National Museum of Mexican Art ’15

Posted on November 8, 2020 by admin

Five years ago this month, I made it to the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen, in time to see its annual Día de los Muertos exhibit. This year it was cancelled as an in-person event, as you’d think. No visiting the Day of the Dead exhibit in person, to reduce the chance of Death coming your way.

I haven’t visited since, though there’s still time to see this year’s exhibit virtually, which is probably interesting, but not as satisfying as being there. If this year has taught us anything, it’s that primary experience is primary.

At the National Museum of Mexican Art, I experienced art skulls.

Two Puebla artists, Jose Antonio Cazabal Castro and Silverio Feliciano Reyes Sarmiento, created this monumental altar for Day of the Dead celebrations in the town of Huaquechula in the state of Puebla. Remembering a boy, looks like.

One more.
A detail, most of it really, of “Skeletons of Quinn/Calacas de Quinn,” a 2015 work by Hugo Crosthwaite of Baja California.

Dickson Mounds Museum

Posted on November 3, 2020 by admin

Got up early to vote this morning, since I believe that visiting the polls for a few minutes isn’t any riskier than going to a grocery store. Also, I am just mossbacked enough to want to vote on election day, just as my parents and grandparents et al. did, though I don’t begrudge anyone else the vote at some other convenient time or place.

It only took a few minutes. Few other people were there at the time. I’ve seen more in mid-day, especially during the 2008 election. Only one thing on the ballot made me smile this year: Willie Wilson, candidate for U.S. Senate from the Willie Wilson Party. That’s the best name for a party since the Rent is Too Damn High.

A few miles outside of Lewistown, Illinois, is the Dickson Mounds Museum. As the sign says, it’s a branch of the Illinois State Museum.

We arrived just after it opened at 10 on October 17. I hadn’t visited any museums of any kind since the Getty Villa back in February, for obvious reasons. But I figured the risk of infection at a place like Dickson Mounds was very low. For one thing — the main thing, actually — almost no one else was there, even on a Saturday.

And I mean no one. Entrance is free, so we didn’t have to interact with the woman behind the entrance counter. There might have been a few other employees of the museum around, but we didn’t see them. As we were leaving less than a hour later, we saw a couple with a small child entering. That was it.

The main museum building.

Completed in 1972, it looks something like a set from Logan’s Run, only browner.

The museum is reasonably interesting, including a temporary exhibit of gorgeous prints by Audubon. Mostly the place focuses on the Mississippian peoples who lived in the area 1,000 years ago and more, and who, like a number of other peoples, left mysteriously before Europeans ever came to the Americas.

But the story of the museum itself is just as interesting if not more so, I think. For example, we were nearly 30 years too late to see any skeletons.

In the 1920s, a resident of these parts, one Don Dickson, started digging into Indian mounds on his family’s farm. He discovered skeletons. Lots of them. Maybe in the 19th century, such a find would have been unearthed and put into a traveling show, a seriously undignified outcome for human remains.

Dickson had a different idea, however, one more suited to his time, when Americans were more mobile than ever. He built a private museum around the skeletons in situ and people came to see them.

Not that dignified an outcome either, but at least the archaeological value of the site wasn’t completely destroyed. According to the museum, University of Chicago archaeologists investigated the area for years.

In 1945, Dickson sold the site to the state of Illinois, which later built the current building and still displayed the skeletons for decades. By the 1980s, the indignity of that arrangement was more widely understood, so in 1992 the state sealed off the remains beneath the building. Visitors today would not know about them unless they do further reading.

(Do people say the museum is haunted? That’s all it takes for a place to be considered haunted, after all.)

The museum also includes a lot of undeveloped land. A number of well-marked trails cross the land, so we took a walk.

Second-growth forest, I suspect, if this used to be farmland. A large section of land was fenced off with a tall mesh fence. Archaeological sites that wankers might try to plunder? Could be, though nothing about the fence explained its presence.

Dinosaurs of New York

Posted on August 23, 2020 by admin

Back in the days of paper letters and postcards, not every correspondence I started ended up in the mail. I have an entire file of letters and a few postcards that I didn’t finish and didn’t mail.

Usually that was for ordinary reasons, such as forgetting to complete it for months, by which time the news was stale. Only on rare occasions did I write a letter and think better of sending it because of its content, though I have a few insolent work memos of that kind.

I wrote a large postcard to a friend of mine in Illinois on August 27, 1983, while I was still in New York City. I think it got lost among the papers I had with me a few days later when I went to Nashville, and all these years later, I still have it.

