The V&A’s jewelry collection is amazing, but two things impressed me the most. First, the cast iron jewelry from 19th-century Germany. (Actually Prussia, I think.) Who knew you could make cast-iron jewelry? Well, you can. It’s black, like you’d think, but quite delicate. The other thing I thought was totally cool was the chatelaine.

I knew that chatelaine was a word, but I think I thought it had something to do with chattel. (And I’m not totally sure I knew what chattel meant; the meaning I was thinking of, slave, is archaic.) But it’s actually the feminine version of chatelain, the keeper of a castle. And it has a second meaning: this thing.

Women’s clothes weren’t always made with pockets, but that doesn’t mean women didn’t carry things around. They had one of these, a sort of ornamental chain worn at the waist with useful stuff hanging off of it, like keys and scissors. This one was made of cut steel around 1850 in London.

Seriously, the museum goes on and on and on. Somewhere in the back of a set of galleries is this bed:

But, oh no, it’s not just any bed. It’s The Great Bed of Ware. Haven’t heard of it? Well, that just proves you aren’t living in 16th century Britain. It was so famous, it made an appearance in Twelfth Night:

…and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of
paper, although the sheet were big enough for the
bed of Ware in England, set ‘em down: go, about it.

A traveler first wrote about it in 1596 in an inn in Ware, in Hertfordshire. The real textiles didn’t survive; these hangings and bed coverings are based on other textiles of the time.

The museum is truly mind-blowingly ginormous. Here’s a room of 20th-century design:

Note that the upper reaches of the room hold part of the library’s collection.

And then there’s large quantities of sculpture. And that huge wall thing at the end of this gallery used to be in a church, although I completely failed to collect any information about it.

I mean, I have a little information – it’s a choir screen, which goes between the part of the church where the congregation hangs out and the part where the action happens. They used to be common, and now they’re less common, if I remember correctly from the label. They’ve been taken out of a lot of churches, including whatever church that one used to be in, and some ended up at the V&A.

Including the one in this picture:

What’s that? You say the choir screen isn’t the most noticeable thing in that picture? Yeah. That blue-green thing is a glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly that hangs in the big main entranceway thingy. I think “Dale Chihuly” is a good bet whenever you see a swoopy monumental piece of glass sculpture.

I was at the V&A for a couple of hours and really just barely scratched the surface. I suppose I’ll have to go back sometime. One thing that makes that easy: Admission is free. I love free museums. Not only because I am totally cheap, but also because I feel like I can just go in, look at a couple of things, and leave again. There’s no need to stay for hours and get my money’s worth. Well, come to think of it, that’s less true in this case, because I had to get all the way to London – with a plane ticket from the U.S., then a train ticket from Guildford for the day. But anyway, V&A. Yay.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

On the way home from a recent wedding, I had lots of time – thanks for the delays, United – to examine the exhibit Second Chances: Folk Art Made From Recycled Remnants.

It’s from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. I’m not totally clear on what that means about the relationship between them, but I’m guessing a curator in Santa Fe put it together and they lent it to the SFO Museum.

The items in the exhibit are charming – it’s fun to look at something, see its current shape, and also be able to see what it was before. License plates turned into dustpans, bottle caps strung together on wire to make a toy snake. Of course, it’s not like people were recycling to be cute; a lot of this is recycling born out of necessity.

That’s a trunk made out of tin, wood, and paper, Dakar, Senegal, c. 1994. I just looked up “arachide” in the handy French dictionary next to my desk and am delighted to tell you that these tins used to hold peanut oil.

This kind of recycling also funnels into a souvenir trade. One of my favorite Christmas tree ornaments is an angel made from an insecticide can that I bought in Mali. I also love a little dump truck I got there, made from pieces of a can of the “Gino” brand. Something that involves tomatoes. I bought it from a small boy atop a mud-brick building in Djenne. So I was pretty amused to see the exact same design (made from a different can) in the exhibit:

It’s also from Mali, but from 1994 – I bought mine in 2005. So I guess that particular form of folk art manufacture has been going on for a while. It’s really a pretty sophisticated toy. The dump truck dumps.

