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Some of the greatest attractions of Washington, DC are the museums, most of them free and open year-round. At the Renwick Gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue we explored a fantastic exhibit called Wonder. Each room of the gallery features the work of a single artist who created large-scale installations from unexpected materials like Index cards, marbles, insects and strips of wood to produce awe-inspiring results. When you enter the free exhibit, a sign encourages visitors to take photos. This is what we found.  Jennifer Angus used dead insects that she collected around the world to cover the walls of a room with her design inspirations in "In the Midnight Hour."  Angus startles us into recognition of what has always been a part of our world.  Gabriel Dawes' Plexis A1. Dawe’s architecturally scaled weavings are often mistaken for fleeting rays of light.  The artist Patrick Dougherty has crisscrossed the world weaving sticks into marvelous architectures. Each structure is unique, an improvised response to its surroundings, as reliant on the materials at hand as the artist’s wishes.  Maya Lin uses glass in her piece "Folding the Chesapeake."  John Grade selected a hemlock tree in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle that is approximately 150 years old. His team created a full plaster cast of the tree (without harming it), then used the cast as a mold to build a new tree out of a half-million segments of reclaimed cedar. After the exhibition closes, Middle Fork (Cascades) will be carried back to the hemlock’s location and left on the forest floor,  Visitors can lie on the floor to watch the changing colors of Janet Echelman's woven sculpture, "1.8."  Tara Donovan, "Untitled." Employing mundane materials such as toothpicks, straws, Styrofoam cups, scotch tape, and index cards, Donovan gathers up the things we think we know, transforming the familiar into the unrecognizable through overwhelming accumulation.  Leo Villarreal created this shimmering chandelier that flickers in an ever changing pattern of white light and silver.  Chakia Booker created "Anonymous Donor" with tire treads and re-treads.
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 We left the rig in the Hudson Valley and came to the nation’s capital for most of April where Mark could work in his office for a change. We rented an apartment in Adams Morgan from an old friend and roamed the city as it burst with all the beauty of spring.  At the White House we checked out the protestors who bring their grievances to the President’s front door.  This peace vigil was started by Concepcion Picciotto 35 years ago.  This man claims he was unfairly targeted by the FBI.  The man inside this van believes the Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to the US. In Lafayette Square, across from the White House, a statue of General Lafayette, including these two officers, honors the French contribution to the American Revolution.  We spent a week with Margo and John who joined us from Minneapolis and we explored many corners of the city, including a Nationals baseball game and a film night in the offices of the Washington Post.  Caricatures of Lincoln and Obama at Off the Record, a cozy snug tucked in the basement of the Hay Adams Hotel and across the street from the White House (of course). (Don't miss our tour of the Wonder Exhibit at the Renwick Gallery just down the street.)  At Georgetown University we found these students celebrating the Hindu Festival of Colors.  Everywhere we went, we found the colors of spring.  We pulled out of Death Valley on March 19, headed east where we planned to spend the spring before driving to Alaska. Our first stop was Kanab, Utah, a town made famous by the hundreds of Western movies shot in the shadow of its red stone mountains.   Farther east, we hit the BLM land near Pariah Canyon, an area of amazing land formations that stretches north to the Escalante National Monument and south to Antelope Canyon over the border in Arizona.  The Toadstools of southern Utah. We made plans to come back to explore the area next winter and continued driving to Taos, New Mexico, home of the Earthships and the most delicious New Mexican food.  An Earthship in Taos, New Mexico. On dirt back roads we headed south til we hit the now faded Route 66.   On I-40 now, we headed to Amarillo, where this Cadillac sculpture caught our eye, along with the Second Amendment Cowboy standing proud in West Texas.   Hitting the Texas panhandle, we bounded down two-lane highways and Interstates, into Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia. Luck stayed with us as we drove, missing fires, hail and brimstone of the borderline South til we arrived in Washington, DC, our way heralded by blossoming fruit trees. We finally arrived in the Hudson Valley to be greeted by a spring snow.  |
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