Note the missing piece. I got as far as stamping the thing, but later removed it for re-use.

The printed text of the card says:

ALLOSAURUS (foreground) was a large, meateating dinosaur that lived during the Jurassic period of earth history, about 140 million years ago. This aggressive reptile, which preyed upon other dinosaurs, was about 30 feet long and probably weighed several tons when it was alive. Several individuals of CAMPTOSAURUS, a small, inoffensive, plant-eating dinosaur, are shown in the background.

Painting on Display
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
NEW YORK, U.S.A.

I wrote, in part:

Dear R—

I have come to New York to learn such oddities as “August is Bondage Month,” which a simple advertisement in the window of the Pink Pussycat Boutique told me. [Remarkably, the shop is still there; give the people what they want, I guess.]

Since the long line to pass through customs at JFK [returning from Europe], I’ve shuffled first to the P’s house in New Rochelle, then S’s house in Stamford, Conn. Since last Friday (the 19th), I have been at D’s apartment while she is on the Jersey shore with her parents. This is a good arrangement. I’ve become acquainted with the Village and various other parts of the city.

This card, for instance, is an accurate portrait of Brooklyn, by the East River.

The National Museum of Denmark

Posted on June 21, 2020 by admin

Another example of somewhere I visited but don’t really remember: The National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet). You could say that’s because I was there 37 years ago this month, which is a long time ago, but at roughly the same time, I visited the Carlsburg Brewery and Tivoli — the same day in the case of Tivoli — and I remember those fairly well.

Memory’s a slippery character. Here’s what I wrote at the time.

June 18, 1983

Walked [after breakfast] to the National Museum and spent a lot of time in the early Danish collections, a fine assortment of artifacts from pre-farmers (4000 BC) to the Vikings. They had a lot — tools, weapons, pots, clothes, ornaments, more. I noticed that much of the collection — seemed like nearly all of it — survived because it was buried with people.

Then I spent a long time ogling the coin collection, mostly the Roman ones. The museum had at least one example of every emperor and plenty of usurpers and others. I didn’t take as much time in the rest of the museum, but walked through. It is vast. Rooms and rooms and rooms of exhibits.

I left to eat lunch at a Chinese place, spring rolls with sauce and a heap of rice. After lunch I bought chocolate: Toblerone and Ritter Sport.

Those sound like ordinary chocolate purchases, and maybe they are now, but in those days Toblerone wasn’t available in every shop from here to East Jesus and my traveling companions and I had never heard of Ritter Sport. It was an important discovery for us that summer, somewhere in Germany a few weeks earlier. If you’re walking around all day, chocolate’s a good thing to have. Even better, it’s good to snack on high-quality choco like Ritter Sport. Best of all, it’s chocolate that I’ve enjoyed ever since it became available in the U.S. sometime in the late ’80s.

The Getty Villa

Posted on March 9, 2020 by admin

I’m connected on Facebook with a man named Rolf Achilles. I took a noncredit class he taught on Chicago history at the Newberry Library in the late 1980s. I think he also attended the Harvest Dinner Party at my apartment on October 22, 1988, but I’m not sure — a lot of people were there. Not sure I’ve seen him since then, or whether he’d remember me if he saw me.

Rolf’s an art historian, and often publishes images of fine art on Facebook. Not long ago, he posted pictures of items on display at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, California. I also happened to be planning my trip to California at the time. Almost at once I knew I wanted to see the place, along with the Getty Center. Thanks, Rolf.

When the time came, on the afternoon of February 23, I only had time for one of them. I decided on the Getty Villa. Of course I did. It offers a collection of ancient art.
Oil billionaire and notorious tightwad J. Paul Getty had the property developed in the 1970s to house his large collection of ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan art. Tight-fisted Getty might have been in many things, but not when it came to the sumptuous villa. The structure, on the hills overlooking the Pacific, is a re-creation of a specific villa in Herculaneum, the Villa of the Papyri, which wasn’t just any Roman country villa, but among the poshest known.

Apparently the old man died before the villa was completed, or at least he never went to see it. Too bad for him. The villa was opened to the public as a museum for a short time, but soon closed and wasn’t re-opened until 2006, after some additions to the grounds.

Langdon Wilson Architects did the original design. “Architects looked closely at the partial excavation of the Villa dei Papiri and at other ancient Roman houses in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae to influence the design,” the Getty web site says. “The scale, appearance, and some of the materials of the Getty Villa are taken from the Villa dei Papiri, as is the floor plan, though it is a mirror of the original.”

