Chicago: Architectural boat tour and Museum of Science and Industry

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Patty

What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? It is lofty. It must be tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.
– Louis Sullivan, American architect, The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered, 1898

The few brave souls to take the river cruise on a cold June morning.

A River cruise of Chicago architecture
Upon recommendation of friends, we booked a boat tour of Chicago’s riverfront architecture. The morning of the tour was cold and foggy, but we persevered. The sites were no less impressive. Victor, our tour guide, was well versed in the history of Chicago’s architecture, as was expected, but he was so passionate about sharing that history and being a voice in preserving the riverfront’s architectural integrity. We started at the Navy Pier and worked our way up two of the three forks in the river.

Chicago’s riverfront skyscrapers on a foggy morning.

It is amazing to learn about the history of buildings. For instance, the U.S. postal building was this massive building built in the early twentieth century to accommodate the Federal Reserve printing notes and stock certificates and the large mail-order business of Sears and other retail companies. Snail mail has given way to the Internet as a common form of communication, which has led to the postal building’s demise. It has sat empty for years, awaiting redevelopment plans to transform it into residential and retail use.

The riverfront is home to a mix of buildings – some post-industrial and massive, others tall and slender, and created out of green glass and steel. All rising to create a beautiful cityscape. While there are disputes as to which city had the first skyscraper, Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885 but no longer in existence, has been recognized for being the first to be framed in steel. One of my favorite buildings is the Tribune Tower, with its Gothic crown and flying buttresses. Interestingly, Colonel Robert McCormick, the head of the Chicago Tribune requested that journalists embed fragments of historically significant buildings from all over the world into the base of the Tribune Tower. Such fragments include the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and the Alamo in San Antonio, TX. Another favorite is the Wrigley Building, owned by the chewing gum tycoon, which was the tallest building in Chicago when it was built in the early 1920s.

A skyline of old and new buildings.

Playing with shadows, magnetic magic, and falling colored chips on a screen.

Museum of Science and Industry
Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (5700 South Lake Shore Drive, 773.684.1414), which opened in 1933, is the largest science museum in the Western Hemisphere. It houses 35,000 artifacts and nearly 14 acres of scientific experiences, and is located in a massive building near the University of Chicago campus. We were there for five hours, and it wasn’t enough time to see everything that we were interested in seeing. At times overwhelming, the museum is best approached in small chunks; we slowly made our way around each section of the floor, though some exhibits were sold out or we had to make decisions about what we really wanted to see in the amount of time we had.

We saw the film The Last Reef in the Omnimax Theater, a five-story, domed, wraparound theater. The reef is near the Bikini Atoll, part of the Micronesia Islands of the Pacific Ocean. It was amazing to see marine life from the ocean floor, magnified. What stood out for me is seeing the abandoned decommissioned ships and stone statues that are deliberately sunk to encourage coral and other life to grow and create new “communities.” The stone statues are, ironically, people with their eyes closed. Many already were covered with algae and other life forms. The statues are haunting and mesmerizing.

A real German submarine is on display for people to walk through.

Jacob’s favorite exhibit was the U-505 submarine, the only German submarine in the United States’ possession. This submarine was captured on June 4, 1944. There were 37 bunk beds in the submarine, but at one time 59 sailors were on the boat, which meant that while men slept in the lice-infested beds, others worked. They were often out to sea for roughly four months, with nary a shower or a washing of their clothes. Isabella’s favorite exhibit was Genetics and the Baby Chick Hatchery, which featured an incubator where new-born chicks had just chipped their way out of their shells. You could see many eggs with cracks, but we’re told that it can take up to 10 hours for a chick to get out of its shell, after 21 days of a hen laying an egg.

The massive Science Storms exhibit.

