Art Visit

For my Art Visit, I decided to visit the Crocker Art Museum along with my mom and my 7-month old son, who got to enjoy his first art experience- hopefully the first visit of many! Our visit took place on Thursday, June 19th. The museum’s current exhibit was “The Language of the Nude: Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body”, running from May 10th to June 27th.
In all honesty, I’ve never had any interest at all in viewing representational works with nude subjects, which was in fact the focus of the entire exhibit. What I do love is learning about the history of major periods in art, so I really enjoyed reading the captions next to each sketch. I was absolutely fascinated by the history of the education of artists in working with nude subjects.
During our visit, we viewed many pieces of work that were a few hundred years old, and I was captivated by how well the sketches had been maintained and how incredibly detailed they were! Even though I’ve never had an interest in nude sketches, I couldn’t help really getting into looking at the minute details of the pieces. We saw work from all over the world- Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Germany were the focus and the period was from the 16th through the 19th centuries.
One of the sketches I found the most wonderful was a sketch by a 9 year-old boy! It was modeled after a great master’s work (I’ve forgotten the name) and it was absolutely incredible! I would never have thought that a child would be capable of making such a realistic sketch!

While the nude pieces were fascinating, they weren’t my favorite pieces. We found two pieces that we loved in the Crocker. The first was an incredible installation called Public Eye, Private Me, by Mildred Howard. It is what appears to be a house from the outside, constructed with inward-facing mirrors that had a square or ovular transparent space in the middle of each piece. The artist is an American-born woman, born in 1945. She’s a Berkeley artist and this particular work was meant to show how, with fame and popularity, everyone gains the ability to invade one’s innermost spaces and judge them. J.J., my son, loved this installation! We were able to walk inside the piece and he was absolutely enthralled by all of the mirrors!
The other piece at the Crocker that I love is one that lives there permanently. It is a painting by Edwin Deakin, titled Grapes and Architecture. The painting is so incredible, so completely realistic, that it seems as if the grapes are real, popping out at you, and ripe for the picking.
While I enjoyed both of these pieces very much, I must admit that there was one work that I thought was hilarious, wonderfully amusing and it actually made me start laughing incredibly hard. This piece is called All Nations Have Their Moments of Foolishness. This work, created by Richard Notkin, consists of many plaster tiles that, when viewed from far away, are shaded ever-so-slightly, in the image of President George Bush. When the viewer moves closer to the piece, he or she can see that each individual tile is carved with a design. The designs are of ears, daisy-cutters (a specific type of bomb), skulls, and donkeys or asses, which is what I think the artist meant to symbolize.

Notkin’s work is definitely my favorite piece in the entire museum because it really struck me. There aren’t a lot of pieces that can really draw a physical reaction out of me like his piece did. I don’t think I’ve ever physically laughed out loud at something that addresses a political controversy. My son also tried to give the piece a kiss when I was holding him up close to it, so we can conclude that he enjoyed it too!
I’ve always been absolutely in love with the idea of visiting art galleries. I’ve been very blessed and fortunate to have grown up in a family that encouraged the study and discovery of art. We’ve always gone to at least one museum on every family trip so that I could explore and learn and get that satisfaction out of seeing something in person that I’ve read about online.
We really enjoyed our visit to the Crocker but it wasn’t all that I’d hoped for. Since I don’t find much intriguing about nudist subjects and representational works, I was a little bored with the main exhibit. Luckily there were a few new, contemporary pieces in the other areas of the museum that I could check out and enjoy. I suppose this all just means that we’ll have to go back in July for the Andy Warhol exhibit! I highly recommend it to everyone, by the way. If anyone would like to join my mom, son, and myself on a trip to the Crocker to check it out, let me know! It’s going to rock!