I Feel So Artsy Fartsy

My mom and I decided that we needed to do something fun, today. Yesterday, our fun consisted of getting our toenails painted, lunch with a family friend, and finding out that aforementioned friend's daughter is expecting (yippee!), which is impossible to beat.

After finishing our brunch at La Madeleine, we started kicking around the topic of "fun," and decided that "fun" should be a trip to a museum. But which museum to pursue? I whipped out the trusty iPhone and discovered that the Fort Worth Modern is between exhibits, so they were off the list. The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University had an exhibit of Cubist portraits by Diego Rivera, which sounded intriguing. For Christmas the past two years, my mom has received a membership to the Dallas Museum of Art. Naturally, that was the next museum whose exhibits I Googled.

The main exhibit was titled Private Universes. I was originally put off by the painfully ambiguous title, as well as the rhetoric that enshrouded the description of the works in a veil of mystery. This critique from a former art major. Maybe my mind was just clouded by the omelet and croissant I'd just devoured. My mom decided, however, that she wanted to see Private Universes, so we set sail for Downtown Dallas.

I am so glad we did.

The works of art were breathtaking (kind of like the view from my hopefully future apartment, but better: breathtaking on par with an ozone alert maroon day). They ranged from the slightly disturbing to the sublime. One work was executed on canvases that enveloped you - literally - in a wall of 24K gold lusciousness - the gold foil applied to the canvases created stylized woodland scenes interspersed with pure abstract shapes (and still this by Jim Hodges is shown on the DMA's web page about the exhibit). Franz Ackerman's my "Ready Now" jolted the viewer with its heroically scaled riot of flourescent colors. I was enthralled.

The first three paintings at the entrance to the main gallery (the barrel vault) were my favorites, though. Those and a word painting with an underlay of Sponge Bob Squarepants checks - yes, from a check book...seriously - that talked about accidentally shooting his mother-in-law on a hunting trip when he mistook her for a deer wearing an orange vest and brewing coffee. It made me laugh out loud.

If you're a museum-y kind of person, and you're in Dallas, I highly suggest checking out the exhibit.