Science Storms was an impressive and expansive exhibit that showed how avalanches and tornadoes are created in large scale. The Great Train Story connects Seattle to Chicago through 1,400 feet of track and more than 20 miniature trains traversing across miniature mountains, valleys, and towns. We all love trains, especially older trains, so it was a thrill to pretend we were traveling on the Silver Streak, the Pioneer Zephyr, which was one of the country’s first diesel-electric streamlined passenger trains. Just like on the airplanes, cars were divided up into coach, business class, and first class, which was a private compartment that seated six in the last car. Farm Tech was a strange exhibit in that it was about the latest innovations in agriculture. Can you say genetically modified organisms?

Checking out how static electricity works.

After returning to the Loop, we attempted to catch dinner at Frontera Grill (445 North Clark Street, 312.661.1434), the Rick Bayless restaurant, well known for its Mexican cuisine. With two starving children, we couldn’t swing the two-hour wait. Another strikeout in terms of enjoying recommended Chicago food. We have not given up on making it to recommended restaurants. Stay tuned.

Airplanes from different time periods soar over a replica of downtown Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Chicago: The Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum, Millennium Park, and more

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Patty

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning…proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
– Carl Sandburg, American poet and writer

The first and last time I was in Chicago was for an industry conference three years ago in early April. The first day of the conference at McCormick Place, I looked out the convention center windows with amazement as the snow came “down” horizontally, thanks to the cold and wind off Lake Michigan. Although I stayed a few days after the conference, I didn’t get to see much of the city, but I knew I would return.

The Chicago skyline from the Shedd Aquarium.

So it is June: Here we are on family vacation and I have my check-off list for the week. We gave the kids a list of sites and told them to look them up on the Internet, tell us something about each site, and let us know which ones they were interested in seeing and why. At the top of Isabella’s list was the Shedd Aquarium (1200 South Lake Shore Drive, 312.939.24380) – it was Jacob’s close second. She loves animals and marine animals the most, next to dogs and horses. I admit that thoughts of going off to antique shops while they went to the aquarium came to mind. I figured if you’ve been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium there was no need to go to another aquarium. I was pleasantly surprised.

The leopard shark at the Shedd Museum.

The Shedd Aquarium is huge – and not a crowded as Monterey. Isabella got to touch a sturgeon, we saw an exhibit of the marine life from the Great Lakes, we watched some amazing fish swim in the round tank that is the Pritzker Caribbean Reef, and we saw many sharks – including the leopard shark with its interesting tail fin – at the Amazon Rising and Wild Reef exhibits. We took in the aquatic show of beluga whales, penguins, and dolphins. I’m not usually a fan of watching these kinds of shows, but our emcee explained that they train the animals, which happens to be conveniently entertaining, in order to get them used to being handled for their medical check-ups. I appreciated knowing that piece of information. For the kids’ sake, I endured the Ice Age 4D mini-movie, which was also shown at the aquarium.

The impressive Field Museum.

After the aquarium, we walked over to the Field Museum (1400 South Lake Shore Drive, 312.922.9410), Chicago’s natural history museum. We watched a 3D movie on the woolly mammoths and the other big animals of the Ice Age, saw a lot of dinosaur casts and original skeletons, including Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever discovered. Jacob used to love dinosaurs, and he and Isabella had a field day naming them all, which were housed in the sprawling and comprehensive Evolving Planet exhibit.

Sue the T-Rex.

We had spent so many hours at the aquarium that we rushed through the Field Museum, which is impressive for its massive building and numerous exhibits. We’ll have to catch the Inside Ancient Egypt and the other exhibits another time. I recognized Bushman, the giant gorilla who was orphaned as an infant and lived the rest of his life in captivity at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. I remembered reading about him when I was a child and being intrigued by photos of him, especially his human facial expressions. When he died on New Year’s Day 1951, his massive body was stuffed and is on exhibit at the Field Museum.

The peaceful Lurie Garden in Millennium Park, with the city skyline above.

