A recent visit to the Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, was informative and best of all, free.
This is a museum I know fairly well since I worked there for a couple of years just out of college and had a wonderful experience working in the library. Since much of the permanent collection are like old friends to me, I headed to the contemporary art collection to see what was new and fresh in the museum.
Several works of art jumped out at me as being meaningful and provocative, much of it art by women artists. In one room there were two pieces of art by two separate artists, both entitled Strange Fruit, presumably after the song made famous by Billy Holiday and based on a poem by Abel Meeropol, also known as Lewis Allan.
The first work of Strange Fruit is by Alison Saar, an American artist from California, and is a sculpture of the figure of a black man hanging by a foot, upside down and bound. The figure itself is an amazing texture that seems to be formed from rusty tin ceiling tiles and also contains other bits of rusty hardware. This piece of powerful sculpture is a commentary on lynching, racism, and violence and also addresses issues of our interaction with atrocities against humanity. We are able to walk around this life-size sculpture and we want to free this bound figure, yet the exquisite texture and the theme of the work are arresting.
Also on display in the same room is a modest collection of leathery looking fruit peels that have been lovingly stuffed and sewn back together by Zoe Leonard a New York-based artist. Bananas, lemons and oranges are all represented here and even include the small oval stickers that identify country of origin and PLU. The sewn fruit made me think of baseballs as well as the organic process of decay. These strange fruits are lined up on a plinth similar to a mantelpiece and allow us to contemplate their strange and yet everyday characteristics.
And one more plug for my hometown museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art: the best museum guards in the world work here! The museum has an excellent collection of contemporary art that inludes Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly and many others.
Read more about Alison Saar here.
Read more about Zoe Leonard here.
This is a museum I know fairly well since I worked there for a couple of years just out of college and had a wonderful experience working in the library. Since much of the permanent collection are like old friends to me, I headed to the contemporary art collection to see what was new and fresh in the museum.
Several works of art jumped out at me as being meaningful and provocative, much of it art by women artists. In one room there were two pieces of art by two separate artists, both entitled Strange Fruit, presumably after the song made famous by Billy Holiday and based on a poem by Abel Meeropol, also known as Lewis Allan.
The first work of Strange Fruit is by Alison Saar, an American artist from California, and is a sculpture of the figure of a black man hanging by a foot, upside down and bound. The figure itself is an amazing texture that seems to be formed from rusty tin ceiling tiles and also contains other bits of rusty hardware. This piece of powerful sculpture is a commentary on lynching, racism, and violence and also addresses issues of our interaction with atrocities against humanity. We are able to walk around this life-size sculpture and we want to free this bound figure, yet the exquisite texture and the theme of the work are arresting.
Also on display in the same room is a modest collection of leathery looking fruit peels that have been lovingly stuffed and sewn back together by Zoe Leonard a New York-based artist. Bananas, lemons and oranges are all represented here and even include the small oval stickers that identify country of origin and PLU. The sewn fruit made me think of baseballs as well as the organic process of decay. These strange fruits are lined up on a plinth similar to a mantelpiece and allow us to contemplate their strange and yet everyday characteristics.
And one more plug for my hometown museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art: the best museum guards in the world work here! The museum has an excellent collection of contemporary art that inludes Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly and many others.
Read more about Alison Saar here.
Read more about Zoe Leonard here.