In 2006, Machado Silvetti renovated the villa and added a nearby complex of buildings, such as a cafe, museum store and auditorium. These buildings set the pattern for your approach to the Getty Villa. After parking at some distance, you walk to a bank of elevators or flight of stairs that take you to a elevated path to the villa. Then you have to go back down (part of the way) to enter the villa — via a 500-seat outdoor amphitheater, which was also part of the addition.

In this shot, the amphitheater is to the left, the entrance to the right.
The entrance. I decided to go in and look at the building and grounds first, and then the works of art on display.
The entrance leads to the Atrium, a splendid introduction to the structure that has rooms off each side, exhibiting art. Then the structure opens up into an open-air Inner Peristyle.

“This type of space was common in the second century B.C., when the main structure of the ancient villa was built,” signage in the peristyle says. “The Getty Villa’s garden is lushly planted with a variety of annuals and perennials bordered with hedges. The colonnade is paved the terrazzo, a mosaic flooring… A long, narrow pool emphasizes the east-west axis of the Getty Villa. Statues of young women, reproductions of ancient bronze sculptures found at the Villa dei Papiri, are set around the pool.”

Exit the Inner Peristyle and you’re on a small balcony overlooking to Outer Peristyle. I stood there for a while, just gawking. It’s a gawk-worthy place.
The top level of awe at the property, as far as I was concerned. The Atrium had been bronze and the Inner Peristyle had been silver. Now I was at the gold level.

Walk out into the Outer Peristyle and all the way to the far end, and you get a view of the Inner Peristyle that you came from.I quote at length a press release from the time the Getty Villa reopened in the mid-2000s that’s remarkably informative: “Designed by Denis L. Kurutz Associates, and implemented by kornrandolph, inc., the Getty Villa landscape takes into account the lush topography of the Malibu canyon.

“In addition to the historically accurate species found in the four gardens and in areas closest to the J. Paul Getty Museum building, the landscape design also features a mix of Mediterranean and native California varieties, local plants of the Santa Monica mountains, and plants from other parts of the world that grow in climates similar to that of Southern California.

“[The Outer Peristyle] is the Villa’s main garden, the largest and grandest of the four. Bronze sculpture and replicas of statues discovered at the remains of the first-century Villa dei Papiri have been placed in their ancient findspots…

“Just like its smaller neighbor, the Outer Peristyle is dominated by a large pool running down the center. Trimmed ivy topiaries frame the edges of the pool, which is crowned at its north end with two sculptural pomegranate trees and enclosed by 24 Grecian laurels on either side, mirroring the structural columns of the building.

“Four benches are available — two located in arbors draped in grape vines, and two nestled in pockets surrounded by hand-crafted wood trellises. Clusters of rose gardens are filled with ancient gallica, damask, and musk roses, while much of the ground is covered with a layer of sweet violet. Flowering perennials such as chamomile, daisy, rosemary, and sage are planted in abundance for variety and color, along with tulips, iris, Madonna lily, cyclamen, and narcissus.”

I understand that the Getty Villa isn’t an exact replica of the original in Herculaneum. For one thing, the Villa dei Papiri hasn’t been fully excavated. Also, buildings in our time need to be up to modern fire codes and so on. Still, as a re-creation of ancient Rome, this is likely to be the best I’ll ever see.

It’s also an excellent setting for the art collection. I’ve read that the once upon a time, Getty had some issues with stolen artwork. Or at least disputed provenance. Back around the time the villa re-opened, a number of objects were sent back to Italy and Greece. Hope that’s all behind the museum. What remains is amazing enough.

Might as well start with the museum’s star piece of art. Its Mona Lisa, you might say: the Lansdowne Hercules, Roman, ca. AD 125. (As the museum styles it — not CE.)
Found near Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, so maybe the emperor himself saw it. In our time, the statue has its own room in the Getty Villa.

Other Roman statues include Leda and the Swan, AD 1st century.
Venus, Roman, AD 2nd century.
Crouching Venus, Roman, AD 100-150
Jupiter, Roman, 1st century BC
Plus busts. A number of emperors. Such as Augustus.
Tiberius.
Caligula.
All very good, but I’ll never shake the feeling that those emperors looked like Brian Blessed, George Baker and John Hurt, respectively.