We walked back from the two sites along the waterfront. It was a balmy warm late afternoon, perfect for seeing the Clarence Buckingham Memorial Fountain in Grant Park and the Lurie Garden – with its wooden walkways and shallow troughs of water that was home to coins and weary bare feet, including my daughter’s – at Millennium Park. From there we walked through a free concert at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, which was designed by Frank Geary, who – David tells me – is a famous contemporary architect who designed, among other structures, the Disney Opera House in Los Angeles. The kids weren’t interested in staying for the concert, but afterwards I ventured back to listen to the music of Daniel Lanois, who is a producer for artists such as Bob Dylan and Peter Gabriel but also a songwriter and musician, known for his pedal-steel infused music.

Millennium Park hosts terrific free concerts all summer long.

After a long walk, the kids were relieved when we finally came upon one of our destinations – The Bean. I’d seen it before, but it is such a mesmerizing sculpture that I don’t think I will ever tire of or be jaded seeing it again. I was also looking forward to showing them the Crown Fountain, with its twin glass towers facing each other and faces of local residents reflected on the glass. After a certain amount of time they open their mouths to spout out a stream of water. When I first saw it, nobody was around with a chill in the April air. But today the shallow pool between the glass towers was a noisy playground, with a bunch of screaming kids in swimsuits skipping and running through the water and then clamoring beneath the gushing water coming from the towers’ mouths. It was a quintessential Chicago summer scene.

The Bean in all its polished glory.

We returned to Lurie Garden because The Purple Pig (500 North Michigan Avenue, 312.464.1744), which was highly recommended to us, was too crowded to get in. Dark clouds scuttled above us and soon sprinkles and then a light rain fell. We left our umbrellas at our hotel room, but I’m not sure we would have opened them if we’d had them, given that nobody seemed to notice the rain at all. It is the difference between hardy Midwesterners and Californians.

View of The Bean from underneath.

We ended up eating a late dinner at The Gage (24 South Michigan Avenue, 312.372.4243), which was recommended by local friend Maria Diecidue and not too far from where our hotel is. It’s a boisterous tavern restaurant. Jacob and I ordered seared sea scallops with Korean BBQ short ribs and Chinese broccoli with toasted peanuts and kimchi, which was nicely paired with a smooth Oregon pinot noir. After eating the tender scallops, I realized that all the scallops I have eaten before in my life have been overcooked. Isabella ordered chicken strips and fries. Being a French fry fiend, I couldn’t help reaching across the table to snag some fries. I couldn’t stop eating them. Crispy on the outside, the fries had a consistency inside that was like whipped potatoes – light and fluffy and like “buttah” – seriously. I have never had a better French fry, and I fear none will ever come close.

The Crown Fountain spouts off.

We’re staying at the Congress Plaza Hotel (520 South Michigan Avenue, 312.427.3800), which is close to many of the attractions on our list. It’s a historic hotel, of which many former Presidents have been guests. David pointed out that it is old in the classic European way. And, in the classic European tradition, we have a room with a view. The “L” train rumbles through the Loop below us and the skyline is graced with the Willis (nee Sears to the locals and will always be referred to as the Sears) Tower and the rooftop of the Chicago Public Library’s Harold Washington Library Center branch, with its painted aluminum – to look like copper with patina – owls sheltered by acroteria at the corners of the building. The architectural history, the architecture overall, the Loop – it doesn’t get any better than this.

My blog tradition of posting my room with a view.

Celebrating Mother’s Day 2013

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Patty

The older I get, the more I see
The power of that young woman, my mother.
– Sharon Olds, American poet

Mother’s Day 2013 with David’s parents after breakfast at Fat Apple’s.

David started a Mother’s Day tradition that pre-dated our getting together. This tradition has been going strong for 20 years now. He is a fantastic chef and he loves to cook – lucky me – and every Saturday evening of Mother’s Day weekend, he makes a gourmet dinner for his mom and me. His parents and his brother Michael come up for the weekend, and then Sunday morning, his parents treat our family for breakfast at Fat Apple’s in El Cerrito (7525 Fairmount Avenue, 510.528.3433). We have learned to get there before eight in the morning to avoid having to stand in line, which can be quite some time when there are seven of us waiting for a table.

