For many, many years I considered Shenandoah National Park to be the setting of one of the worst experiences of my life. It was a Boy Scouts camping trip, and more specifically a canoeing trip. We set out early on a Saturday with all of our camping gear in a fleet of canoes, and were to camp overnight by the side of the river before proceeding again the next day to the pull-out point. I remember every single thing as having gone disastrously. By definition I was a young teen at the time, and therefore judged others much more harshly, a dire trait to have when it seemed that everyone else was so much worse at canoeing than I was. I recollect spending nearly every moment of the canoeing feeling only like I was being held back and forced to wait as less fluvial Troopmates made their way down the meanders. I also got partnered with the least-skilled canoeist of the group, a situation I should have treated with much more kindness but in the moment made him only the target of my ire. When it came nearly time to camp, we at first passed up one camping spot in favor of looking for something a little farther down river. In my memory this original camping spot has become so picture-perfect it glowed. Instead, we didn’t actually manage to stop until we were desperate, which left us perched on a cramped and brambly bankside. When it began to rain that evening and into the night we were little better positioned than if we had just camped in the river itself. A soggy dinner was followed by news from my tentmates that I was to be kicked out of the tent (I did have a single-person tent but we had agreed previously to consolidate), news that would have been more amenable had it not come in the middle of a downpour with no room left to pitch my lodgings. After some negotiations I spent the night “sleeping” on top of their bags, each hard pack of Magic the Gathering cards poking into my back. The next day when the trip was finally over, I was so filled with adrenaline from my anger I was shaking. We had managed to survive the trip but it was not so for the tent I had brought, a gift from my grandmother, which had disappeared along with my dignity. It was a terrible trip.

It was not until my super amazing wife and I were doing some planning for a weekend getaway that I discovered the location of my ire was in fact Shenandoah River State Park, meaning I had been mistakenly maligning the national park this whole time. Shenandoah National Park, turns out, is very nearly the opposite of a river valley, what with its central feature being a road stretched along a mountain ridge. Eager for some time nestled among trees but lacking any camping gear, we had booked one of the Lewis Mountain Cabins.

Although Shenandoah is really very close to where we live, we began our relaxation early by taking our sweet time in arriving. We first swung by the lovely and relatively expansive Needles in the Haymarket yarn store, just because it was there. This was followed by a stop at the Buckland Farm Market, which notably did not have the donkeys the pictures of the place seemed to promise, but where we nonetheless got fry pies and salad dressing. By early afternoon we were pulling into Front Royal for antiquing and lunch. Front Royal also has the excellent Royal Oak Bookshop, with the extremely friendly Sunny the bookstore cat. The shop also sold these gorgeously wrapped book sets that come with tea and stickers and honey sticks and the sort, which are obviously assembled with love. It’s a must-visit for anyone passing through Front Royal.

Finally entering the park at its northern entrance, we proceeded directly to the Dickey Ridge Visitor Center to get some hiking recommendations. The very nice ranger there had a shirt that said both “Americorps” and “Scientists in the Park” on it, and she recommended hiking on up to Compton Peak. There are two destinations on that trail, one being some basalt columns and the other being the actual peak. I thought the basalt columns would be cool so that was a pull for this trail. We proceeded directly to the trail head and got going and it was an immensely enjoyable hike. Most of the trail was pretty pleasant, though the bit down to the basalt got a little steep. We admired that and tried to imagine a landscape covered in lava before going to the other end of this trail excursion, up to the peak itself where we were treated to spectacular views. As we were standing there a little kid came bounding up ahead of his family and was audibly impressed with what he could see. But not too impressed; as we were heading out he declared that while the views were good they were “not worth the hike.” Can’t please everybody.

