SF Field Trip

My class went to the MoMA and YBCA. I go to the MoMA for school once or twice a quarter. I get that it is a great collection and it rotates a lot but actually I do not go to galleries under my own power except Oakland Art Murmur so it would be nice to go to contemporary shows. But! The show they have on right now is ridiculous, like a retrospective extravaganza of all the famousest artists they've got.

I spent the day being scolded about taking pictures. Pictures are allowed at YBCA- but not at the Song Dong show! And they are allowed at the MoMA, but not at the Muybridge show(nature and sequential photos, like Yosemite and that running horse.) So when I was finally allowed to take pictures, at the retrospective with seriously every famous artist whatsoever, I on accident took a flash photo of a Matisse painting, which is super bad for oil paintings. I had the flash on "forced off" but I wasn't capturing the color so I turned to "simple mode" and the flash totally went off. I was so embarrassed.

And I found an artist I didn't know, Joseph Cornell, who did art in the 1930s that is like today's shadowboxes and found altered collages. This is his pink palace:


And I visited the Maxwell Ernst piece- the numerous family- that I did my final paper on last term for the painting class I didn't pass.

It is still captivating.

Anyway I took a lot of pictures of the Song Dong installation Waste Not before the attendant noticed, but I won't post them because I am sure there was a reason photography is forbidden. It's a powerful piece about family and fear and China and grieving- the artist assisted his mother, Zhou Xiangyuan, in installing the things she collected over decades to keep her family from ever going without.