This year, David grilled everything – swordfish on a bed of tomatoes and arugula, clams with prosciutto and tabasco, potatoes with a Chianti vinaigrette, and fresh asparagus with prosciutto (his parents brought these fresh, thick spears from Stockton) – and paired dinner with a smooth White Southern Rhone Blend. He ended the evening serving a mango smoothie. Overall, the meal was not heavy at all; in fact, it didn’t seem like it was a five-course meal and we didn’t roll away from the dining room.

Too many choices of plants at Annie’s Annuals in Richmond. A big hat, from Anthropologie, is a must to keep the sun at bay!

After his parents and brother left Sunday morning, we headed to Annie’s Annuals (740 Market Avenue, Richmond, 94801, 510.215.1671), a fabulous nursery that throws a big Mother’s Day weekend party, complete with face painting, entertainment by Budderball the Clown, music, a mini petting zoo (new this year), plant talks under a tent, a raffle, and food and drinks. It gets crowded, but we enjoy going to get a few plants for my pots and admire the row upon row of plants and flowers that I wish would fit in our garden. The trek to Annie’s Annuals has become a recent tradition in the past few years. The evening ended with David preparing a Mother’s Day dinner for our family – lamb kabob, keeping this year’s theme of grilling going through the weekend.

Remembering my Mom
This is the second Mother’s Day that I am celebrating without my mother. In the past, while we spent Mother’s Day weekend with David’s parents, I sent my mother a card and plant (flowers would trigger her seasonal allergies, so I stopped having flowers delivered) and then called her that Sunday. Last year was difficult and painful. This year is no less difficult, but in a different way. Gone is the immediacy of her no longer being with us. Instead, I feel a bit lost, like what an orphan might feel.

Mom and me at my graduation, UC Davis, June 1985.

I posted on Facebook a picture of my mother and me on my graduation day 1985 at UC Davis. It is one of my all-time favorite photos of the two of us because it was spontaneous – I was looking off to the side with my arm around her, and she had this half-smile and looking off into the distance. What was she thinking? Maybe that she was able to get her third daughter through college – a proud moment, indeed. One of my cousins posted a comment that she remembered, as a child, my mother as always looking beautiful and elegant, and that her style and beauty never faded. Growing up, I never thought of my mother as beautiful because I didn’t see her as anything but a mother who was very strict, who worked herself to exhaustion in the vineyards and in the packing house so she could give us the material things that made up the American Dream. Looking back now, yes, she was beautiful. My grandmother had Chinese in her heritage and my grandfather Spanish in his. My mother had that mestizo look.

My mom in high heels, the Philippines, circa 1950s.

My mom in high heels and a modern striped frock, the Philippines, circa 1950s.

She also had a quiet style. She wore her hair fashionably short, which suited her. Though plump as a teenager and young adult, she was always thin since her marriage to my father. I loved her dresses from the 1960s – fitted bodices and flared skirts. Even in her later years, I could find at least one outfit in her closet that I could wear and look neither matronly nor out of fashion.

She never wore high heels in my lifetime, but a few years ago when I became obsessed with high heels and platforms and showed my mother a pair of high-heeled pumps that I had purchased at a local shoe store, she got excited. She told me that she wore high heels when she was much younger. I could see her living vicariously, as she turned my newly purchased shoe over in her hands. She liked what I had picked out. Maganda, beautiful. I looked at her, amazed, never imagining my mother rocking a pair of high-heeled shoes. In the vineyards, she wore old clothes sealed at the openings with duct tape to keep the dust out. She came home after 10-plus-hour days sweaty, her work clothes coated in dust. In the packing house, she wore an apron stained with purple dye from the Sunkist brand stampings on the shiny, hard oranges. I was glad she had told me that about her. It was something we had in common, a story I keep in my heart.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms in the world and in heaven!

A toast on Mother’s Day 2013!

Textures reign in this very comfortable outfit: Ann Ferriday camisole (Personal Pizazz, Berkeley), wide-legged semi-sheer pants (Free People), long tassel earrings (Shopbop) and J. Crew crystal bracelet. The texture and scalloped neckline of the camisole and drop earrings require an accessory-free neck and chest.

