Visiting the Phoenix Art Museum

On Wednesday Dear Husband and I visited the Phoenix Art Museum, which had come highly recommended by a friend.

Something I appreciated about Phoenix (and Scottsdale) was the ubiquity of public art: at bus stops, on highway interchanges, etc. There was even art in the museum parking lot. The diving figure on the left reminded me of a baseball player reaching to catch a ball, while DH liked the Tyrannosaurus Rex in a cage on the right.

Left, me reading the floor map in front of a collage. Right, a piece called "Mass," an exploded cube of charred wood salvaged from a church that burned after a lightning strike.

Is it art? This look like a shelf in your grandparents' garage, but it is actually made of fiberglass.

These mercurial blobs are definitely art.

Selfie snapped before we entered the immersive installation that is "You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies" by Yayoi Kusama. It is a mostly dark room with strands of tiny flickering colored lights that reflect on the black tile floor and mirrored walls. When you step in, you're not sure which way is up (kind of like how my body is going to feel after traveling Mountain Time --> Eastern Time --> end of Daylight Saving Time --> Central Time in the space of 24 hours to go from vacation to home to a conference in Chicago). DH constantly felt like he was falling, while I braced myself with a hand on one wall while I walked the perimeter. It was a trippy experience until our eyes adjusted to the dark, and we could hear other people getting ready to enter, so we found the exit.

Next we visited the fashion wing for "The Modern Cut of Geoffrey Beene." To the left is the first piece of clothing the PHX acquired, a sequin and feather number of his; the black and white figures in the background are a facsimile of the mural in the entranceway of his atelier. I had never heard of Beene (born Samuel Albert Bozeman Jr., 1924-2004) and felt vindicated when a book in the museum shop of "50 designers you need to know" omitted him, although it stopped in 1990, and he appears to have hit his stride in the '90s. This may be thanks to his partnership with the American Ballet Company for fashion shows or a false narrative encouraged by the fact that the majority of pieces of his that they own were donated by a fashionista who wore his label from the late '80s to the early 2000s. Some of the pieces looked dated, but others were fresh. I thought the captions were particularly good at pulling out interesting details, such as the various hem treatments, or variations on a single theme (such as polka dots). I'm definitely not cool enough to have worn most of it, but I did like this black and purple evening gown with tailored jacket.

After a leisurely lunch in the central garden next to a burbling water feature, it was upstairs to look for the historical dollhouse rooms, since neither of us was in the mood for absorbing the impact of their Asian / European / American collections. Signage in the building(s) left a lot to be desired, especially since the upper floors of the two wings don't connect. I had almost given up (despite finding another John Coleman, right--we had seen this exact statue at the Western Spirit Museum in Scottsdale the day before), when finally we found them: the rest of the Thorne miniatures collection (the other half is at the Art Institute in Chicago).

Of course, the one thing I wanted in the museum shop was priced three times as much as I was willing to pay for it. So we picked up take out from a downtown Japanese restaurant that uses purple rice and went "home" to our AirBnB for a nap before eating dinner, a walk around the neighborhood, and (re)watching Forrest Gump.