From here we did the activity that the park was really designed for, which is drive on down it while gawking at the views. Tell you what though man. The park speed limit is 35. This isn’t a highway or even a normal road. The park makes kind of a big deal about how, if you’re in a hurry, you should just come back when you have more time. Even if you don’t want to admire the views, you shouldn’t be driving fast anyways, as there are hikers by the side of the road and the park is made of blind bends. Yet there I was in cruise control, so I know I was going 35, and people were on my butt. One guy tried to use an overlook as a passing lane, which is about the most dangerous way to drive in the park I can think of. At the next overlook I pulled over and let him pass before he did anything even more crazy. However, most of the time it was a very pleasant driving experience, with us spending the time spotting deer and in one case turkeys.

Eventually we arrived at our cabin. It was way past check-in time, and we were a little worried we’d be stranded for the evening, but they had kindly left out the keys for us. We hadn’t brought anything to eat, so from here zoomed on back to Big Meadows Lodge and its food hall. There we had a lovely dinner and admired the sunset over the Appalachians.

Reading this week:

• Weird Fucks by Lynne Tillman (not very weird at all)

I alluded to it in the last post but the gaping hole in my super amazing wife’s previous encounter with the City of Brotherly Love was a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We had gotten close the previous day with our visit to the Rodin Museum but made a point of not going all the way over. We wanted to start the day there and savor it, and so on our second day in Philly we arose and sampled the hotel breakfast fare and started to make our way on up the museum.

There was a Pride festival that day which complicated our approach somewhat. The festival was still in the early stages of setting up so we were still able to navigate around the various fences being put in place. This brought us first to the Washington Monument which is placed there in front of the museum, and whoo boy I can’t believe that sucker is still standing without some explanatory signs. Lots of George Washington lording over Native Americans sorta stuff. Plus like, they got a guy who killed an alligator with a trident, which is just not very nice. Though the animal sculptures are very graceful, especially the cows.

From there and less vigorously than Rocky we clambered on up the steps to the museum itself. The single most impressive thing about the Philadelphia Museum of Art is just how monumental it is. It is quite a building. I think some of the effect comes from it wrapping around you as you ascend into the expansive courtyard and then eventually find the door. But then you go into the entrance hall and it is in fact just as big on the inside as the outside. It is so big that the massive Calder mobile slowly spinning above right in the center of the towering space is barely noticeable (though also it is white on a marble background in dim lighting, which really doesn’t do the mobile justice).

Then came the task of choosing what art to see. We swung by a special exhibit they had on with two sunflower paintings by van Gogh that aren’t normally next to each other, which was neat, but we chose our first destination as the Asia wing to see the teahouse. The museum has a whole teahouse inside, you see, and that’s not the least of it. Hiking on up through the southwest wing they have all sorts of other faraway architectural bits. Turns out they do the Met Cloisters thing of buying up bits of old-world architecture and then incorporating it into the fabric of the museum itself, to dazzling effect. Oh, to have been alive and rich at the time when you could just go around Europe and buy it.

We passed through the Portal from the Abbey Church of Saint-Laurent and then marveled at the woodwork in the Reception Hall from the Palace of Duke Zhao. The Portal was a solid 500 years older than the Reception Hall, but the hall was much more intricately painted. Breezing past other ancient art we made it to the far end of the building and thus finally to the teahouse. Quite the space! The teahouse itself is a whole teahouse, acquired from the architect Ōgi Rodō and plucked from Tokyo back in 1928, it now sits in a space designed with such lighting that it does feel like you are somehow outside, a sort of intimate infinite that also has a teahouse. That was very interesting to walk around and peer into at the other art they have scattered on it. All in all trippy and worth a visit.

We had been unknowingly heading forward in time as we perused this wing, but now consciously approached the 19^th and 20^th century items. We did this as we were waiting for our friend to arrive and meet up with us. Through this stuff I liked the stuff I usually like, paintings with nautical themes, or bright landscapes set in a mysterious orient, or showy Art Nouveau. The single most brilliant thing I think I saw though was Memory Piece by Frank O’Hara, which has a model of a footprint and drawers of sand. Preserving footprints in sand! What a metaphor. I loved it.

