Lucky me. This weekend the Cincinnati Art Museum hosts its biennial "Artists in Bloom" display, with perhaps 200 floral arrangements designed for specific spots in the museum created by amateurs and professionals. Each entrant is given a specific location for a floral arrangement and I guess the rules are that it must be compatible with the surrounding art.
I'm not sure if the Cincinnati Art Museum is any good or not but it was an enormous amount of fun to walk through galleries featuring ancient Egyptian artifacts, African art, 19th and 20th century Impressionism paintings, a lot of Rookwood Pottery, and a smattering of contemporary work, all decked out in art and flowers. I couldn't stop smiling. Or snapping pictures.
The pix on top are from one of the African galleries, and I tried to show the flowers alone, and then as they were, adjacent to masks. Well done!
Here is another set that really amused me:
Findlay Market, the oldest market in Cincinnati, dating back to mid-19th century, is in a poor black neighborhood. Perhaps that's why I was one of the few white people there this morning. There were about two dozen purveyors, most of them selling poultry or meat. There was none of the panache of North Market in Columbus. These vendors were selling chicken corn dogs, potato and bacon stuffed pork chops, lots and lots of processed cheese, etc. The produce consisted of an array of pineapple, bananas, citrus fruit, and other items not grown locally. One vendor did sell Amish meat and poultry that looked good. And Colonel de Ray had a brilliant stand selling over 500 culinary herbs and spices (no nettles or oat straw). I hope to go back tomorrow (Saturday) to see if there's a different crowd there on the weekend.
If you're in Cincinnati, you must visit the Joseph Betts bookstore, which I plan to nominate as the best bookstore in America. No kidding. It's enormous and beautifully organized. There's even a HUGE children's store of its own. I headed straight to the mystery section which has a larger selection than any mystery book store I've ever visited. And then I realized why. They don't carry just the latest title or two of productive writers--they carry the whole line! So for an OCD mystery reader like me who needs to read the books sequentially, it was literary nirvana. My friend Morgan recommended that I read James Lee Burke, and there they were--all of them! And all of the George Pellacanos, who's one of my new faves. I left very happy and a bit poorer.
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