Tag Archives: museum

Montgomery’s Lessons

Leave a comment

When I was growing up in Freeport, Long Island, no one ever told me that approximately 2,000 people wearing Ku Klux Klan robes marched through our village in 1924.

Nor was I taught about the local incident in 1946 when three Black brothers were shot by a white police officer. Two of the brothers died and the third was wounded. The killings sparked civil rights protests and inspired Woody Guthrie to write a protest song.

I had no idea about this history even when I was a teenager and race riots shut down my high school several times. I remember vividly the mobs chanting in front of the school. A bomb exploded. A bus filled with Black students was nearly overturned. A student was stabbed. My best friend’s brother was beaten. Yet even then our town’s racial history remained obscure to me—and I was among the very few white students who enrolled in our school’s African American history class.

 

 

I’ve learned more about this history in the years that followed. But now we all find ourselves living through a time when our national leaders are trying to scrub our painful racial legacy from classrooms and public spaces—a trend we must resist for all our sakes. As Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative has said, “I don’t think we can achieve racial justice or dynamic progress in America until we commit to a process of truth and reconciliation. We’ve got to face our history.”

 

 

This past week, Champa and I traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which Stevenson and his colleagues opened in 2018.

Located at a former warehouse where enslaved people were held, the museum provides a deeply immersive history of slavery, segregation, lynchings and the struggle for justice. I found it eye-opening and heartbreaking.

 

 

Several blocks away, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was even more powerful. It honors the victims of racial terror lynchings. Visitors descend through rows of hundreds of steel monuments suspended overhead, evoking bodies hanging from trees. Each bears the name of a lynching victim. Markers represent counties across the country where documented lynchings took place, including several near our home in Durham. 

 

 

I’ve visited civil rights museums in Washington, D.C., Greensboro and Memphis, all of which were powerful and well worth the trip. But I’ve never been as moved as I was in Montgomery, whose legacy sites also include a sculpture park, top two photos, and Montgomery Square, above, which explores the local bus boycott and the rise of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a national civil rights leader.

 

 

We also visited the nearby Rosa Parks Museum, which honors the woman whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. After leaving Montgomery, we drove to Birmingham to attend a Sunday morning service at the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four young girls were murdered in a bombing in 1963. We received a warm welcome and were entranced by the service, the sermon, the music, and especially the historical displays in the basement, near where the bomb exploded.

 

 

We combined this civil rights pilgrimage with fun stops in Greenville, Chattanooga and Asheville. A highlight was the historic Alabama Theatre in Birmingham, below, where we attended its annual screening of the silent film classic The Phantom of the Opera, accompanied by a live organist.

 

 

I encourage readers to visit Montgomery even if it’s far from their homes. I’ve traveled widely and consider these legacy sites to be among the most insightful and haunting places I’ve seen anywhere in our country or around the world. They are a necessary corrective for all of us who grew up without really knowing where we came from.

Subscribe to Not Exactly Retired. It’s free.

My Art Renaissance

1 Comment

I’m an art lover with a confession: a lot of art in museums bores me. Champa and I both love Impressionism, abstract art and other modern genres. But we’re less passionate about much of the art produced before that. We appreciate it but don’t love it.

When we visit great museums, we often stride through the pre-Columbian, Egyptian, African and other galleries, glance at the old European paintings and tapestries and maybe pause a little longer for Rubens, Velázquez and other great masters, especially Rembrandt.

But it’s only when we get to the Monets and Renoirs, to Pollock and Frankenthaler, that we slow down and really begin to savor. For better or worse, that’s the art that speaks to us. 

That is, until we came to Rome and Florence. 

Night view of the Duomo in Florence

We just spent much of the past week in museums, basilicas and other showcases of Renaissance art. I was familiar with Leonardo, Michelangelo and the other greats, of course, and not only because our two sons collected Ninja Turtles. I admired their work, but it didn’t especially move me. My appreciation was dutiful rather than passionate. 

I don’t know what caused my Renaissance switch to turn on after so many years but, unexpectedly, I found myself entranced by much of what I saw in Rome and Florence. 

For example, here’s Michelangelo’s famous Pietà, which I first saw in my youth at the New York World’s Fair. Its composition and technical mastery are impeccable, to be sure, but what got to me when we viewed it in Saint Peter’s Basilica was its emotional and spiritual power. I could feel Mary’s grace and anguish. 

Michelangelo’s David, in Florence, also spoke to me. Its anatomical precision and monumental scale command attention, but what stayed with me was the look in David’s eye — his intelligence and determination to slay Goliath. David is my namesake and this has always been my favorite Bible story. Seeing this statue in person made him seem so much more real. 

So did this David statue at the Borghese Gallery in Rome. I was less familiar with this Baroque version by Bernini, but I spent a long time circling it, gazing at its details and feeling the drama of what young David was about to do. Just look at his coiled body, holding the stone that will kill the giant. Bernini demands that I engage emotionally. 

And so I did, not just with these three sculptures, but with many of the frescoes, paintings and other works we saw, some of which I’m sharing here.

Leonardo da Vinci, The Adoration of the Magi, Uffizi Gallery

Laocoön and His Sons, Vatican Museum

Raphael’s The School of Athens, Vatican Museum

Michelangelo’s Moses, San Pietro in Vincoli

Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, Uffizi Gallery

The Vatican Museum’s collection also included some work by newer artists I already loved, such as Matisse and Klee, below, and I was happy to see those, too. 

I’m sure some people will read this, shake their heads and consider me an idiot for taking so long to appreciate Renaissance art, or for not paying proper homage to other old masters, from Goya to Vermeer. I can hear the indignant cries that I’m paying short shrift to other artistic lineages, from China to the Incas. 