Texture reigns in this very comfortable outfit: Ann Ferriday camisole (Personal Pizazz, Berkeley), wide-legged semi-sheer pants (Free People), long tassel earrings (Shopbop) and J. Crew crystal bracelet. The texture and scalloped neckline of the camisole and drop earrings look best without a necklace.

The Mob Museum in Las Vegas: You’d better like it or else

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Patty

The Mob Museum is housed in a historic building, the site of a famous mob hearing.

There are always two sides of
the story.
– The Mob Museum slogan

More than a year ago I celebrated my 50th birthday in Las Vegas. So it’s only fitting that I return to the scene of the crime. Last year, while I was at my conference, David took the kids to The Mob Museum: The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement (300 E. Stewart Avenue, 702.229.2734), after I told him my cabbie suggested I see the newly opened museum, which received very favorable reviews. They only lasted an hour because Isabella was too disturbed by the images. This after one of the women who worked there told David in a raspy voice, “Some of the exhibits in the museum are inappropriate for children.” To this day, we will refer to certain things as “inappropriate for children” in a raspy voice.

I couldn’t help not smiling while in the police lineup.

David claimed you could easily spend three hours in the museum, which is located in downtown Las Vegas and housed in the city’s historic federal courthouse and U.S. Post Office. (One of its courtrooms was recreated to bring to life the Senate committee hearings on organized crime.) The museum people told me to allot an hour per floor and they are correct. Unfortunately, I didn’t have three hours to spare and had to rush through some of the rooms. At first and at times throughout, I felt overwhelmed by all of the artifacts, captions, and photos. It’s more like too much of a good thing. I wanted to read all the captions, look at every single photograph, and sit down for every audiovisual presentation. You get to see both the genesis and life cycle of the mob and the very late response by law enforcement. The lateness in responding had everything to do with corruption at the top on down to the police officers on the street. Bribes, for instance, forced officers to turn a blind eye to tax evasion, gambling, prostitution, and whiskey runs during Prohibition.

This display showcases G Man (slang for FBI agent or Government Man) artifacts from the 1930s through the 1950s.

There are so many rooms and exhibits; it’s not unlike a maze, and each room is packed with artifacts and each floor has multiple audiovisual exhibits. One of my favorite rooms is the Hollywood Room, which has plush round seating couches facing a big screen showing famous mob movies. The Godfather and The Godfather II remain my all-time favorite mob movies. I wouldn’t mind coming back and taking a more leisurely pace to get to everything I rushed through and those things that I missed. But there’s no mistaking the biggest takeaway from the Mob Museum, no matter how much time you spend there: Crime doesn’t pay.

The Wynn’s courtyard garden just inside the entrance boasts huge globes of flowers.

My Room with a View at the Wynn.

Flamenco for building strong, confident girls and women – ole!

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Patty

To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful . . . . This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking.
– Agnes De Mille, American dancer and choreographer

: My friend Tana (on the left in turquoise and black) performing her group’s flamenco dance (photo credit: Kim Schartz).

My daughter has been taking flamenco classes for the last five years – since she was in kindergarten – through our school’s after-school enrichment program, thanks to our good friend Tana Hakanson, who brought her flamenco teacher to the program. I have always admired this dance form because of its energy, rhythm, complexity, and – to paraphrase Tana’s reason for her love of flamenco – its ability to convey such strength and confidence, which is really important for girls to gain at a young age. She and her fellow classmates, and the rest of her instructor’s troupe, performed at the International House on Cal Day at UC Berkeley this past Saturday. Many other groups danced, but flamenco brought the house down. In fact, every time I’ve attended their performances as part of a multi-cultural dance program in other venues, flamenco gets the audiences clapping and smiling. It is, after all, a dance that invites and thrives on the audience’s participation. And you can’t help but admire the difficulty of the footwork and foot speed, and the guitar, which can also be frenetic, and the soulful, passionate singing – cante flamenco – which is, in fact, the heart and soul of genre.

