This morning, Michael headed over to this with the boys – I wish I could have gone, too, but I’d told Katie we’d take care of some her business this morning (time is hard to come by with a busy high school junior), so she and I headed out, finished her business with time to spare, so we determined we had a bit of time (before she had to hit the books all afternoon) to spare – enough for a first visit to the Birmingham Museum of Art.
After getting through a bit of traffic from the Magic City Classic parade, we snagged one of the last places in the museum parking lot, which was good, since there was absolutely no street parking anywhere – very busy, which is good to see. A quiet downtown is a depressing sight, which is usually the case in Birmingham on the weekends.
What prompted this visit wasn’t only Katie’s free time, but the new exhibit centered around some of Leonardo’s drawings:
Leonardo da Vinci: Drawings from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin encompasses one of Leonardo’s most celebrated notebooks, the Codex on the Flight of Birds, and 11 important drawings, including one described by Bernard Berenson as the “most beautiful drawing in the world.” The drawings have never before traveled as a group nor in their entirety been made available outside of Italy.
It was well-curated – not too overdone, although as you might guess, you have to do a bit to set only 11 drawings in context and avoid the feeling of “is that all there is?” They were arranged in groups according to interest – the face, the body, horses, and flight. The Codex was in a case, open to a particular page – I wonder if they change the page that’s open on occasion – well, I’ll probably be going back a couple of times before the exhibit closes, so I suppose I’ll find out. One of the nifty things they had going on was a docent projecting images of the Codex on a screen – going through it page by page, explaining what was on each, with some of the drawings being animated to demonstrate what element of flight Leonardo was exploring.
Oh, and yes, they handed you a magnifying glass as you entered, so you could examine the detail of the drawings – and it really did make a difference.
I’m not sure I’ll be letting the boys have their own when I take them. They look a little bit too much like swords with big glass tips.
We took a quick run through the rest of the museum, just to scope it out – it seems like a very good mid-sized collection.
Of just as much – or even perhaps a touch more – interest to me than the Leonardo exhibit was another special show of some photographs by Marion Post Wolcott:
As a female photographer in the 1930s, Marion Post Wolcott was required to cover fashion stories and events for the ladies’ pages. Frustrated, she sought and landed a job with the Farm Security Administration in 1938. Following the path of earlier FSA photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, Wolcott traveled the South to capture images of rural America and demonstrate the effectiveness of the New Deal Administration’s programs in improving quality of life. Through this enduring public art project, Wolcott shaped our historical understanding of life during the Depression by documenting social concerns such as race and poverty, while evoking empathy for the subjects she encountered.
Migrant and tenants at work and in their homes, waiting in line, at leisure, learning to read. Close-in, honest, absorbing pictures. One set was taken when Wolcott traveled to Florida to photograph migrants, but arrived a bit too early for the harvest. So she bided her time by photographing tourists in Miami Beach and Sarasota – and the resulting photographs, migrant workers, nut-brown from the sun next to pale sunbathers – offers quite a contrast.
