Culch

I had a short trip to Kansas City (KCMO, not KCK! There’s a difference!), and spent a short time visiting two museums. I went to the inside of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, which was showing an exhibit of Hung Liu, a Chinese-born American artist whose powerful paintings mix Red China propaganda and children’s literature, political statement, expressionist elements, and physical elements that accompany the image.

I also visited the outside of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, because the inside was closed. I hope to go back, because it is enormous and looks to be quite extensive. It was a beautiful clear day, so I walked the perimeter or the grounds. I saw several of its many Henry Moores, as well as Claes Oldenburg’s excellent Shuttlecocks, a set of four giant birdies caught just as they landed on either side of the main building, as if it were a badminton net. An exhibition on the Plains Indians included some modern large tipis on the lawn. But my favorite piece to experience was Robert Morris’s Glass Labyrinth, a triangular path of glass walls.

I made a movie of my walk through Glass Labyrinth, and a few pictures follow.

It’s a labyrinth rather than a maze: you follow a single path into the center, then turn around to follow the same path out. The glass walls are quite clean, so there are few visible clues to show you where to turn; it was common to see people bang into a wall, which is why you are warned to walk slowly. (I don’t bump into anything, but you can see the expectant looks on the faces of the people I meet inside.)

The buzzing is from a drone someone was operating nearby.