There was quite a variety of stuff in the show – early American furniture and duck decoys, for example, and some items made by contemporary artists who just like working with old stuff. I think my favorite item was this eagle:

It was made by some Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. in 1993. I’d forgotten this, although it sounded vaguely familiar when I looked it up. Their ship ran aground off a beach in Queens and over 200 immigrants were stuck in prisons while the U.S. figured out what to do with them. The last people weren’t freed until 1997.

While they were in prison they did a ton of origami. This eagle is made from magazines and papier mache of rough prison toilet paper. Google tells me that some people now call this style of paper folding “Golden Venture Folding,” after the ship that the immigrants came in. Some were granted asylum; many ended up back in China or in other countries.

The SFO Museum’s website says it was founded in 1980 and was “the first cultural institution of its kind located in an international airport.” That’s a lot of qualifiers, so I guess that means it isn’t the first museum in an airport. But it’s still pretty neat. I loved having the opportunity to lose myself in this art for a bit while I killed time before my flight.

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One of the less exciting sites was Djenné-Jéno. Now, Djenné is fantastic. It’s a city of mud brick buildings, including the world’s largest, this mosque:

But Djenné-Jéno is an archaeological site just down the road from Djenné. Several centuries ago, it was an important city. Now it looks like this:

To an archaeologist, that may be exciting, but to me, it kind of looked like a big empty space covered in broken pieces of pottery.

So I was pretty excited a few weeks ago when I was at Yale for a story, dropped in on the Yale University Art Gallery, and found this case of wonderful terracotta figures from Djenné-Jéno (or Jenné-Jeno, as they spell it).

I love the personality – they’re so different from anything I’ve seen. This male figure is from sometime between about AD 600 and 1200:

The label called this a “maternity figure,” from a bit later, somewhere in the AD 1100-1700 range:

Another label mentioned that some of the figurines show signs of disease and might have been somehow associated with healing. Look at the maternity figure’s back:

I’m not sure what disease involves polka-dotted snakes, but it can’t be a good one.

Isn’t life cool? It was so neat to wander into the art gallery and see these delightful figures from a site I’d walked on. Here’s some background information on Djenné-Jéno from the people who did a lot of the excavation there.

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pictures: first two by Jim Fields; the others by me

While I was poking around, trying to figure out where they live, I discovered that the Milwaukee Zoo sells bonobo paintings. Zoos do a lot of things to keep their animals entertained, especially the smarter ones, and at Milwaukee, that includes letting the bonobos mess around with paints.

I like this trend of animal art. The most famous, I think, is elephant paintings. There was a video going around for a while of an elephant painting…an elephant. Elephants don’t actually know how to make 2-D representations of things they see. They’re trained to make the right set of strokes on paper. But still, it’s awfully cool that you can buy something an elephant painted and have it shipped from Thailand. Actually, you have more than one option, if that is the kind of thing you are into.

By far my favorite thing in the world of animal painting, though, because it’s got the least evidence of intentionality by the artist, is something I saw at the gift shop of the National Aquarium in Washington. They were selling art that was made by dipping turtles in paint and letting them walk around on paper. Or canvas. I forget. Either way: That is funny.

Of course, the cool kids know the best way to visit museums by computer is by reading my museum tourist posts.

Whoa. In an odd coincidence, if you google “Year of Meteors,” about half the results are for an album by someone I went to college with. I’m listening to it now and, wow, she’s good. Here’s the Whitman poem.

None. That’s right, none.

SF MOMA. I might have liked to go in here, but it was $9 on the half-price evening (making it $18 – $18! – on a regular day), and I’m just too accustomed to Smithsonian pricing, I guess. I did visit the museum shop and found one Christmas present for my dad, who is impossible to shop for, so I feel this is a major accomplishment.

Museum of Craft and Folk Art.

Contemporary Jewish Museum. This was tempting, I must admit – it’s got an exhibit on Curious George right now. Weird but true fact: I told my British boyfriend this, and he had never heard of Curious George.

Cartoon Art Museum.

GLBT Historical Society. Oh, I see from the website, the actual museum is over in the Castro. Well, that makes sense. It’s brand-new – I suppose I was walking past the offices.

Museum of the African Diaspora. This sounds fascinating.

California Historical Society. Aw, dang it – their 4th Annual Historic Libations party was tonight, and I missed it.

Zeum, the San Francisco Children’s Museum. Ok, not that I, a single adult woman, wants to go to a children’s museum without somebody’s child in tow. But I’m just sayin. It’s there. With a cool old carousel outside.

