S-ART-urday (Art Museum Day)

In conjunction with International Museum Day, today is Art Museum Day! 

International Museum Day was established by the International Council of Museums in 1977 to encourage public awareness of the role of museums in the development of society. International Museum Day is organized on or around May 18th each year. Last year, 32,000 museums from 129 countries participated in International Museum Day. Approximately 125 museums in the United States celebrated Art Museum Day by offering free admission or special programs. Click here to see which art museums in your area are hosting special events today.

What museums have you visited recently?

Check out these past blog posts for some of my favorite museum visits: Kentuck; Smithsonian; MoMA

Washington D.C. Part 2

Here are more photos from my day in Washington, D.C. For a girl that wants to work in a museum one day, I was seriously in heaven.

Flight attendant uniforms
at the Air and Space Museum

John Glenn's space suit

"I have a feeling that there is just one more flight in my system."  -  Amelia Earhart, June 1, 1937 before what would become her last flight.  

Woolworth's lunch counter from Greensboro, NC sit-ins

World War II canning poster at NMAH

NMAH

JFK's inauguration

Filing cabinet broken into at Watergate at NMAH 

Berlin Wall at NMAH

Library of Congress

Creating the United States

Hope for America: Performers, Politics and Pop Culture

Hope for America jukebox

Above is a screen shot of a jukebox from the Library of Congress politics and pop culture exhibit that played songs about political or social issues.  I listened to snippets of a lot of my favorites from the 1960s and 1970s, but played this entire song in honor of my mom, who introduced me to Aretha when I was just a young little thing.

S-ART-urday (Robert Rauschenberg)

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) was born in Port Arthur, Texas and served in the U.S. Marines during World War II.  For a brief period, he used the GI Bill to study art in Paris, but moved to North Carolina after less than a year. He moved to chaotic and exciting New York after North Carolina and became truly inspired.  Not really belonging to any one movement, he rejected the Abstract Expressionists and embraced popular culture and non-traditional materials.  In 1997, the Guggenheim Museum organized the most comprehensive exhibition of his works ever.  Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective featured nearly 300 works.  Rauschenberg died from heart failure on May 12, 2008.  

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Find out more about Erased de Kooning (1953), Rauschenberg's work created by erasing a work created by Willem de Kooning.  

via MoMA

Bed, 1955, is one of Rauschenberg's first combines. This mixed media piece was on view during my trip to MoMA last week. It is oil and pencil on an his actual pillow, sheet, and quilt.

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This piece, Untitled (Asheville Citizen), was made from two canvases, matte black paint, and a piece of the August 3, 1951 Asheville Citizen newspaper. Asheville is near Black Mountain College, an experimental arts college with professors like Josef Albers, where Rauschenberg was a student during the late 1940s and early 1950s.   It is reminiscent of Mark Rothko. This was on view as well during my visit.

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Signs, 1970, is a silkscreen print that really sums up the 1960s through an assemblage of various clippings. Images include U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Janis Joplin, Martin Luther King, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin.  According to Rauschenberg, Signs was "conceived to remind us of love, terror, violence of the last ten years. Danger lies in forgetting."

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Lotus Bed I from The Lotus Series, a 2008 series of twelve digital prints.  View more of his prints here.

View previous S-ART-urday posts: DIY Paint Chips, Tom Slaughter, Eric Carle, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Molly Mattin, Chuck Close

Welcome to the Concrete Jungle! - New York (Part 1)

I arrived in New York Monday evening after my weekend in Philadelphia and stayed with my lovely friend Lydia until Thursday afternoon.  Lyd works at the Museum of Modern Art and has Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, so we did a lot of sightseeing together.  Thursday morning I followed her to work and explored MoMA for myself.   

Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge 

Grimaldi's

The Starry Night

F-111

F-111 cont'd

Read all the posts about my spring break trips: New York 1, New York 2, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. 1 

Do you have a favorite museum? Tell me about it! 

All photos are my own unless credited otherwise.All images appearing on this blog that were taken by the author are exclusive property of Jamie Burke.  Reproduction with permission only.  

What Does An Archivist Do?

I know these are getting old, but this made me laugh. Especially because while it takes too long to explain to people why I am in Library school, it takes four seconds to say "Abigail Chase in National Treasure."

via Flickr

Same Song, Different Verse

And they have done it again...Ryan Gosling stars, once again, in the newest Hey Girl addition, Hey Girl. I love museums.