Flamenco is both graceful and strong (photo credit: Kim Schartz).

David and I spent our honeymoon in Spain, a destination decided upon when one of our colleagues from our Madrid office – many years and jobs ago for me – offered his congratulations and his second home on the Costa del Sol for our honeymoon upon learning of our engagement. We met up with our gracious host and his wife in Madrid and got our fill of the wonderful museums, including, of course, the Prado. We drove to the Costa del Sol, enjoyed the sun in the afternoons. We relaxed in Granada, admiring the Palacio de Generalife and the Alhambra. In Barcelona, we marveled at Gaudi‘s architectural wonders, particularly the Sagrada Familia.

Plaza Espana in Parque Maria Luisa, Sevilla, Spain, September 1998.

And yet, my favorite city in Spain was and still is Sevilla. There is something other-worldly about its lush palm trees, river life, thick heat, and Moorish history and architecture. We stayed in a quaint hotel with the rooms overlooking the tiled courtyard. We got tickets to see a flamenco show and were treated to a marathon performance so intense, we could see the sweat flying off of the male dancer’s long hair. I remembered being so overwhelmed by their energy and their ability to move their feet so quickly and expertly while their faces were serene and yet passionate and in command.

On the fashion front, I love the full, swishy skirts, the bold and colorful flowers in the slicked-back and swept-up hairstyles, the long-fringed and equally colorful, floral shawls – worn with the corners pinned in front or wrapped around so that the designs are shown in front – the seductive fans, the dangling statement earrings, the castanets, and, of course, the simple but strong-silhouetted flamenco shoes. I love how the dresses and skirts can be so unique and yet together the outfits complement one another. You don’t have to be a flamenco dancer to try components of this style (just not all at once or else it comes off costumey)!

If I were going to Sevilla in the spring, I’d wear this comfortable outfit. Straw hat, colorful top, and bold sandals are required elements.

I greatly admire Tana’s commitment to flamenco, and I enjoy watching her dance and helping the girls with their form. The girls are very lucky to have such a unique dance class available to them at their age. And while I would love to take it up in the copious spare time I don’t have, I strongly recommend flamenco to women who want to be strong for themselves and for moms who wish to instill those traits in their daughters. Ole!

Bright fiesta colors are complemented by gold jewelry – earrings from Lava 9 in Berkeley and dragonfly necklace by Alkemie of Los Angeles. A golden smile, though, is always the strongest accessory.

Dallas Museum of Art: Art Matters

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Patty

Art is really about how someone else makes sense of the world and their place in it…the viewer connects with the artist in such a way that the two agree to share their humanity, their hopes, their fears.
– Robert Hoffman, art philanthropist

My Omni Hotel room with a view of downtown Dallas.

I flew into Dallas yesterday late afternoon for a morning executive roundtable event to cover and will be hopping on a plane to go back home in the afternoon – a very short business trip. It was fortuitous that I flew out on a Thursday because the Dallas Museum of Art (1717 North Harwood Street, 214.922.1200) is open until 9pm on this day of the week. It was a short walk from the Omni Hotel to the museum district, and a much-needed one after a bumpy descent and landing.

Cindy Sherman: Self-portrait of women
in society
DMA offers free general admission, which is really a gift. Admission to the two exhibits currently on display, Cindy Sherman (through June 9) and Chagall: Beyond Color (the only U.S. venue, through May 26), were $16, which is a bargain in the museum world. I will admit that I didn’t know who Cindy Sherman is, though she is “widely recognized as one of the most important contemporary artists of the last 40 years, and is arguably the most influential artist working exclusively with photography.” Throughout her career, Sherman has taken self-portraits that are a commentary on women in society. She is known for a series of black-and-white self-portraits called “Untitled Film Stills,” in which she portrays herself as various B-grade film characters – the vamp, the housewife, the actress, and so on. The exhibition included a series of recreations of her in famous paintings, as well as a series of beyond-life-size portrayals of the one-percent women in their wealthy splendor. It reminded me a little of Diane Arbus, who is famous for having taken photographs of “marginal” people in our society, because I came away from this exhibit feeling spooked and discomforted, which I’m sure Sherman would feel is a compliment to her art.