After our friend arrived what we had left to view were the Duchamps, which normally the museum has a grander collection of but at the moment most, we assessed, were actually in New York. The art-iest experience we had in this section was trying to figure out what a dark and empty room was for. We were wandering off when a woman arrived and announced that her friend had told her she had to see what was there. Turns out the mysterious door on the other side of the room was Duchamp’s Étant donnés. Frankly it didn’t move me but good on Duchamp to have pulled off such a piece.

Having done our savoring we slowly wound down our visit, exiting via the sculpture garden which had fewer sculptures than our friend remembered. I liked the giant plug though, that was good, and perched loftily. The sculpture garden brought us to the Schuylkill River and an idyllic walk back downtown to an art festival where we nearly almost bought something. And then finally back on a bus and back on home, having sated our Philadelphia desires for, I assume, another decade or so.

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.

Reading this week:

• Dark Voyage: An American Privateer’s War on Britain’s African Slave Trade by Christian McBurney

The central irony of the New River is that of course it is one of the oldest rivers. They explain this is the lovely video in the visitor’s center, though in the video they, for inexplicably humble reasons, like to emphasize it was really the Teays. Then again as I have pointed on this blog before in deference to Heraclitus, how old can any river be if no man can step in the same river twice?

We pondered this as we arrived for breakfast at the Cathedral Café (they did not use the website’s tagline “feeding your mind, body, & soul” anywhere in the restaurant itself as far as I can recall, but it is a good one). Tell you what if you are going to go, go early. That line was way out the door even by the time we left. I guess given how early the river itself appeared on the geological landscape, it makes sense that the overall theme of any visit to the gorge should be to arrive early. After breakfast we proceeded directly to the parking lot for Endless Wall Trail, another misnomer along the lines of “New River.” We had wanted to do something resembling a hike, though having become city slickers by default we were equipped with neither the shoes nor technical pants to go on any hike that was particularly strenuous. And so we chose this trail which is not Endless but only a couple miles long and pretty flat.

Like I said, make sure you arrive early. The trail was pretty sparsely populated when we were hiking on it but by the time we made our return the parking lot was rapidly filling up. Although there was a lot of rain during our stay new New River Gorge on this morning the weather was gorgeous with the sun shining and illuminating the deep valley. The hike takes you along various viewpoints where you can look down at the river and the riverside railroad tracks and long for a train to come by to complete the scene. It can make you forget yourself, as evidenced by the coffee cup that someone forgot which I then, as an environmentalist, picked up and hiked out with. I am such a good person.

At Diamond Point itself the view spans a shallow bend and if you go to the very pointy end of the point you can see the bridge off in the distance. The best part here was looking down at the birds soaring around through the valley. I think these were peregrine falcons, which I base off a thing I later learned where the bridge had been suffering corrosion early on due to an overabundance of acidic pigeon poop. Peregrine falcons were later reintroduced to the valley, significantly cutting down on the pigeon population. They were gorgeous to watch.

Having gotten in the nature portion of the visit with the hike, it was now time to indulge in some history, and for this we took the drive on down to Thurmond. Thurmond was historically a town down deep in the gorge and back in the day was the very center of hustle and bustle in the valley. It was the major rail yard and a town sprung up around it, including a popular if potentially bawdy hotel. Today it exists as a scenic stop for Amtrak with a few preserved buildings. It is worth a visit but frankly the best part was the drive, winding through a very green valley as you descend to river level. I had been expecting something more akin to Harpers Ferry, with the buildings being used as a museum themselves, but not so much. I am sure the people enjoyed their hometown but I think Thurmond must have been a frightful place back in the day, with far fewer trees and coal smoke billowing everywhere. While we were there a freight train did come through though which was exciting and lent a bit of historical realism to the site.