The Greek galleries excelled in pottery. All the pictured objects are Athenian, 6th or 5th century BC. Such as Storage Jar with Diomedes Slaying Rhesos.
Mixing Vessel with Adonis and Goddesses.
Prize Vessel with a Chariot Race
All in all, the ancient art collection is in the same league as those at the British Museum and the Pergamon Museum, in my amateur opinion, though I’ve barely scratched the surface of the many collections around the world.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Broad

Posted on March 3, 2020 by admin

The last time I was in Los Angeles, the Walt Disney Concert Hall looked like this — still more than two years from its completion in 2003. I paid no attention to it then.

On February 22, 2020, the 2,265-seat hall looked like this from across Hope St.
Whatever else you can say about Frank Gehry, his designs aren’t like their surroundings. They’re going to stand out. Also, they’re interesting to stand under.
I’d read that self-guided tours of the venue were free, and that’s true. You get an MP3 player at a table just inside the Hope St. entrance, and off you go. The audio snippets about the development of the building, along with various design elements, are narrated by John Lithgow, with some additional commentary by those who worked on the project, including Gehry.

I was keen to see the auditorium. It was not to be. Musical careers were hanging in the balance in there.

Still, the rest of the interior was worth a look.

Though it’s invisible from the street, the hall has some outside space at mid-level, including greenery. A pleasant interlude among the twists of metal and vaulting ceilings.

At one point, the outdoor space practically becomes a box canyon made of metal.

Later that day, I visited The Broad, which is next door to Disney, though much newer, completed less than five years ago.
Interesting texture for a 120,000-square-foot box. It looks good, but how long will it be until its gleaming exterior begins to turn gray and streaky? Eventually, but I won’t worry about it. That will be on designer Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who did The Broad in collaboration with Gensler.

Even at 6 p.m. — the museum is open till 8 on Saturdays — the standby line was fairly long. But not as long as the more popular rides at Disneyland. It took about 20 minutes to get in.

Once in, you see works by the likes of Christopher Wool, Jean‐Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Kerry James Marshall, Barbara Kruger, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and others. Always something interesting to see, even if not everything on the walls is that compelling.

Somehow I managed to miss the Infinity Mirrored Room by Yoyoi Kusama, which I chalk up to being pretty tired after taking more than 20,000 steps that day. So it goes.

One more thing about The Broad, something other museums with sizable endowments could take their cue from: admission is free. Among others, that means you, Met.

More Skulls and Bones and Things

Posted on February 5, 2020 by admin

Here’s one reason the Field Museum might have jacked up its admission in recent years: it spent $8.3 million in 1997 to acquire the fossilized remains of the T. rex nicknamed Sue. Or at least part of that hefty figure, since other organizations, corporations and HNWIs also chipped in, I understand.

From 2000 to 2018, Sue stood in Stanley Field Hall. Mostly bones, but also a number of replacement replicas for a few missing ones. Even so, the museum and other sources call Sue the most complete T. rex ever discovered, at about 90 percent.

These days, Sue has her — his — gender actually uncertain, so its — own room in the Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet, a multi-room exhibit about the evolution of life on Earth, complete with various fossils to illustrate various periods. Naturally, most of the crowds gravitate to the dinosaur bones, and not just Sue, but the creatures in the large Elizabeth Morse Genius Hall of Dinosaurs, which you reach before you get to the T. rex room.

Lots of impressive fossils there. Such as a triceratops. Can’t very well have a dinosaur collection without one of those.
Or an apatosaurus.
Or a stegosaurus.
Sue not only has its own room, there’s narration and a minor light show as the narrator describes different parts of the beast, the better for the audience to ooh and aah.
The head mounted on the rest of the skeleton is actually a replica. Sue’s head is kept in a separate box.
If I remember right, that’s the way it was when Sue was in Stanley Field Hall.

Sue isn’t the last of the fossil parade. Time marches on, a meteor kills the dinosaurs, and mammals increase in size. This fellow looks pretty large, even for a bear.
Known as Arctodus, or a short-face bear, it lived in Pleistocene North America but vanished about 11,600 years ago.

An Irish Elk.
How did they hold their heads up? Strong neck muscles, I guess. More subtle minds than mine have taken up that very question. Amusingly, Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “The Irish Elk, like the Holy Roman Empire, is misnamed in all its attributes: it is neither exclusively Irish nor an elk.”

A mastodon.
They are all examples of animals that didn’t survive the most recent Ice Age unless, as Gould mentions, Irish Elk survived into historic times. Just goes to show that no matter how tough you are, along comes a little climate change or hunters with pointy sticks and soon all that’s left is your bones, if that.

