Reading this week:

• The Story of my Life by Sir Harry H. Johnston

Every once in a while I get annoyed with myself for not being rich. I think I can rightly say it is entirely my fault. Mostly it’s just that like, look, I am a mediocre white guy so not only do I have that going for me but also I went to Yale. I am also, I sometimes like to think, a fairly smart guy, and have you seen the people out there who are rich? Do you really think they are all that smart? Like so much smarter than you that they get to have a billion dollars and you, and more importantly I, don’t? It is ridiculous to think so. So it’s gotta be my fault I am not fabulously wealthy. Besides me whining about not using my privilege to the utmost, I also have to admit I have made several career moves that were explicitly bad money-wise, not entirely but definitely in part because a buddy of mine, in response to me saying I didn’t care about money, said I did care about money, and I kinda just wanted to prove him wrong. And more firmly than being annoyed about not being rich personally is that I am annoyed at all the very silly things the fabulously wealthy do spend their money on. 44 billion U.S. dollars for Twitter??????? I can think of so many cooler and more fun things to spend even a paltry $100 million on and these people are out here blowing the GDP of Cameroon on things that very obviously don’t even bring them joy!

Which brings us to the Rubells. They are a rich couple with a penchant for buying a lot of contemporary art and then building museums to put it in. They seem nice! I’m not going to verify if that is true or not and it in no way reflects a change in the soft policy of this blog that the rich should be eaten (not me though, don’t eat me when I achieve the fabulous wealth of my idle ponderings). But man if I was rich this is what I would do! This and a lot of other things, let me tell you. Like funding local journalism and showering infrastructure on the village where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer and look I haven’t totally gamed out how I would spend $100 billion or whatever but not only would I fund so, so many cultural institutions but I wouldn’t even ask them to put my name on it. That last sentence was not a dig on the Rubell Museum DC (their other museum is in Miami) because it is a very nice place and I recommend you go.

My super amazing girlfriend and I visited the other weekend, making a whole day of it by eating some fried chicken beforehand and going to two bookstores afterwards. We got in for free because I used to be in the Navy and also the Rubells are very nice about only charging the tourists to see their art. The coolest part of the museum, it slowly dawned on me as I visited, is the space itself. It used to be a school and the news articles will tell you all about how Mera Rubell made sure to highlight the vaunted windows and it was a very, very neat thing that they have an exhibition of Keith Haring’s Untitled (Against All Odds) which was inspired (loosely) by Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On and they had it playing in the background and the significance here is that Gaye went to this very school. Like that is such a cool thing to do! But even without the Gaye connection I loved how the building itself affected how I viewed the art. The first room you enter is this gigantic cavern of a hall with four monumental artworks displayed. Then you traverse into the rest of the museum which is split over three floors with different halls and hallways connecting in a few different ways. The more open halls felt more like a regular art museum, but then you also had these tiny hallways where you couldn’t get very far away at all from the art, especially when it was crowded with other visitors. It forced you to get up close to the pieces even when they were large enough to ask for perspective that just wasn’t given to you. And since the rooms are put together somewhat mazelike you filter in and out of the exhibits in a very non-linear way and I hope the curators have a lot of fun thinking about what it means to put art in a space and spaces like that.

Another aspect of the museum is that it feels unfinished in a pretty exciting way. The walls are all brick but certain portions are covered with like drywall in what fells in spots to be done very randomly. You sort of float in and out of regular ole’ art museum walls and then these old bricks, some replaced by wooden blocks that are falling out. It makes the whole space feel more exciting and the art even more exciting by association. I noticed the floors would be updated in spots and then old in others. And the final space you wind up visiting is just sorta the basement and it feels like a basement with graffiti still on the walls in some spots and painted and unpainted brick and unfinished, low ceilings and twisty passageways with art just sorta stuck in there. It’s great! We should never design an art museum ever again and instead just stick art in repurposed buildings.

Anyways here are some of the pieces I liked. I liked the above piece, Chalkboard Drawing #3, because it is a chalkboard and the museum used to be a school and so I liked how that all fit together. They didn’t mention anything in the description about putting a chalkboard in a school which was a very hip move, if you ask me. Anyways that’s why I liked this piece.

The next piece, Big Black Rainbow (Smoky Eyes) was one of the four pieces in that first gigantic hallway. My photos don’t convey the scale but it is huge. What I found really interesting about this piece is that it was painted on terrycloth, which is not a painting medium I would have ever thought of. I have documented my interest in impasto and this picture for me was all about the impasto. So that was very neat.

The final piece I wanted to highlight is Existing in Rose Thoughts by Jamea Richmond-Edwards and I hope to be in enough with the art crowd someday to own one of her artworks. This one reminded a lot of the painting/collage Vendor by Prudence Chimutuwah with the use of different media to highlight the themes of the painting and the fact they both center similar figures. It’s just such a beautiful piece with so many layers.

So that was my experience at the Rubell Museum DC. Maybe we’ll make it to the one in Miami someday.