Going Backwards

I have changed my ways. Well, “added to my ways” is a better description.

I have always enjoyed art museums. Loved, really. I hold the one in my own hometown so close to my heart as to think of it as my own. My museum. When I was young and reading The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.Frankweiler, the museum I saw in my mind’s eye was my own, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I have roamed freely its many rooms most of my life, reconnecting with the pieces that have always been there and making sure that new art is fully taken in and welcomed. I don’t have to actually like it to welcome it, but it never hurts.

Recently, in my own museum and in those further afield, I have visited short-term exhibitions in a new way. Forwards, and then backwards. Be these big shows or small installations, I enter and pass through each show in the way the curators and planners prepared it. I take it all in. I read the walls and the pamphlets. I soak in the vibe and the deeper meanings. I take my time, and, if I am with others, I let them know we can move apart from each other.

“I’ll catch up with you,” I’ll say quietly if I feel my lingering is chafing my companion.

I am lucky. I attend shows most often with people I love most and who have known me the longest. They accept that I might cruise right through a show that doesn’t pierce me or that I might have to meet them at the exit because they have cruised faster. Either way, we all win.

More often than not, when I meet them near or at the exit, I will whisper, “I am going back for a bit. You can join me. I’ll be right back.”

I am loving going “backwards” through shows. This is new to me in the past ten or so years. It is usually because something has caught my attention later in the show that my mind wants to place against an earlier idea or work. This has me looking at all the pieces in a new way.

I liken it to living on a one-way street and only going one way on it year after year. And then, one day, the water department has blocked off one end and you have to approach your house “the wrong way on a one way street.” Fabulous! You see everything in a new way. The street doesn’t even look like yours. You might even drive a little slower for full absorption.

I did just that at an indoor and outdoor exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s work this past weekend at Crystal Bridges Museum in northwest Arkansas. The friend I traveled with is not opposed to backtracking and mixing things up, and we enjoy museums in the same way. We do not have to be side-by-side, and we do not even have to talk. At one point in the day, we whizzed through a huge gallery to get to lunch reservations telling each other in our own words, “We’ll come back later. Don’t stop! Don’t look!”

We saw both the indoor and outdoor exhibits twice, the second time by backtracking. I can assure you that Mr. Chihuly’s pieces beg you to see them from all sides and in varying ways. High. Low. Squinting. Wide-eyed. I was drawn backwards through the inside exhibit to see about a curve on one of the vases and how it possibly was mimicked in another room in another form. My mind was racing, and my feet kept pace.

 

The outdoor pieces haunted us a bit while we ate lunch, and we talked of going back outside in slightly wilted tones – rare for us. We had just come in from the 95-degree day that was blasting with sunshine in a clear blue sky. We were drying off by sitting still.

As we ate, cloud cover arrived and was barely noticeable in the slightly-tinted windows. When I mentioned it to him, we both knew we would be back outside in a flash after dessert. The sun was gone, yet the humidity draped us. We became just as sweat-soaked as before, but the light had totally changed, and the gardens and forests held the glass works in a way that had not been available to us earlier. Better yet, we advanced upon many of them “backwards” from the way we had encountered them the first time around.

Then, we went back inside to the icy galleries we had hurried through hours earlier and took our sweet time. We separated, joined back up, and separated again. We spoke quietly and briefly before moving apart for the final set of pieces.

My memories of museums and gardens near and far are thick. I have traveled to so many of them with my son and husband. Several with parents, a sister, a niece. A few with friends. I am pretty sure I have tested them with my silences and my chosen paths. Some forwards, and some backwards, but all of them in the direction of the art.

 

p.s. All photos above were captured this past Sunday at Crystal Bridges Museum. They are small parts of larger art works. I go back to things to take pictures of what struck me deepest. I place my phone in my bag between shots and do not keep it in my hands. That makes it easier to cover my mouth when I gasp or wipe my tears.

 

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