stone heads

On Tuesday, Scott and I made a stealth* and crazy-fast trip down** to the big bad city*** to redeem a prize we'd won at a church auction. See, one of our fellow UUSO-ers has a son who has the best job ever - which "Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator" - and he donates a private tour of the museum to the fundraiser. This year, we (and the Pie Goddess and Grill Master, with whom we went) won the tour. And it was easily worth several times more than we paid for it.

Some of the many highlights was Kurt, the curator, walking us through his recent installation, Buddhism Along the Silk Road.

Asian art is generally not my thing. But it's amazing how something not your thing can quickly become your thing when someone whose thing it is explains it to you. So I now have a new thing.

What this picture fails to capture is this head's eyes, which are garnet and draw you in.

After exploring this exhibition, Kurt asked us about what we most wanted to see - my answer was textiles - then walked us up, down, and around to show us all he could. It was like having your own pocket docent for a morning.

One of the textiles we saw was a paining.

Which, again, is so much more striking in person. And in person, her dress, despite being made of paint, looks exactly like fabirc, until you get your eyes up close enough to make the gaurds nervous.

On the way, we passed one of my favorites in this collection.

Eventually, I'll remember to write down both artist and title. But I've stumbled upon this same painting a couple of times and am charmed each time. 

Once Kurt had to return to his actual job, we just wandered, as one should do in a museum.

Javanese texile...

... whose intracacy you best appreciate up close.

One of the many ganeshas:

I noticed that a lot of the ganeshas had pennies on their plinths. Is this a thing? Or just random coincidence?

Who hasn't had this day?

I can only tell you how tempting it was to sit in this chair.

I spotted this as we were walking back to the car:

Unfortunately, this isn't a retail outlet. (It's art, apparently.)

Then home again. The dog was thrilled by our return, because it meant she could finally relax:

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* So stealth and crazy-fast that we weren't able to visit all of the folk we'd love to see. Stupid life with all of the stupid things one must do in order to be able to do the more fabulous things.

** Scott's mom came down to look after the kids. We figured that way the law wouldn't call while we were away.

** I love NYC more and more each time I go. I want to spend a week there, just going to museums and eating exotic foods from other lands. But that is another story.

Comments

[Heidi]

When you're ready to do the week, let me know. I love NYC, too. And have rarely museum-ed there.

[kmkat]

Elder Son did 4 undergrad years @ NYU and 4 years in med school @ Mt. Sinai. Such a treat it was to have an excuse (and sometimes, a place to stay) to visit NYC.

[Debra Dylan]

Glorious photos!