the Hirshhon Museum

A quote that stood out to me on the wall of the Utopian Projects Exhibit at the Hirshhon Museum

Because I have a lacrosse game interfering with the field trip to DC next week, I took my own field trip to the Hirshhorn today. I focused my visit on the two exhibits you will all focus on next week. I do not want to spoil anything, so I won't give too many details, but instead maybe get you excited for what you'll see and highlight some of my favorites.  

In the Utopian Project exhibit, my favorite was the “How can one change oneself?” piece, which gives 5 steps to take in order to change oneself. I won’t completely spoil it since you will all be going next week, but these steps consist of putting on wings.  Many of the pieces in this exhibit have to do with wings actually. Most others also include angels or flying. 

The exhibit “what absence is made of” was my favorite. 

One that stood out to me was an untitled piece by Didier Vermeiren (below), which was supposed to be some kind of empty pedastool. This reminded me of when Professor Tamir talked about using our pedestals as a piece of art (like Reggie did with her pizza boxes). 

I found the "Condensation Cube" particularly amazing. Water droplets form in this acrylic cube as a reaction to the changes in the surrounding environment. 

I also thought "the Today Series" by On Kawara was very interesting. These are seemingly simple rather small paintings that each have a few seperate dates in October 1971. After reading the description, I learned that these were just a few of the 2,000 paintings in the series, all of which were handmade. Fun Fact: if one was not finished the same day it was created. It was discarded. 

After these first pieces, I felt the content got much darker as I continued through the museum.