TEXAS: HOUSTON MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, PART III (KINDER BUILDING - 20th CENTURY ART)

 November 24, 2021

I've never done THREE posts on a single museum, but this museum is really a museum network of seven museums. Had we spent another day in Houston, I would have visited another museum in the network.

After finishing our tour through the first of the Houston MFA buildings, we decided to cross the street to check out a beautiful church we had admired on our way to our parking spot. It turned out to be St. Paul's United Methodist Church, built in the 1930s, and it also turned out to be locked. 

Before heading in to the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, a relatively new addition to the Houston MFA, we took a quick walk through the sculpture garden.  The one piece that looked the most interesting, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Column, was pretty much un-seeable. 

NEW YORK : STORM KING ART CENTER

 July 24, 2021

On our third day in New York, we picked up a car at JFK, thinking that would make it easy to turn it in when it was time to go back to California (oh, we were so wrong, but more on that later), and we got on the road to go "upstate." ("Upstate" refers to almost all of the geographical region of New York--everything but the metropolitan area of New York City.) It was a Saturday morning and traffic was fairly light, especially by NYC standards.

 We were amazed by how quickly we left the city behind. Within an hour, we were traveling on forest-lined highways with big breaks between cities.

Our first destination was Storm King Art Center (marked by the red ballooon), about 70 miles upstate from JFK Airport (marked by a red star).

Wow, if you haven't heard of this place (as I had not), pay attention and get yourself there on your next trip to New York. It is amazing! This outdoor art museum, containing perhaps the largest collection of contemporary outdoor sculptures in the United States, was founded in 1960 and covers 500 acres. We're not talking minor artists no one has heard of. The most prominent sculptors of the 20th and 21st centuries are represented.

The Arch (1975) was created by Alexander Calder just one year before his death. There is an open arch you can walk through on the other side, but apparently I liked this view better! It is one of the first things we saw after driving into the grounds.

NEW MEXICO, DAY 3: ABIQUIU AND GHOST RANCH

 June 27, 2021

We spent the morning of Day 3 in what we called "Georgia O'Keeffe Territory." As mentioned in the prior post, O'Keeffe owned two homes in New Mexico. We stopped at the second one she bought first, was a crumbling adobe on three acres in  the village of Abiquiu (pronounced A-bih-cue) when she purchased it. She remodeled it extensively, and it became her principal residence in 1949 after her husband died. She lived there until 1984, two years before her death in 1986. The name "Abiquiu" means "wild choke cherry place" in the Tewa language.

We got there pretty early in the morning before anything was open. Unfortunately, advance tickets are required to take a tour of the O'Keeffe property, which was declared a National Historical Landmark in 1998. Tours of the O'Keeffe home on the property are not available right now because of Covid, and we couldn't even find the actual house on the property, which nowadays is dominated by the Abiquiu Inn and what looks like upscale cabins/casitas for rent.

However, as we drove around the property, we discovered that it also serves as an outdoor art gallery, with most of the art for sale! We had a good time checking out the various pieces, such as Water Garden by Brenda Jones:

TEXAS: MARBLE FALLS

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

After visiting Longhorn Cavern, we drove to the town of Marble Falls, where we were planning to spend the night. Lake Marble Falls is actually a reservoir, and we had a good view of it from our hotel room window. (We never saw any falls, and I'm not sure there are any.)

Marble Falls is pretty small town--just 6,000 or so people. For such a small town, it had an impressive outdoor art scene in its downtown where there are a series of pieces that make up what is known as "Sculpture on Main."

Some of it is a little kooky.

Some of it made me hungry.

MINNEAPOLIS SCULPTURE GARDEN

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden sits on eleven acres of prime real estate in downtown Minneapolis. With forty permanent installations, it is one of the largest sculpture gardens in the country. Unfortunately, when we were there, most of the sculptures were in storage while the park was getting a make-over.

We began our visit at the Cowles Conservatory, the ultimate "house with glass walls." The walk is lined with seasonal plantings, succulents, and ferns. Loud talking seems out of place in this almost church-like place.

Individual rooms are created by walls covered in creeping fig

The pathway opens up into this room filled by an enormous glass and steel fish created by architect Frank Gehry in 1986.

Of this sculpture, Gehry wrote, "In Toronto, when I was very young, my grandmother and I used to go to Kensington, a Jewish market, on Thursday morning. She would buy a carp for gefilte fish. She'd put it in the bathtub and this big black carp--two or three feet long--would swim around and I would play with it. I would watch it turn and twist . . . and then she'd kill it and make gefilte fish and that was always sad and awful and ugly."  This fish is worth a visit all by itself. Gehry's childhood trauma has become pure joy for today's tourists.

DES MOINES, IOWA: PROOF RESTAURANT AND THE PAPPAJOHN SCULPTURE PARK

Maybe I'm naive, but I don't associate haute cuisine with Des Moines. Leave it to my husband, however, to scout out a restaurant with a chef who was a semifinalist for the James Beard Award for best chef in the Midwest, which is a pretty big deal (especially to my husband).

First impressions were good. I liked the name--"Proof"--and the unassuming location in a brown brick building next to a sculpture park was very nice.

The presentation of the food plays a huge part in upscale restaurants like this one. If you do it right, you can pass off a very thin slice of cucumber wrapped around a thin bit of salami as an actual course and charge a lot of money for it:

 It's hard to go wrong with a cheese plate:

. . . followed by a delicious blend of prosciutto and artichokes:

However, not only was the duck confit (left) ugly, but it didn't taste very good. The pork belly (right) was a little better looking but only a little better tasting:

Tender, flavorful, Spanish-grilled ribeye with three unique dipping sauces was the dish that made the visit worth our time:

The perfect pairing for these artistic dishes at Proof was the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park, located right next door. Open since 2009, this 4.4 acre park contains an assortment of 24 sculptures by internationally renowned artists. The total value of the art exceeds $40 million, making this one of the premiere sculpture parks in the nation. The works were donated by the art collectors for whom the park is named. (John Pappajohn made his millions as a venture capitalist.)