Click on images below to enlarge:
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| Chipotle
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| A panoramic video of Chipotle, where we ate lunch, packed with a
business lunch crowd. (It was a Monday.)
| My burrito, close up.
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| Freer & Sackler Galleries
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| The Freer Gallery of Art.
| A panoramic video of a room with Indian artifacts.
| A pair of canteens of the size appropriate for a giant.
For
details, read the text in the full sized image.
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The gallery seems inordinately proud of a Japanese sake bottle that's
two centuries old.
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| Some fairly gruesome Japanese sculpture of victorious warriors with
defeated demons. They are said to symbolize "dominance over any enemies
of Buddhism."
| More such sculptures. Such detail! For more information, see the Freer
Gallery's detail pages on each guardian: north,
south,
east,
and west.
| The Freer Gallery's courtyard.
| An interesting essay about aestheticism, the philosophy that art can be
judged by beauty and need not be examined with respect to an external
context. Obviously, view the full size image to read the essay.
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| A too-quick panoramic video of a room filled with impressionists (?),
surprising in a gallery devoted to Asian art.
| A panoramic video of the wall-sized scroll Daoist Divinity of
Water.
| The description of the long scroll shown in the previous video.
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I found the Whistler's
Peacock Room unimpressive.
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I saw shabby pottery by Gwyn Hanssen Pigott.
| A model of an alien spaceship.
Or perhaps a strange piece of
Chinese art. (Inspired by reality? hmmm... ;) ) View the full size
image to read the symbolism in and history of the item.
| October Morning - Deerfield, MA by Willard Metcalf. Lovely
textures.
The gallery has other Metcalf that are nice too:
Pasture and Blossom Time.
| A glimpse of a tall, odd sculpture: Monkeys
Grasping for the Moon (a.k.a., 21 Monkeys) by Xu Bing.
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| A panoramic movie showing the sculpture 21 Monkeys emerging from
a fountain and showing the other sculptures in the room.
| Since we entered the Sackler Gallery underground from the Freer Gallery,
I took this picture (of the main entrance to the Sackler Gallery) last.
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| Museum Break #1
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The Smithsonian castle. It only contains information about the
Smithsonian museums.
Apparently Smithson never visited America and
it's unclear why he chose it in particular to bequeath his money.
| Many flags are visible on L'Enfant Promenade / L'Enfant Plaza SW.
(Given all my talk about Atlanta, international cities, and flags, I
needed to take this picture. Admittedly, these are flags of other
countries...)
| The pecan pie we had for a snack in the Smithsonian castle wasn't bad at
all, surprising for such a tourist trap location.
| The flower garden in front of the castle.
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| Apparently there's a scale model of the solar system along the Mall. At
each proper location--this one is Neptune--a large sign provides
information about the appropriate planet.
| A wrought-iron bench that matches its nearby fountain.
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| Hirshhorn Museum
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| The Hirshhorn has a distinctive circular shape that makes it stand out
from everything else along the Mall.
| A panorama of the Mall as seen looking north from the Hirshhorn Museum.
For reference, mid-left is the National Museum of American History,
straight across is the National Archives, and mid-right is the National
Gallery of Art.
| In the Hirshhorn's lobby was this incredible glass sculpture/chandelier
by Virgil Marti.
| A Calder: Red Cascade.
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| A Calder mobile.
| Goat's Horn With Red by Georgia O'Keeffe looks like the firefox
logo.
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We watched part of a cool video, The Way Things Go by Peter
Fischli and David Weiss, of a rube goldberg machine. As I couldn't
record the video, here are links to the wikipedia page
on the video and a three-minute clip on
YouTube from the thirty-minute video.
| A panoramic video of the Arshile Gorky gallery.
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