before going out for lunch. Thomas Hart Benton was a friend of her father-in-law, and he painted a huge mural for the family department store, Harzfeld's. That mural is now in the American wing of the Smithsonian, but Myra and her husband have a small oil of it hanging in their family room:
Imagine this scene 24' long. I couldn't get the details clearly so you can't see the figures, but most of them were drawn from Myra's husband's family. They have a goodly amount of Benton memorabilia, which is fun particularly if you're a longtime Benton fan like me.
Touring her house today was the second time in just a few days that I've been blown away by fascinating collections people amass. My friend Mary Sprague in St. Louis is a long-time collector of stuff. I walked around her living and working quarters looking at collections of wooden feet, Indian dolls, Japanese dolls, contemporary ceramics, beaded necklaces, wooden horses, toy animals of all kinds, African masks, rubber band thingies, antique paintbrushes, trompe l'oeil furniture, clay figures...and so on and so forth until your eyes and your mind shut down from sensory overload.
Same with Myra's house, replete with folk art from all over the world Fruit baskets from Spanish markets, Egyptian artifacts, folk art from all over Latin America, Native American goodies, Eastern European wood carvings, plastic beads from Mardi Gras, minerals, antique English game boards, Irish animals, Cambodian and Laotian crafts... and so on and so forth. Not to mention all the serious art. Makes one breathless.
Well, this was a first. I've never been warned not to bring a gun into an art museum before, but there you see the evidence. This was my introduction to the Nerman Museum at the Johnson County Junior College in Overland Park, KS. It's a lovely building with good-size, well-lit galleries. I couldn't take pictures of a temporary exhibition (too bad because the work by Agathe Snow is fabulous), but I did snap a sculpture created by a South Korean made of military dog tags. Very striking.
Today I also visited the Kemper Contemporary Art Museum, opened here in KCMO in 1994. I'm staying about two blocks away from the Nelson-Atkins Museum (their main art museum), which is about two blocks from the Kemper, and we're all just a few blocks from Country Club Plaza, built in 1922 as the first suburban shoppping center in America. Quite the cultural nabe.
This spider graces a lot of the publicity for the Kemper, but I prefer the "Crying Giant" by Tom Otterness.
Oh dear, maybe we want one of the no gun stickers for the front door of Town Hall.
ReplyDeletePeople out here in the midwest don't think it's strange to see a "no gun" sign on school or museum doors. It really freaked me out.
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