A little bit of culture

As I mentioned the other day I played tourist a bit on Sunday, including my first visit to the Hirshhorn Museum.

It was a foggy and miserable day outside....

 

but the art inside was intriguing and inviting. Here are a few of my favorites:

A spiral of 'wine' bottles

This was actually a series of 8 or so foot tall wooden
blocks with a circle in the middle. They were aligned
so I snapped this shot at one end, looking through them all

The snake was made of backpacks, to represent
all of the bags left behind by school kids when an
earthquake struck. 

Only the center stool has it's legs on the ground. 

Of all the cool pieces I saw, the ones that got me thinking the most where these two: 

And what I was thinking was - did they come attached or not? And if they actually arrived as hundreds (thousands?!?) of individual porcelain (I think) crabs and rebar rods, who had to put them together? And how did they know if they did it right?

Luckily, I had some one to ask those very questions! A friend I grew up with works in Art Conservation and is on staff at the Hirshhorn. I sent her these two pictures after my visit and my questions and she said it varies from installation to installation, but in this case the staff at the museum was largely responsible for setting out each and every crab as well as every one of those rebar rods. I would not have been excited about going to work on that day.

I definitely enjoyed my visit to the Hirshhorn. This exhibit is there through February 24 and it's certainly worth checking out.