Field Museum ’20

Posted on February 4, 2020 by admin

Our main destination on Saturday was the Field Museum. Been awhile since we’ve been there. Looks as sturdy as ever.An important consideration was that the museum charges no admission for Illinois residents during the entire month of February, representing a $69 savings for us. A savings in theory, because it’s unlikely we would have ever paid full price. Maybe half that. I don’t have the numbers at handy, but I strongly suspect that ticket prices have significantly outpaced inflation over recent decades, and that sticks in my craw.
Not that you don’t get a high-quality natural history museum for that price.

Something I didn’t know before: the main hall, the grand, sweeping main hall of the Field Museum, which measures about 21,000 square feet, and whose ceiling reaches up 76 feet, actually has a formal name: Stanley Field Hall. He was Marshall Field’s nephew, but more than that, president of the museum for a long time, from 1908 to 1964.
T. rex Sue, the museum’s most famed — and marketed — artifact, isn’t in the hall any more. Those bones occupy their own room these days, more about which later.

Rather, an exhibit called Máximo now lords over the hall, at 122 feet across and 28 feet tall at the head. Not actual bones, but a model cast from a titanosaur discovered in Patagonia, and considered its own species, Patagotitan mayorum, only since 2018.

Still, it’s impressive.
After the main hall, we spent time at the Granger Hall of Gems, the Malott Hall of Jades and at a display of meteorites. Last time I visited the museum, we were promised that there would soon be a permanent exhibit of pieces of the Chelyabinsk Meteor, which fell to Earth in Russia in 2013.

Here they are.
Not that large, but I think every bit as interesting as the dinosaurs. I’ve always had more fondness for astronomy than paleontology.

Here’s something you don’t see every day, which is pretty much the reason you go to a place like the Field.
We’d happened onto an exhibit called Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman. It’s a remarkable group of sculptures.

“In the early 1930s, the Field Museum commissioned sculptor Malvina Hoffman to create bronze sculptures for an exhibition called The Races of Mankind,” the museum says. “Hoffman, who trained under Auguste Rodin, traveled to many parts of the world for an up-close look at the ‘racial types’ her sculptures were meant to portray.

“By the time the exhibition was deinstalled more than 30 years later, more than 10 million people had seen it — as well as its misguided message that human physical differences could be categorized into distinct ‘races.’

“Today, 50 of Hoffman’s sculptures are back on display — with a new narrative.”

Namely, that Hoffman did some remarkable sculptures of individuals, not illustrations of racial typologies. There’s some indication that Hoffman herself considered the whole typology idea as malarkey, even as she was creating the artwork.

“In her letters from the field, Hoffman told museum curators that she wanted to illustrate the dignity and individuality of each of her subjects,” the museum says.

“The Looking at Ourselves exhibition team believed that naming Hoffman’s previously unnamed subjects was an important way of illustrating that individuality. They spent months poring over Hoffman’s and her husband’s letters and journals, and consulting the work of others who have researched the Hoffman collection over the years, to find the subjects’ given names.

“For subjects whose specific identities remain unknown, the team worked with anthropologists to correctly pinpoint the names of their ethnic groups.”

The figure above, climbing a tree, is a Tamil man from southeast India, identity unknown. This is a Nuer man from Sudan, also unknown.
A group from various parts of Indonesia, put together by the artist. The two standing figures were modeled on Ni Polog and I Regog, a sister and brother from Bali. The others are a man from Madura and one from Borneo, identities unknown.
A Hawaiian: Sargent Kahanamoku, an aquatic athlete and member of a well-known Hawaiian family.
Glad we got to see Hoffman’s work. Ann and I spent a fair amount of time looking at them and discussing them. An idea for those who would destroy discredited statues: re-contexturalize instead.

T.C. Steele State Historic Site

Posted on January 8, 2020 by admin

Back in March 2002, we visited Columbus, Indiana, and took a foray west from there to visit Nashville (Indiana), Brown County State Park and the T.C. Steel State Historic Site. That last one was still closed for the winter.

