During one beautiful weekend back at the very start of summer my super amazing wife and I had found ourselves in that most between-DC-and-New York of cities, Philadelphia! This was a city we had both visited in the past, and purportedly on purpose (long-time readers will of course recall my Peace Corps Staging took place in Philly). Our main goal in this trip was to see our friend, but besides that our main goal was going to be art. On my super amazing wife’s previous trip to Philadelphia she seems to have seen everything besides the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and this had left a decade-long hole in her vision of the city she was longing to fill in. Meanwhile my major association with Philadelphia was in fact art. Back in my Academy days I had gone one summer up to see another friend and during that brief trip visited the Institute of Contemporary Art. Frankly, this left me befuddled and confused. I had foolishly figured “contemporary” and “modern” were synonyms, and walked in expecting Warhol (reader, I was so young). I don’t recall exactly what I saw there, but I carry to this day an impression of something strange and beyond the circles of culture and propriety I had thus far known. Which I think speaks very highly of the museum and whatever they were doing there, they were nailing it. We didn’t visit the ICA this trip.

What we did instead was arrive mid-morning via bus to the Reading Terminal Market, or close to it anyway. By the time we finished wandering around Reading Terminal Market to admire all the finest delicacies that Philadelphia had to offer, it was close enough to lunchtime so we settled in for some traditional Pennsylvania pupusas, posting up near Philbert. Next up was another obligatory stop, this one at Loop where my super amazing wife custom-ordered some yarn (they were low on stock on a color but said they could just dye some up for her), having gotten only briefly distracted at Neighborhood Books.

Then finally after another bit of a hike and a stop to hydrate with some lemonade we approached our first major art destination, the Rodin Museum. Is it funny that it was founded by a motion picture magnate? Like Jules E. Mastbaum’s day job was the ephemeral and fast-paced world of film (pre-talkies, even), and so in his evenings what he yearns for is solid, unmoving hunks of bronze? Also even funnier to realize that this was all of a two-year obsession for him. He visited the Musée Rodin in September 1924 which sparked something in him and instead of picking up a book from the gift shop went about buying every Rodin thing he could. Only months later he was showing off his collection, but his shopping spree stopped when we got himself an appendectomy gone wrong 27 months after his Musée visit and died leaving, in the traditional fashion, his wife to do all the work of setting up the museum. Oh to be rich.

Of course I have only learned all that just now reading the Wikipedia page, and on the day knew none of it. My first impression of the Rodin Museum was therefore, as advertised, a lovely oasis, the museum itself set back from the street by trees and a facsimile of a façade and a fountain. This makes it the perfect place for say wedding photos, as evidenced by the bride and bridesmaid party looking beautiful and happy and trying to stay cool enough in the shade to avoid too much sweat beading on their foreheads. Besides the happy if overheated bride, the formal garden surrounding the fountain and pool was still pretty empty at this time of day, and we breezed on past the flowers and into the museum itself.

It is not a large museum, with the central, airy space containing most of the collection. Jules only had 27 months to collect this stuff after all. Besides the sculptures themselves the collection contained Rodin’s in-progress clay sculptures and a number of re-purposed studies. The re-purposed studies were interesting, as Rodin would combine previous works into more abstract pieces, all jumbled and mis-matched. My biggest takeaway from the museum though is that Rodin seems to have been a trying man to be around; from my notes it seems that every artwork that anyone criticized suddenly became something Rodin felt was his most important work. In addition to the pieces themselves the museum had an interesting display on how bronze casting is done.

Now that, for us, the Rodin Museum was the Ro-done Museum, we wandered out and on down past the large Swann Fountain. It was a hot day and the fountain featured lots of kids and other people playing around in it which did indeed look very refreshing there under the sun. Our destination however was the Fabric Museum and Workshop, a fascinating and unique museum I would rank highly on anyone’s Philadelphia must-dos.

The museum had two exhibitions going on while we were there (they have two smallish floors, so two exhibitions is what they do). On the ground floor were a series of quilts by Jesse Krimes and they were gorgeous. The series is called Elegy Quilts, and they are created using textiles gathered from incarcerated persons. Krimes then depicts a scene from a description by the incarcerated person of a peaceful place or a domestic place, along with a protector animal. The mix of textiles was extremely interesting, with even leather I guess from boots incorporated into one. I found that when Krimes depicted birds they were so expressive, and being so large they were pretty powerful.

The exhibition upstairs was more of a mish-mash as it was about Some American Dreams which could mean a lot of things. There were some very interesting works however, all different takes on what it means to be an American, a perennially difficult topic. My super amazing wife was a little disappointed because a lot of the art was on textiles instead of textiles, which is a complicated distinction but nonetheless a lot of passion went into all of it.

At this point the remainder of the art we saw that day was commercial. The Fabric Museum is right near the Philadelphia Chinatown, which is phenomenal in its own right but even better compared to DC’s attempt. We wandered through a number of the shops and saw more Sanrio products then I recollect seeing in a long long time. Eventually it was off to meet up with our friends for dinner, but not before wandering by the Liberty Bell and then the waterfront. In a town known for its symbols of freedom we stumbled upon the best one of the lot, a squadron of YPs up from the Naval Academy for summer training. Truly, a very artful day.