De Young Museum

This week, the wee boy is in school, while the wee girl has her last week of summer vacation. When we’re ~~free from him~~ without him, we like to do things we can’t do with him in tow! So today we arrived at the De Young art museum bright and early. In fact, we were the first visitors!

The De Young is a really good museum, with a huge variety of art– old African masks, Colonial American paintings, plenty of Classics, and they currently have an exhibition on Modernism, which I wasn’t that enthralled by. I suppose I prefer, hmmm, less “Modern” art? :0

Anyway, here are a few favorites for the day!

A creative use of dollar bills.

A portrait of George Washington made out of dollar bills sewn together!

It’s so fun to find one’s hobbies represented in fine art, although I hope I’ll look less annoyed when my (future) grandkids interrupt my knitting!

Knitting!

I like you so much I can’t look at you/I broke the yarn, darn it!

Spinning!

Now, I think this was our biggest hit of the day. There was a video by/about a New Zealander woman who is a mix of Scottish, Maori, and other Aboriginal tribes, and in it she explained about these cloaks that they traditionally make and how she made these four different cloaks to represent different stages of life. At first we didn’t realize that the actual cloaks in the video were right there in the museum, but when we noticed, the experience was definitely heightened.

For example, in the video we saw how the artist cut these blue pieces out, shaped them into long, narrow cylinders, and sewed them together to make this fantastic blue. Then we turned to our left and saw it! I think it also helped that after this, we had some lunch, so we left this exhibit on a particularly high note.

Really, really wanting to touch it!

On our way out, we passed this guy.

Super art!

Oh! I forgot to post this photo from yesterday. It’s a blast from the past; me knitting on BART. Yesterday the wee girl and I went to Berkeley by BART and of course, it was prime knitting time.