Water Lilies

I managed to capture a classic water lily picture at Cheekwood Garden and Art Museum - crisp flower and black background. It looked good on the small screen of my camera but even better once I saw it on the larger monitor of my computer. So - enjoy my June 2012 pictures of water lilies from Tennessee and Texas! If you want more - check out the post from last November - Water Lilies at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania.

 

Cheekwood’s Howe Garden

The Howe Garden at Cheekwood Garden and Art Museum in Nashville, TN has been recently renovated so the plantings are just becoming established. There were three things that caught my interest: the rain garden, the botanical images stamped on the gates, and the thatch roof on the cottage.

A rain garden is made to retain water with terrain and plantings. I had read about them but never seen one. The renovation to the Howe Garden included one that can be viewed from both sides of the bridge (the metal silhouettes of the bridge add to the view as well).

The botanical images stamped on the panels of the garden gate were of familiar things - lilies, lady slipper orchids, morning glories, and trilliums…and some I couldn’t name. They were wonderful images for a garden gate.

And last but not least the thatched room of the cottage. It was a thick layer of rushes, tightly layered. The underside, visible from inside the cottage looked just as neat.

Cheekwood Tree Houses

As promised in a previous post - this post is about the “tree houses” at Cheekwood Garden and Art Museum in Nashville, TN. They are all sized in a way that children can climb up into them and were very popular. There were families and groups of summer-program children all around them so it was good that they were scattered throughout the garden. My favorite is a giant fish that has recycled CDs for scales!

There was a conch shell, a slide that was built with a ramp and sides with every non-walking or sliding space covered with plants,

a ship,

a traditional looking house among the trees , and

ball of yarn suspended over a pond (there was a walkway into it just out of the picture).

The excitement these structures evoked from children changed the tenor of the gardens!  It was a high energy place.

Cheekwood Garden and Art Museum

Cheekwood Garden and Art Museum was my favorite place on a recent trip to Nashville TN. The weather was near perfect and the place was full of other people (young and old) enjoying the place. There was a great-grandfather looking for the Howe Garden with his granddaughter and her two children. Groups of children in look-alike T-shirts were roaming the garden enjoying the tree houses or in art programs. I’ll post more in upcoming days about the Howe Garden and the tree houses…so the pictures below are just an introduction.

The glass bridge (1st two images in the collage below) was in the forest. The dappled sunlight enhanced its appeal. The stream with plantings along each side was lush. The sculpture of a mythical plant (a combination of several) seemed to be what Cheekwood is all about - the blending of art and garden. Finally the owl sculpture was in very bright sunlight and dessert plants. There is something to enjoy at every turn at Cheekwood.

Museum Strategies

I’ve been visiting a lot of museums recently and discovered that I very quickly settle on my strategies for a particular venue based on my experiences with other museums of the same type. I’ve listed the ones I’m most conscious of below.

Slow and read everything or fast for ambience. If the topic of the display is something I am really interested, I read everything - pull out drawers for extra information, push a button to watch a short video or hear a noise; in other words - I do everything the curators offered. This tends to happen in historical or science related displays. An example of this strategy, was in the Frank H. McClung Museum on the campus of The University of Tennessee in Knoxville; they have a detailed exhibit on the Native Americans in that part of Tennessee and a very well done video about Cherokee perspective. In art museums I tend to move through looking at pieces rather than reading the plaques - unless it is a piece I really like; it’s not necessarily ‘fast’ but it is not following every lead the curators have provided. I applied this strategy in the Cheekwood Art Museum in Nashville; the piece I walked up and read everything about was the Alexander Calder ‘Snake’ made of hemp rope (since I had never seen a Calder work in fiber….the metal mobiles are his best known work).

Pick favorite pieces. In art museums, picking a favorite piece (or 2 or 3) makes the museum more memorable. The Calder piece was my favorite at the Cheekwood Art Museum and Reclining Dress (pictures below) was my favorite from the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga. A Caddo Indian pot was my pick from the display at the DeGray Lake office of the Corps of Engineers in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

Pictures. When museums allow pictures - they are a great way to capture the essence of the museum. The Hunter Museum allows pictures in same galleries and I captured the reclining dress along with the information about it with my camera.

Buy the museum book. If the museum does not allow pictures - consider buying the museum book. I checked the Cheekwood Art Museum book for the Calder piece; it wasn’t included….so I didn’t buy the book.

Check out the museum web page. Many museums have wonderful web pages. The Hunter Museum of American Art has particularly good ones. My favorite painting was a picture of the moon through trees titled Landscape with Moon by Ralph Albert Blakelock and sure enough - they had a page about it on their site. There was also one for the Reclining Dress by Karen Lamonte.

What are your strategies for enjoying museum visits?