Two Museum Memories

Posted 9 hours ago

This month the topic for the IndieWeb Blog Carnival is “Museum Memories.” I am taking a cue from Joe Crawford and writing about two museum experiences that popped into my mind while I was reading his post this morning. Thanks to James for picking this topic and to Joe for the inspiration.

Design Museum of Barcelona

I visited the Design Museum of Barcelona almost two years ago when I traveled in Europe with my son. I believe this is the last museum that I visited so it is probably the freshest on my mind.

My son and I visited the museum late in the day on our last day of our trip. We were able to take advantage of free admission because it was the first Saturday of the month. My son was excited because he had wanted to visit this museum during his semester of study abroad in Barcelona (Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering) but never gotten over to it.

Taken by my son with his very nice camera

We started with the product design exhibition. I enjoyed observing my son get excited to see products that had been discussed in his furniture design class. He would see one, get excited, take a picture, and tell me a bit about it. And then the process kept repeating as we made our way around the exhibit. It gave me such joy to witness his excitement to see the real objects that he had only seen in slides in the classroom.

I took a lot of pictures of a lot of different chairs. There were several objects from the 1992 Olympics that Barcelona hosted including one of the torches from the relay. The last part of the exhibit focused on creative solutions to use recycled materials and solutions to make the world more inclusive including adding texture to sidewalks to signal to blind people that a street crossing was ahead. I thought the sink that recycled water to use in a toilet was a very clever idea. I thought about reading the book, User Friendly, and learning about making products more useful to people.

We moved on to another floor and another exhibit about graphic design in Catalonia. The exhibit included a lot of different artifacts–posters, magazines, packaging, album covers, and other physical objects. There was even a section on digital. We enjoyed making our way through this floor through our shared interest in graphic design.

Cobi, the Olympic mascot of the 1992 Barcelona Games

We also enjoyed an exhibit about how fashion “shapes” a body. They had examples of different approaches that exaggerate the body shape, lengthen the body shape, articulate the body shape, and others that I cannot remember. I think my youngest would have enjoyed the exhibit.

I wish I had taken more pictures in the fashion exhibit. My son got at least one. The second picture is of me after a long day of walking around and seeing much of Barcelona. I was ready to go get churrios and then rest at our hotel.

This visit stands out because of the shared experience with my son. The museum was focused on design, which we are both involved in. I have designed and built websites for over 25 years. He has been practicing graphic design for about 7 years and is about to get an art degree and has three years of working with agencies in the summer and freelancing during school.

So the exhibits touched something deep inside of who we are as designers/creatives. I am so glad that I got to be with him when he visited this museum. As I already mentioned, most of my enjoyment came from watching his reactions to seeing pieces that he had studied earlier in the year. And he was able to give me some good perspective on a lot of the things we were seeing because of what he had learned during his time in Barcelona. It was a great way to end our time in Europe.

Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida

The second museum visit that came to mind this morning was my visit to the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. I went with a friend. We had just attended the Front End Design Conference the day before. We toured the museum in the morning and then I took him to the airport before making my way back to home in Orlando.

I cannot say that I am big fan of Dalí or the style of art that he is known for. I also did not know that the art of his early career was more realistic or more in line of what I think of when I think of art. I really enjoyed seeing the entire collection. Some of his earlier paintings were very large and covered most of all of a wall in the museum.

I remember that the thing I enjoyed the most was being up close to the art and seeing all the brush strokes. Some of his work was heavy with paint and I enjoyed the texture of seeing that up close. I cannot say I came away a bigger fan of Dalí’s work but I did have a better appreciation of him as I worked my way through his life and gained a better understanding of how he developed as an artist.

The visit was also memorable because of the company. I had met Jason online. Actually, our relationship started when he commented on one of my blog posts. That led to us following each other and interacting on Twitter. He found out about the conference through a tweet I had made about going.

We split the cost of a hotel room and had a blast hanging out and getting to know each beyond throughout the weekend. We found out that both of our wives had asked us about staying with a “stranger” because we only knew each other through the Internet. It worked out great and we did it again the next year (the conference) and visited the Museum of Fine Arts.

I also enjoyed the architecture of the museum itself. The spiral stairs capped off by the glass ceiling was beautiful and let in a lot of nice Florida sunshine.

It is difficult to limit this post to just two experiences. So many others come to mind, many from the trip two years ago where I visited Barcelona and Budapest. But those are stories for another time. Or you can visit my daily articles from the trip to explore on your own.

Museums I have visited (not an exhaustive list)

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