A workout for the COVID19 pandemic.
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The Glenstone Art Museum is a unique modern art museum located in Potomac, Maryland. The museum is a blend of human art and nature with 300 acres of landscape that ranges from meadows to forests, crisscrossed with walking paths. The larger art pieces can be found outside in the museum grounds and the smaller ones in the main gallery and pavilions. The Glenstone does not allow visitors to take pictures of most of the indoor art, so here I show you only the photographs and videos that I took of the outdoor items. Nature itself is part of the art at the Glenstone which shifts from one season to another. The emblematic piece of the Glenstone is the amazing Split Rocker floral sculpture by artists Jeff Koons. The pavilions housing the majority of Glenstone’s indoor art are themselves a work of art. At the center of the pavilions is the water court which at the time we visited contained flowering water lilies. A remarkable outdoor sculpture at the Glenstone is Richard Serras’s Sylvester containing a spiral path that you walk to the center of the sculpture. The oldest building at the Glenstone is the main gallery located next to a pond. While we visited the main gallery we saw a performance piece by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija entitled Fear Eats the Soul. We tasted his pumpkin soup with spices, which was delicious, but we had to leave before he made his tacos. Entrance to the Glenstone is free, however bear in mind that it is not easy to get in. They make available a finite number of tickets which when released online are snatched very fast. Your best bet is to do like we did and take the Ride On Bus Route 301 from the Rockville Metro Station which does a few trips back and forth per day. Any visitor arriving on this bus gets to enter the Glenstone without a ticket. The photographs belong to the author and can only be used with permission. The Enchanted Highway is a 32 mile two-lane highway that connects the town of Regent to Interstate 94 in South-Western North Dakota. It is called this way because it contains some amazing scrap metal sculptures which rank among the largest in the world. The sculptures are the work of artist Gary Greff. We drove the highway close to dusk, and the setting sun's light bouncing off or silhouetting the sculptures was truly a remarkable spectacle while surrounded by the wide open spaces of the North Dakota countryside. The photographs belong to the author and can only be used with permission. Fairs are an old-fashioned form of entertainment in our increasingly “on-line” society. I love going to fairs because of the variety and originality the exhibits, the colors, the rides, the lights at night, and the food. But I also like fairs because they provide a link to rural America showcasing the most outstanding results of the activity of our farmers. While large fairs with their huge crowds can be a challenge and small fairs can be boring, middle size fairs offer just the right mix of size and interesting things. This year I visited the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair in Maryland and below you can peruse some of the things I saw. Have you been to a fair? Leave a comment and let me know what you liked. The photographs belong to the author and can only be used with permission. The Biosphere is a museum about the environment located at Park Jean-Drapeau in Montreal, Canada. It is inside a unique spherical structure that originally housed the United States pavilion at the 1967 World’s Fair. The geodesic dome structure made out of steel was designed by the American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. The photographs belong to the author and can only be used with permission.
The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space is an event held in the city of Prague in the Czech Republic every 4 years. The quadrennial is sometimes referred to as the Olympics of design for performance, scenography, and theater architecture. I had the good luck of travelling to Prague while the quadrennial was going on, and I managed to visit a few of the exhibits. In the videos below I present some of my favorite ones. The Hungarian Exhibit (Infinite Dune) Stranded due to a storm, the end of which seems invisible: In this apocalyptic weather-project, the spectator peeks into a space where light, sound, and material all perform together and are synthesized into an immersive experience of transformation and memory. This exhibit won a prize for the Best Exhibition in the Exhibition of Countries and Regions. The Danish Exhibit (Blood of a Virgin) According to legend, the blood from virgins has magical properties. The person in the rotating box is a virgin, and every so often an aide would draw a little blood from him. Then they would have a raffle, and someone from the audience would win and take home the blood! The Russian Exhibit (Theater of a Madman) This installation by Shishkin-Hokusai and Olga Muravitskaya reflects the desire to abandon everything yearning for a solitude that would be similar to madness...an escape into the woods. The Romanian Exhibit This was one of the most surreal exhibits at the quadrennial with its themes of vision, visions, and time.
The writer of the fantastic and the macabre, Edgar Alan Poe, is buried in the grounds of the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, Maryland. For decades on the anniversary of Poe’s birth, a mysterious character would show up at his grave leave 3 roses and toast to the late writer. This character became known in the popular lore as the “Poe Toaster”, and his appearances over the years became the stuff of Baltimore legend. The Poe toaster appearances ceased in 2009 (the bicentennial of Poe’s birth), but the Maryland Historical Society decided to restart the tradition. They organized a competition and selected a new Poe Toaster, who still remains anonymous. This new Toaster shows up at more regular and tourist-friendly times. I went to see his appearance in 2018.  Left: The tower of the former Westminster Presbyterian Church now known as Westminster Hall. Right: The crowd assembles around Poe’s grave waiting for the Poe Toaster.  Left: Poe’s grave. Right: Inscription on grave.  Poe Toaster playing the violin (Left) and laying the roses (right). The Poe Toaster emerged from among the graves in the burial grounds playing Saint Saens' Dance Macabre on a violin. He was wearing a fedora style hat and had a scarf obscuring part of his face. He walked up to Poe’s grave, lay down his violin, and pulled out 3 roses which he placed on the grave.  Poe Toaster toasting The Poe Toaster then proceeded to pull out a bottle of cognac from his coat, fill his glass, and toast to Poe reciting the epigram from the Roman poet Marshall, “Cineri Gloria Sera Venit” (praises to ashes come too late).  Left: Poe Toaster leaving Poe’s grave. Right: The bottle of cognac he left behind. The Toaster then picked up his violin and played “Happy Birthday”, after which he departed by walking back to the burial grounds and disappearing among the tombstones. Who is this man? “Ye who read are still among the living, but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.” From Edgar Allan Poe’s “Shadow” (Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840) The photographs belong to the author and can only be used with permission. My better half and I went on a culinary adventure to the Restaurant at Patowmack Farm in West Virginia. The restaurant menu changes every other day and features fresh produce from local farms. To go you have to make a reservation in advance. The place has a superb view, and the food was great. Every time that the server brought us our dishes he would spend a while describing the different components in the plates. What they serve here has both philosophy and art, and as I expected, it was also pricey. So this is not a place that we will visit often, but it's OK as a one-time adventure. Below is a photographic log of our explorations. The photographs belong to the author and can only be used with permission Marv Ashby & High Octane from the West Virginia Panhandle played traditional and contemporary Bluegrass music at the Black Rock Center for the Arts in Germantown, Maryland on July 6 2019. This is the Sedlec Ossuary outside the town of Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic. These are real bones. When the local cemetery got too full back in the middle ages, the bones of 40,000 people were moved to this chapel. Later on a woodcarver with an artistic streak named František Rint used the bones to make what you see in this video. They have things like a chalice or a coat of arms made entirely out of human bones, and even a chandelier that features all the bones in the human body! |
I am a tinker, tailor,  BlogrollLaura Novak
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