These days, the site is open year-round. So around noon on December 28, we drove east from Bloomington, less than 30 minutes out of town, into hilly, rural Brown County and on to the state historic site.
In the early 20th century, Theodore Clement Steele and his second wife Selma acquired acreage — played-out farmland — in Brown County and set about building a hilltop house. After various modifications and additions, including a few other buildings, the place became their full-time residence and his main studio space. Even as a museum, the place is homey, full of furniture and other items the Steeles owned, with little roped off from visitors.
The view from downhill.
T.C. Steele is best remembered now for landscapes, but also did a lot of portraits, since that’s where the money was. Numerous examples of both hang in the main house, as well as the larger building nearby (“Big Studio”), well lit by an enormous window.
No doubt about it, Steele had a gift for landscapes. One I especially liked was “Selma in the Garden,” which is hanging in Big Studio. Other examples of his work are here. While T.C. painted, Selma gardened, as nicely depicted by the above-mentioned painting. The land might not have been great for farming, but Selma apparently had the knack for making her gardens flourish.

Gardening isn’t so much in evidence in winter. Still, the grounds are inviting.
We spent time tramping around the woods near the house. Since this was previously farm land, the trees are mostly second growth, some of which the Steeles planted.
Thick with leaves. At that moment, the ground was too warm for snow cover.
T.C. Steele State Historic Site In a poetic touch, the Steeles named their place The House of the Singing Winds. Our visit wasn’t on a windy day, so that isn’t what we heard out on the hillside. Rather, the crunching of leaves underfoot. Without the sound of traffic coming from all directions, and with birds and insects quiet or gone for the season, that was about all we heard. That by itself was a good reason to get out of town.

The Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art

Posted on January 6, 2020 by admin

We didn’t go to St. Louis just after Christmas, much less time travel to St. Louis to see the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. But in a way, we did.

“Occupying two square miles on the western side of St. Louis, the 1904 World’s Fair was the largest in history, with 1,272 acres containing more than 1,500 buildings,” Serious Eats tells us.

“At the heart of the exposition were 11 monumental ‘palaces,’ each dedicated to a subject, such as Electricity, Fine Arts, Horticulture, or Machinery. Sixty-two countries and 42 American states had their own halls or buildings, where they displayed the highest achievements of their cultures and economies… They were designed not to endure for the ages but to captivate the crowds for a brief moment.”

With a few exceptions. The former Palace of Fine Arts is now the St. Louis Art Museum in Forest Park, which we visited during one of our trips to St. Louis. The Connecticut Building at the fair is now the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art in Lafayette, Indiana. That’s where we went during our end-of-December trip.
We arrived about 30 minutes before closing on December 27, but decided pay the admission and look around anyway. Glad we did. Time was short, but one of the volunteers gave us a tour. Spontaneously, since (I think) admission normally gets you a self-guided tour.

She took us from room to room, each well appointed, noting some of the museum’s highlights — paintings by Indiana artists, ceramics, bronzes, towering grandfather clocks, a wide array of other antique furniture, a model train that traversed between two rooms, and this time of the year, Christmas trees and wreaths and other elaborate seasonal decor. Especially prominent on the walls were works by T.C. Steele, Hoosier landscape painter of renown, with numerous other Indiana artists represented as well. Though it’s a fine house museum, the Haan’s specialty is art created in Indiana.

Our guide also told us the story of how the house ended up in Indiana after its stint at the 1904 World’s Fair. The tale began in Connecticut.

“The Charles and Lydia Sigourney mansion in Hartford provided the inspiration for the building,” writes the the Connecticut Historical Society’s Karen DePauw. “The Connecticut commissioners to the Exposition felt the house represented colonial ideas, as well as stood for cultural and social life in present-day Connecticut. Edward T. Hapgood was hired as the architect, and H. Wales Lines Co. served as builders.”

A wealthy fellow from Lafayette, one William Potter, visited the fair and liked the house so much he bought it. Or rather, his wife liked the house so much he bought it and had it rebuilt in Indiana for them to live in: three full floors, a basement, seven fireplaces, five-and-a-half bathrooms, a 26-light brass-and-crystal chandelier, and a double staircase leading to the second floor, among other posh features.

Closer to our time, the Haans, who made their money selling sewing kits to junior high schools, acquired the property in the 1980s as a residence. They’re also collectors of Indiana art, which accumulated over the decades — as things do in a house — and a few years ago they deeded the house to a nonprofit to display their collection.

Behind the house is more art: a sculpture garden sporting Indiana-created work. Such as “Venus Rising” by Tuck Langland of Granger.
“The Miner” by Peter Rujuwa.
Rujuwa, originally from Zimbabwe, now of Indianapolis, also did “The Guitarist.”
“Metal Menagerie” by Roy Patrick of Lafayette.
“Garden Art” by Kathleen Kitch of Lafayette.
Pretty soon we noticed something moving in the sculpture garden. A little cat.
He followed us around for a while, but then lost interest and spent time climbing trees behind the artwork.