Renwick Wonder

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.