The Museum of the North

Posted on August 15, 2021 by admin

The flight from Seattle to Fairbanks actually isn’t that long, only three hours or so. I expect getting to Anchorage is even shorter, something to keep in mind for the future.
I could see parts of Vancouver Island not long after takeoff, including the city of Victoria from on high. Only a few days earlier, I’d seen it from a vista in Olympic National Park, far away but distinct on the shore of the Salish Sea.

Soon, however, British Columbia and whatever I might have seen of southeast Alaska were obscured by clouds. Closer to Fairbanks, the clouds thinned, and in places I got to see just how undeveloped the interior of Alaska is. A structure here, one there, a place that looked like cultivated land (maybe giant cabbages), but not much else manmade.

I arrived in Fairbanks on July 26 to find partly cloudy skies and comfortable temps, in the low 70s. It was mid-afternoon, with a lot of light ahead, so I made my way to the Museum of the North, which is on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and thoughtfully open until 7 pm during the summer. Seemed like a good choice for the first place I went in Alaska. Not much else looks like it in Fairbanks.
“Joan Soranno and the GDM/HGA architectural team designed the building to convey a sense of Alaska,” says the museum web site. Hm.

A sign inside the building expands on that idea: “The design is a composition of four abstract forms. Angled, curved, tipped and cantilevered, these forms reflect the lines and shapes found in Alaska’s coastlines, mountains and glaciers.”

The exhibits cover a lot of ground. “The museum’s research collections — 2.5 million artifacts and specimens — represent millions of years of biological diversity and thousands of years of cultural traditions in the North,” the museum says.

The university began exhibiting artifacts as long ago as 1929, with various places for its displays, but the current building wasn’t completed until 2006.

“The collections are organized into 10 disciplines: archaeology, birds, documentary film, earth sciences, ethnology/history, fine arts, fishes/marine invertebrates, insects, mammals, and plants,” the museum says.

Let’s start with one of those mammals. He greets you at the entrance to the first-floor gallery.

Followed by plenty of other sizeable creatures of a stuffed nature.

Along with prehistoric relics.

The first-floor Gallery of Alaska is organized geographically, with sections for the Southeast, South-Central, Interior, Western Arctic Coast and Southeast. The exhibits include much more than large stuffed animals.

The Native presence is well covered.

Nods to the Russian period.

And the early U.S. years.

If genuine, there’s a 19-oz. gold nugget in there among others nearly that large. I assume the display is wired against theft.

On the second floor is the Rose Berry Alaska Art Gallery, which includes an eclectic mix. The only thing all the works have in common is that they were created by Alaskan artists.

“Arctic Winter” by Theodore R. Lambert, 1936.

“Iron Eskimo” by T. Mike Croskrey, 2002.

“Great Alaska Outhouse Experience” by Craig N. Buchanan, 2005

That one has an interactive element. You can enter the structure and sit down. You’ll then be up close to the walls and something of a ceiling.

All in all, the museum turned out to be a pretty good way to start my visit to Alaska.

The Edsel & Eleanor Ford House

Posted on June 21, 2021 by admin

Major thunderstorm last night, especially around 10:30, when I had a mind to take out the trash. Soon my phone started making a racket. It was sounding a tornado warning. That and the lightning and the heavy rain persuaded me to postpone my outdoors task until around midnight, when the storm had blown over. Naperville, a good ways to the south, had the worst of it.

Last Friday afternoon in greater Detroit, we made our way to Grosse Pointe Shores to see the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House, a 20,000-square-foot mansion on the shore of Lake St. Clair completed in 1928. The Fords hired Albert Kahn, who seems to have done everything in metro Detroit, to design the place.

The Fords had liked the cottages they’d seen in England, especially in the Cotswolds, including such features as stone roofs, vine-covered walls and lead-paned windows. Not only did the Ford House design reflect English inspiration, the Fords had paneling, fixtures and other bits and pieces of Old England brought over for installation in the new mansion, back when that sort of thing was possible.

All in all, a handsome set of rooms to wander through. Such as barrel-vaulted Gallery, the largest room in the house. Sizable events were (and are) held here.
“The Gallery… is paneled with sixteenth-century oak linenfold relief carved wood paneling,” notes Wiki. “Its hooded chimneypiece is from Wollaston Hall in Worcestershire, England; the timber-framed house had been demolished in 1925 and its dismantled elements and fittings were in the process of being dispersed… [the] barrel-vaulted ceiling for the Gallery was modeled on one at Boughton Malherbe, Kent, England.”

A handsome living room. Too handsome ever to be a living space, I think, and no doubt clutter wasn’t allowed, or at least the staff made sure it disappeared.

This looks more livable: an upstairs art deco bedroom, one of the more modern rooms designed by Walter Dorwin Teague. You can imagine leaving newspapers and magazines and books lying around in a room like this, with a globe or two sitting around as well. Not visible in my picture are the number of radios the Fords had built into various pieces of furniture.

An attached complementary bathroom.

In Edsel Ford’s private office, I noticed a flag behind glass.

Adm. Byrd had taken the flag with him on his flight over the South Pole, and gave it to Ford — who had supported Byrd’s expedition, besides being the president of the company that built his airplane, a Ford trimotor — along with a handwritten letter. In another part of house is a flag Byrd took with him on his North Pole expedition.

One more item inside the house: a copy of a portrait of Edsel Ford by Diego Rivera. The artist wasn’t so much of a red that he wouldn’t take money from a leading captain of industry.

Outside, as you’d expect, the house has an expansive view of the lake.

Plus swarms of mayflies, some of which decided to land on my shirt. They didn’t bite or do anything but appear in large numbers in my vicinity.

We asked a Ford House worker about them, learning that they’re known locally as fishflies. This is their high season, when they are most likely to swarm.

St. Joseph, Joliet

Posted on March 10, 2021 by admin

The iron works in Joliet might be ruins these days, but St. Joseph Catholic Church, one of the city’s major church buildings, still stands on Chicago St. downtown. It’s the second church on the site, built in 1905 to serve Slovenian immigrants, many of whom worked in the local iron and steel mills.

By the time we got there on Sunday, masses were over, and it might have been closed in the afternoon even under normal circumstances. Still, we got a good look at the exterior.

“The St. Joseph community includes Slovenian attire and music in its Masses, offers one Mass in Slovenian each month, refers to the Virgin Mary by her Slovenian name of Marija Pomagaj and holds a celebration for St. Nicholas Day, which is a tradition in Slovenia,” Shaw Media reported on the occasion of the parish’s 125th anniversary, including some interior shots.

Charles Wallace, an Irish-born Chicago architect (1871-1949), designed St. Joseph. He apparently did a fair number of churches in the Chicago area during the golden age of church building for large immigrant communities.

Across the street from the church is this building, headquarters of the Slovenian Union of America as well as the Slovenian Women’s Union of America Heritage Museum. The building dates from 1910.

Closed, of course. My kind of little museum, though, so we might visit some other time. Might visit Slovenia some other time, too, with any luck. I hear it’s a pleasant place to visit.

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.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Museums