And I probably missed some. That’s a lot of museums. I couldn’t have resisted a natural history museum – and I’m still hoping to get to the California Academy of Sciences while I’m out here – but it was still kind of a bummer turning down all that art.

Arcimboldo painted portraits of people composed of fruits, vegetables, fish, books – everything but flesh. They’re delightful, and seem like a very early precursor of Surrealism. He was court painter to Maximilian II, the Holy Roman Emperor, and was celebrated in his time because some of the portraits are darn funny. (Nice to see someone getting credit for humor.)

Photography wasn’t allowed in the exhibit, but you can see some of the paintings and read a bit about the show here.

All of Arcimboldo’s plants and animals are scientifically accurate – botany and zoology were new sciences at the time. The exhibit included old books with lovely botanical illustrations and some other things that would have inspired Arcimboldo, like Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of ugly faces.

Out in the gallery’s mezzanine was this sculpture, finished this year and inspired by Arcimboldo’s Winter:

Compare it to the painting.

Greg was there because of a blog post by our mutual friend Wray Herbert about psychological research on how we perceive faces. Wray has a new book out about the shortcuts we use to make decisions. It’s beautifully written, and I’m not just saying that because one of my many freelance jobs is writing press releases for Wray. And while I’m mentioning books, I should also note that Greg’s first poetry book is now available for pre-order. (Go to this page and scroll down to Drinking Weather.)

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Anyway. The other day I stopped in to see a traveling exhibit called “Da Vinci-The Genius.” It consisted mostly of models of devices Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebooks. He was a creative guy.

Like this one, the aerial screw:

The idea is that four guys would stand on the platform and push on the bars to make the screw turn and lift you through the air. (An actual one would have been much larger.) This is the thing that led to the stories that Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter.

I think “invented” is a pretty strong term, considering this would never have worked and was also, as far as anyone knows, never built. “Dreamed up something helicopter-like” is more like it.

Here’s a diving suit he dreamed up:

And a tank – one of many, many military machines in his notebooks:

Yes, a real one would be a lot bigger – presumably there’d be guys inside, firing those guns that stick out in every direction. He also came up with that bridge in the background. The idea was that soldiers could put it together in the field; the logs are notched in such a way that it doesn’t need any nails or pegs or rope or anything. So they could build it with logs, cross a stream, and dismantle it again.

One of the irritating things about the exhibit was the absence of actual artifacts…and presence of fake artifacts. I’m not talking about the models, which are obviously modern, and the point of the show. But right near the entrance, they had glass cases with reproductions of a couple of his notebooks, only you’d have to read the entire text next to them to realize they were reproductions. Yes, logic suggests they would be reproductions, since an actual Leonardo notebook would require a major security force, but still. I thought it was a little tacky.

Then there were also reproductions of paintings. It’s fine that they didn’t have any – he didn’t do very many, and it’s hard to get hold of them. But the wall text tells you, “Leonardo’s original works are considered too priceless to move from their permanent locations.” Right. So, explain to me why I saw the Lady with an Ermine, which belongs in Krakow, in San Francisco in 2003? It’s fine not to have them, but don’t make up reasons.

Also, having seen the Lady with an Ermine in person – in San Francisco and then, five years later, in Krakow – the digital reproduction is so lame as to not really be worth displaying. The original practically glows. It’s stunning. That Leonardo knew how to handle paint. The digital version? Not so much. It’s just, you know, a flat copy of a painting.

So, I’d say the exhibit is worth dropping by if you’re in the neighborhood, because the models are neat, and you can play with some of them, but not worth a special trip to D.C. The exhibit is created by “Grande Exhibitions – Creators of museum quality traveling exhibitions.” Here’s their website for this exhibit.

I actually was much more excited about the exhibit across the hall, Design for the Other 90%. It’s about products designed to solve problems for poor people, mostly in the developing world. Like a cheap water pump that brings up clean water from the aquifer, or an inexpensive, easy-to-assemble shelter. One of my favorites was a water barrel shaped like a very wide tire, so you could put a rope through the center and roll it home instead of having to lug it. But the exhibit didn’t allow photography, and I am a rule-follower, so you’ll have to go see these things yourself. It’s put together by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

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