Dallas Museum of Art.

Marc Chagall: Way beyond color
I’m familiar with Marc Chagall, but seeing his paintings in person has given me a greater appreciation for his sense of color. Indeed, Picasso once said in the 1950s that when Matisse died, Chagall would be the only painter who understood what color really is. Chagall’s intense reds and blues have a life of their own. I sheepishly admit that I didn’t know Chagall did costume and set decorations for plays and ballets, both in his native Russia after the turn of the century and in New York City during WWII. I also didn’t know that he turned to pottery and collage later in his long career as another way to express himself. One quote of his was particularly moving to me: “Every artist has a homeland, a native town, and though other environments and spheres will exert their influence on him, he will remain forever marked by an essential trait: The scent of his homeland will always live in his work.” I was particularly drawn to his “Nude over Vitebsk.”

Quin Matthews and Sharon Benge share stories of their interviews at the DMA.

Art really does matter
I had the good luck to be in town on this particular Thursday. Locals Quin Matthews and Sharon Benge presented a 45-minute montage of interviews they had conducted with actors, writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, conductors, architects, dancers, and so on for their Art Matters radio show, a local show aired on WRR Classical 101, which debuted in October 1988. They are donating their more than 25,000 interviews and 100 hours of film spanning 25 years of covering the arts to DMA. One of DMA’s executives noted that it’s the single largest media gift, and DMA intends to make these available and searchable on the web so that these historic treasures are accessible to everyone. Stay tuned. (Attendees were given free CDs of interviews with various artists, which I look forward to hearing!)

Glass sculptures at the DMA.

I’ll share a few inspiring quotes that I got out of the snippets of interviews that were included in the montage. First of all, Quin Matthews is a filmmaker who devotes his life to telling stories. What I noticed right away in the interviews was that he is a good editor. He knew what to keep and what to leave on the cutting floor. It truly is an art to edit – what you leave out is just as important as what you show. How lucky for Matthews and Benge to have spent a quarter century learning about all of these artists and recording the artists’ own words for prosperity. And how lucky for their listeners through the years and now for everyone. Since college, I’ve harbored a secret desire to be a filmmaker, documentary and otherwise, as another medium for storytelling. For now, though, I’ll admire those who have really made filmmaking and storytelling an art.

Matthews and Benge didn’t just focus on local artists. They went to the ends of the world – The Czech Republic, Bolivia, China, Russia, and many other countries – to bring art to their listeners in North Texas. When I listened to the chamber choir, I was reminded of my time in choir in high school. I had forgotten how moved I could be, how my whole body responded and rejoiced when we sang Gregorian chants, Bach, even show tunes from the 1940s. I got the same shot of adrenalin and exuberance listening to classical music performed by the Dallas orchestra and other musical groups.

Happily, I was introduced to artists such as Rusty Scruby, who talked exuberantly about how math and the landscape that numbers make excited him. If you take a look at his art, you will understand how math and numbers are a part of his art. Vernon Fisher talked about how art is a way of understanding the world, how man makes maps, counts things, tries to make sense of the world, as a way to avoid death. Jean Lacey talked about how she wants people to look at art and respond. Dorothea Kelley, a musician who championed chamber music in Dallas, talked about how music can help your life by giving you joy, helping you out at times, and feeding you spiritually.

I came away from DMA nourished on a spiritual and creative level. Not a bad deal for a 36-hour business trip!

The Dress at 50

Live the creative, meaningful, and full life

Category Archives: Places to See

Chicago: Architectural boat tour and Museum of Science and Industry

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Chicago: The Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum, Millennium Park, and more

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Celebrating Mother’s Day 2013

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The Mob Museum in Las Vegas: You’d better like it or else

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Flamenco for building strong, confident girls and women – ole!

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Dallas Museum of Art: Art Matters

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