Having had our walk around the remaining buildings we got back in the car and re-ascended the 1000 feet to Fayetteville for a lunch of pepperoni rolls and explored the town. There were a number of vintage shops and at one little artisan co-op where we wound up getting some cookies because the proprietor (and the baker’s father) had so thoroughly explained the local sites and how the baked goods helped support their small farm. Prompted by his suggestion, we eventually departed on one last adventure to Cathedral Falls which are worth another winding drive. They are right by the road so no hiking is involved but they are gorgeous. The falls are ensconced in an appropriately cathedralesque semi-circle of rock topped by trees, and cascade down further domes of rock to beautiful effect. We spent some time admiring them before departing one final time for Fayetteville proper.

After that it was only really a matter of enjoying one final night surrounded by the sounds of rain and frogs and then the drive back the next day. That drive featured more Americana, namely a breakfast at Tudor’s Biscuit World and a lunch at Buc-ee’s, which is something approximating the opposite of Diamond Point. But it is all these things that make us what we are I suppose, and each are to be celebrated in their own way.

For one of the long weekends back in the spring my super amazing wife and I decided to go to New River Gorge National Park! It was beautiful.

We had a couple of motivations, the major one being that it was a three-day weekend and so it would be a waste to not get out of town. The second is that my super amazing wife is a big fan of going to national park sites, and New River Gorge has the claim to fame that, besides all the natural wonders, it is the newest national park. I hadn’t realized before going that this had been mostly a bureaucratic step, with the site having been in the national park system as a national river for over four decades by that point. But still, novelty!

We set out amongst uninspiring weather, with rain coming down hard or harder during the drive. We lucked out with the weather really, as the sun came out when we were hiking and the rain letting up mostly when we wanted to be out and about. Then in the evenings when we were cozily secure in our lodgings we could hear the rain come down amongst the trees and frogs and it was oh so very nice.

To break up the drive we stopped at the Cestari Sheep & Wool Company which was great. That place was indeed a sheep & wool company. My super amazing wife found them because they are a small sheep farm with their own flock of Rambouillet sheep which they turn into yarn in-house, a combination of words which ensures my super amazing wife will eventually darken your doorstep and buy a sweater-quantity of yarn. They will also grill up a lamb burger for you on weekends, and that was a delicious lamb burger indeed. Inside their shop it is all sheep-themed with sheepskin gloves, sheepskin booties, sheep meat, sheep cheese, yarn, wool blankets, you name it, and then a whole farm store to boot with ciders and wines and jams and what have you. They even had some antiques for sale and upstairs is housed a tiny “museum” of textile manufacturing equipment. They seemed really nice and are worth a stop if any of that at all interests you.

Eventually we approached Fayetteville and the gorge, but before crossing turned off into the Canyon Rim Visitor Center to see the gorge as the National Park Service intended. They have a viewing platform down 178 steps which signs warn you very sternly that you’ll have to walk back up again yourself. It really wasn’t so bad of a climb and we saw plenty of dogs. As you descend you are well ensconced in the woods and only really break out into the view at the very end, giving you a dramatic reveal of the bridge above and the river below. This gives you a chance to not consider just how thin and spindly the bridge looks, really, before you drive over it later. No need to think about that at all.

Having verified the gorge was there, and knowing we would get further dramatic views the next day, we head back up those steps and finished our drive before getting some dinner. Despite not being mountain bike enthusiasts ourselves, we went to The Handle Bar + Kitchen (get it, they do bikes there) for dinner, another lovely spot. This was a bit of a theme of our time in New River Gorge, where it seems the majority of people go for adventure such as long hikes or whitewater rafting or BASE jumping or rock climbing, but we instead went for scenic views and cozy mountain town vibes. So even without a mountain bike in tow at The Handle Bar we enjoyed some excellent brats and fries while dining near a small herd of very friendly goats who will let you give them a scratch if you walk up to the fence. From there, an excellent day was rounded out by an excellent evening playing scrabble, cozily tucked away from the rain.