I get it. They’re right. But I can’t help what I like or what touches my heart. Art is so personal. I can recognize the greatness of, say, British landscape painters but still not be moved by them. I can’t explain why I prefer Georgia O’Keeffe’s landscapes or Monet’s water lilies, but I do and think they’re gorgeous. 

Monet, Water Lilies, MoMA, New York

Champa and I visit museums often during our travels and have recently steered towards the work we love most. When we went to Amsterdam a few years ago and had only one day to see art, we chose the Van Gogh Museum over the iconic Rijksmuseum. In Paris, we chose a return to the Orsay Museum, which is filled with Impressionists, over revisiting the Louvre. On a recent trip to New York, we went to MoMA and the Whitney instead of the Met.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Whitney Museum, New York

In Rome and Florence, though, we necessarily focused on Renaissance art, which led me to reevaluate how I felt about it. Maybe something similar would have happened if we’d immersed ourselves for a week in some other artistic style. Maybe not. I think it was the art itself that caused this rebirth, or renaissance, in my sensibilities. 

In any case, I now regret that I didn’t open my eyes sooner and acknowledge that my sons were smarter than me to idolize Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello. I should have paid closer attention when they shouted Cowabunga!

Top image: Detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens, Vatican Museum

Artistic Adelaide

2 Comments

Adelaide is known for several things — beautiful churches, wineries, festivals — but what I’ll remember most about it is the life-sized sculpture of a mother breastfeeding her baby at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

As you can see, it’s not quite a human mother. What gives the life-sized piece by Patricia Piccinini even more power is its placement beside a traditional Virgin and Child by William Adolphe Bouguereau. 

Here are the two works together, each offering a different vision of motherhood. 

Now consider this Rodin sculpture placed beside Ricky Swallow’s meticulous carving of a skeleton from lime wood.

I found the juxtaposition strange and wonderful. Likewise for the presentation shown at the top of this post. 

Champa and I are both art lovers; she is an artist herself. We try to check out local museums whenever we visit a new city. Most have galleries filled with works of specific periods or genres. Adelaide’s museum had those, too, but it also challenged us to think beyond categories, as with this surrealist mashup:

Adelaide’s museum can’t compete with the volume of places like the Louvre, but it impressed us in its own way, as did the city generally. 

Next door, for instance, and also free, is the South Australian Museum, which has excellent displays of natural history and Aboriginal culture. 

Next to that is the State Library, whose historic Mortlock Wing looks like a reading room at Hogwarts.

Further up the street is an excellent botanic garden, now featuring pieces by American glass artist Dale Chihuly placed in strategic locations and lit up at night. 

We also enjoyed Adelaide’s giant outdoor Rundell Mall, decked out for the holidays, and a Central Market filled with luscious produce and specialty food shops. 

Australia’s fifth largest city has many other attractions, which we didn’t have time to visit. However, we saw enough to give it an artistic thumbs up. 


This very red piece is by Chiharu Shiota, a Japanese artist now living in Germany.

Seeing in New Ways

3 Comments

Have you ever thought of Baghdad as a “city of peace” and “a miracle”?

Me neither, but that’s how it was described in an exhibit we visited recently — not in Iraq, but at the National Museum of Qatar.

Several of the exhibits there reminded me that people around the world see things very differently than we do in the United States, regardless of who is “right.” Another one highlighted the collapse of the global pearling industry, which was devastating to Qatar but unknown to me. An exhibit about the “Ramadan Blockade” described how Qatar was blockaded by several neighbors a few years ago. I barely remembered that happening.

The museum, which opened in 2019 with a design evocative of a desert rose, wasn’t the only one in Doha that made me think in new ways. Across town, at the Museum of Islamic Art, an exhibit examined how Lawrence of Arabia and other films have contributed to Western misunderstanding of the Arab world. Another gallery showed how modernity has brought prosperity to Islamic nations while upending local traditions.

Both museums featured stunning architecture and beautiful exhibits. Neither was especially political; on the contrary, both were designed to appeal to broad international audiences. Inevitably, though, they reflected the perspective of a society that, for all of its wealth and rapid modernization, still differs from our own.

This is why I love to travel. It challenges my assumptions and broadens my perspective, no matter where we go.

Shortly before we flew to Qatar, for example, we had lunch at the Kathmandu home of two old friends. Here’s what I saw on the gate outside their house:

If you’re startled to see a swastika displayed so proudly, much less beside a Star of David, think about your own vantage point. Swastikas were sacred symbols in Hinduism long before they were linked to Hitler. The six-pointed star, which we associate with Judaism, is also a Hindu symbol. Both symbols are common in Nepal and have nothing to do with Nazism or Judaism, at least in the local context.

Or consider this statue we saw in Ilam, Champa’s home town. It honors Ratna Bantawa, a local Communist leader who opposed Nepal’s former king. Ratna and his brother were denounced as terrorists and killed for their activities. Today Ratna’s memory is celebrated. There’s a road named after him. Communists now play a prominent role in Nepali politics even as “communist” remains an epithet in our own country.

My point here isn’t to debate Iraqi history or communism, just to note how travel changes our perceptions. This latest trip reminded me of something I wrote several years ago after returning to Moldova from a trip to Bulgaria and Romania: “One of the things for which I’m most grateful about serving in the Peace Corps is how it’s made me less fearful about traveling to places that seem exotic or dangerous to some Americans even though they’re actually safe, beautiful, fascinating and cheap.”

As I wrote then, “you hardly need to have served abroad to expand your horizons a bit. … There’s a big world waiting beyond the American comfort zone” for those of us fortunate enough to be able to travel, a privilege the two of us never take for granted.

That big, mysterious, fascinating world is still there and still waiting. Now that the pandemic has eased, I hope more Americans will explore it, as we hope to keep doing ourselves.