Field Trip! Reflection.

This week our class took a trip to Minneapolis, Minnesota to see the Walker Art Center and the Bell Museum of Natural History (at the University of Minnesota). This day was a lot of fun. First we walked around the Walker, which I have been to previously but I got to see a lot of new artwork this time. My favorite pieces were probably Naked, by Eiko and Koma and the Yves Klein exhibit, specifically his Untitled Fire Painting. The first one was very interesting. At first I thought the piece was the large wall of feathers and I didn't see that there was something inside, until someone walked out and I realized you were supposed to enter! I also saw the pictures of the people in the pamphlet and thought they were sculptures of some sort. Then upon entering the piece I finally realized that they were breathing, moving, real people. I watched for about ten or fifteen minutes, seeing them shift and sleep. It was very calming but at the same time curious. I got a sense of the importance of time, and survival, and birth or death. The Yves Klein exhibit was fascinating, and more so because we talked about his work in my sculpture class. The room of his pure blue works was overwhelming! I loved his pieces using women's bodies to make imprints in paint on canvas. He also had some works, like my favorite "fire painting" that used the form of the bodies but with warmer, fiery colors. There was something about them that fascinated me. The quality was very unique and the canvas was manipulated in an interesting way.

The second half of the trip we went over to the Bell Museum, which was a smaller museum containing stuffed animals from the midwest. I saw birds, moose, wolves, etc. but I wasn't quite sure what to draw so I went to the room with all the bones and live animals. I ended up drawing an antler that had an intricate piece of bone attached. This I enjoyed doing a lot, and I even got to learn about some of the bones later and see an elephant skull, which was cool.