We are wrapping up our current little sunshine state series with everyone’s favorite Florida fauna, the manatee. In the midst of writing that sentence and trying to remember that “the sunshine state” was Florida’s nickname, I have found out that the legislature has gone to great lengths to gerrymander the state symbols and delineate as many animal constituencies as possible. So although manatees are Florida’s state marine mammal, on that same page you’ll note the dolphin still makes the list as the state saltwater mammal (which in my opinion does not address manatee migration habits), the alligator is titled the state reptile, leaving therefore room in turn for the panther to represent the entire Linnean kingdom as state animal and thus rounding out every animal that anyone is aware lives in Florida. I will note for the sake of my dairy cow-raising father-in-law that we get down to meat of things with the Cracker Cattle being the Florida state cattle, rounded up presumably by cowboys on the state horse, the Florida Cracker horse. Every state is stupid and ridiculous.

But back to why we’re here, manatees. The state is dotted with manatee viewing areas and over the course of our travels we visited two of them on different days. I am not educating any readers here but manatees, like any reasonable living creature, prefer warm water and will therefore concentrate on cold days where the water is warm, specifically the cooling outlets of power plants. The first of these we visited was Tampa Electric’s Manatee Viewing Center next to their Big Bend Power Station.

I had first learned of this viewing area via Atlas Obscura, and I thought it would be kinda hokey. Like not really a destination, but some picnic tables where the locals were aware you could see manatees. We were very surprised therefore when we arrived and turned into the large parking lot dotted with solar panels leading the way to a massive visitor’s center. It is a whole destination. You could spend the afternoon. We only really touched on a part of it because it was so late in the day when we arrived, that we couldn’t possibly have gotten down to the big viewing tower or anything before the trails closed.

But we arrived and proceeded directly to the manatees. And there were tons! It will be an unfair comparison to our next manatee park, because on the day we visited the TECO MVC it had been cold (for Florida) for the few days prior in addition to being a bit nippy right then. So the manatees were huddled for our viewing pleasure right in the little discharge canal. They mostly floated there. It was a lot like watching hippos, in that most of what you see is small patches of the backs of manatees, though every once in a while you see a snort or them swimming around. Manatees fight less than hippos do though. Still, magical to see the majestic manatee in its natural(ish) habitat.

And the visitor center is very nice too. We didn’t poke around the exhibits much, but they had a café and a gift shop. The whole place is set up by the power company to make people feel better about living next to a coal-fired power plant (when I bought a lapel pin in the gift shop the credit card charge was to Tampa Electric), but it’s pretty effective. It seems a great place to take kids, and also very significantly they had an unbranded Mold-a-Rama, which I went gaga for. I love a Mold-a-Rama, and I am now the proud owner of a plastic manatee.

Our next manatee viewing experience some time later was down at the Fort Myers Manatee Park! This again was a nice little way to spend some time in an afternoon. This park is downstream (as seems obvious in hindsight now that I’ve looked it up) of the Fort Myers Power Plant. This one, from my quick Googling, is natural gas- and fuel oil-fired. The biggest thing about this park for us is that it had been warmer when we visited, so there were not so many manatees. They were taking advantage of the nicer weather to go forage in less crowded pastures. But there were a few, and also some big fish and then also some kayakers, one of whom we got to watch capsize. I can’t tell if that was due to the fish, the manatees, or a personalized imbalance.

The rest of the park here too is a nature park with some short nature trails, and we got to check those out more thoroughly in this location because we had more time. It is always beautiful to be in nature. This location too had a gift shop (though without lapel pins that said something akin to “Fort Myers Manatee Park”) but which supported the local government instead of the local power company. There was no visitor center per se except a few signs about manatees. All in all a nice little local park, with the added bonus of seeing some manatees, and pondering the modern power infrastructure that makes the world work.

This post continues of course my current little disjointed Florida series, but it also continues a survey of Tampa-adjacent art museums – I have previously covered on this blog visiting both the Dalí Museum and the Imagine Museum. Both those museums are actually in St. Petersburg, but we won’t split hairs. On this day we were in fact in Tampa visiting the Tampa Museum of Art to give us something intellectual to do on a sunny Florida day in late November.

The most significant part of the experience of going to the Tampa Museum of Art was the fact that we (my super amazing wife and I) went with my mom. As a youth, I do not recall my family going to art museums a whole bunch. This is not my mom’s fault, it is the fault of kids having such a heavy choice in the selection of museums, by which I mean my brother always wanted to go to the Natural History Museum but if I had a say in the matter we would be going over to the Air & Space Museum. I think if dad got to pick we went over to the American History Museum, and mom’s influence was generally being in favor of any museum that would keep either the kids or dad from getting too rowdy. All of which to say that although it’s not like we haven’t taken mom to art museums before (see my first two links), it is always fun!

And the Tampa Museum of Art has quite an eclectic collection. Thinking back, the eclecticness is probably my major recollection. The museum’s website has that habit of particular museums that I am disappointed by, i.e. they have only a tiny portion of their collection viewable online, so it will be hard to show you some of this, as a heads up. The bulk of the museum is up on the second floor, and exiting the elevator we were deposited in a small section of I think recently acquired contemporary works. The first ones I took photos of were by Ya La’Ford and Paul Devoti. The piece my mom particularly liked, which I cannot find online because I did not take the right photos, was a large photographic artwork titled I think “Tod’s Liquors.” This was a I think you would call it a surrealist piece, a photo of the eponymous store but with out front a whole bunch of people designed to exude character. It would be seedy if it weren’t so sunny and my mom liked it a bunch. Maybe that says something about her psyche. This is a swerve for her because while that was up there in her favorites list, her actual favorite was a much less surprising pick by Emile Gruppe titled “Winter Stream.”

I mean look at that thing, that is much more a mom piece of art. This piece was in the second part of the museum we wandered through in our rectangular journey (the museum is mostly on the one floor, and you go around the perimeter), a long gallery of various impressionists and closely related artists. I feel like I am about to say I didn’t know the earth went around the sun here, but I’m not sure I was aware there were particularly any American impressionists. But there were and they were pretty good. As you walked down the gallery the impressionism came into focus with a number of artworks more in the Hudson School vein. The bits I liked the most though were the most Florida bits, which were paintings of the swamp. There were some really great ones! I feel like capturing say a sunset over a river valley nestled amongst mountains is a difficult skill but a widespread one as you got all these American artists roving the West learning from each other on how to paint that, but how many artists were honing the ability to evoke the particular choking depth of a cypress grove? It seems to me it takes a real light brush for that stuff but some of the artists on display had mastered it.

Like all conscientious American art museums are doing these days, the museum was also taking a focus on art by Black artists. “Untitled (Marshland with Palm)” above is by Highwayman Alfred Hair, but also they had a small if stunning display of Vodou flags by Haitian artist Myrlande Constant. These were really remarkable. We have a Haitian friend whose house is filled with beautiful art, but these flags were an artform we were entirely unfamiliar with. They are so intricate, using beadwork to form scenes inspired by religious stories.

But I mentioned eclecticness. After all that Very American stuff, then the museum has the real pride of its collection, a whole bunch of mostly Etruscan artifacts. You really gotta change up your perspective as you go from one gallery to the next. Mom wasn’t too interested. The focus on the antiquities comes from an early donor, one Joseph Veach Noble. There is apparently exactly one photo of this guy, and it is fierce. But what to say about these artifacts? They were neat. The Etruscans are mysterious enough that every little glimpse into their lives is a portal into a strange and unknown world. Like a little model of a liver used for divination, that is something I would never do, use a liver to divine the future. And then of course there is also the mundane but beautiful, like a 2300-year-old fish plate with bright colors and fetching wave pattern on the side and a very useful built-in central indentation probably used for holding fish sauce. I would use that today and as always it is so amazing to see the same brushwork that they would have seen as they sat down to an evening meal.

And so yeah that was the museum. A nice place with a lot of cool art and changing exhibitions. It is strongest when focusing on art centered on Florida itself, reaching into the swampy mists to discover a side of the United States not typically part of the American canon. But artifacts are cool too!