I grew up in western Maryland, but almost all of my family lives right in the Baltimore area, so I was really familiar with it. And I went to museums in Washington DC for just about every school trip ever. I started college at Towson in 2010 and would venture into the cities for concert and outings and stuff, and now my knowledge is even better than it was before and it's basically pure badassery living so close to so many cool places. The photo at the top of the page is from the Hirshhorn gallery in DC, where I had a spaz attack over the Francis Bacon paintings and insisted my friends take my photo with it. If you like bizarre paintings of people looking blurry and tortured, I cannot recommend Francis Bacon to you enough. (If you think I'm being sarcastic, watch my reaction when anyone talks about Francis Bacon around me. I would marry him if he wasn't gay and also dead.)
There's a lot of great contemporary stuff at the Hirshhorn, too, like a whole Ai Weiwei exhibit. One of the Ai Weiwei pieces is a giant wall of names and their corresponding ages and grades and genders in Chinese. I asked my friend Harry, who spent last summer in China, what they all said and he showed me, and then he wondered why the listing of names was significant. It turns out they were all names of students who died in an earthquake, which dampened the mood a little bit. Nobody said looking at political art was going to be a barrel of monkeys, but it's really fascinating to go through the exhibits and get a little exposure to another culture and how its artists piss off its government.
There's so, so much to see and do in DC. I go to a lot of places as often as I can (with the exception of the Holocaust museum, because it's so haunting and it's kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing, the way it touches you). The National Gallery is always a pleaser, just because it's vast and full of popular things and if you're sort of a casual art admirer, you'll be able to look at things and go "Oh, I know this!" and if you're more advanced, you'll still see things you know and it won't feel like first grade. The Natural History museum isn't very artsy, but I can't help but mention it, just because it's so wonderful.
Baltimore has some really great collections too...I think it's kind of underrated, especially since it's competing with New York and Boston and DC and all the other east coast art scenes. I went to the re-opening of the contemporary wing at the Baltimore Museum of Art with some friends, and I have never been to an art museum that crowded. Everyone, from the hoity-toity to the broke art school students, was there, and it was a lot of fun. I stepped out into the Cone collection to get some air because the contemporary wing was very nearly a mosh pit at one point, and I had a great time looking at all the Matisse and Picasso things in there as well. No matter what you're looking for, you'll probably find it at the BMA.
My favorite museum in Baltimore is the Walters, though. Since I took on my art history minor, I've been more interested in ancient and Renaissance and especially Baroque stuff than the modern and contemporary, and the Walters has a vast amount of the older stuff. I actually got sent on a scavenger hunt there for my ancient Greek art class, and I can now very proudly identify vase and pottery types and the painting styles used to make the art on them, as well as the stories on the vases, a skill which will doubtlessly get me many many jobs. In all seriousness, though, there's no feeling like going into an art museum and getting to be like Michael Sheen's character in "Midnight in Paris" for a few minutes. There's nothing wrong with indulging your inner pedantic side every once in awhile. It's good for your self esteem.
I'm getting off track, though. Basically, the Walters is a great crash course in ancient and medieval art, and they have a mummy. A mummy! Like, a real-life dead person from an Egyptian tomb! I went to the Walters a few months back during their special extended hours, and the museum was very empty by the time I wandered alone into the ancient Egypt wing. I was sooooo convinced that mummy was going to just punch through the glass and I'd scream for help and no one would hear me because they'd be in the damn Dutch masters section, looking at the Heemskerck and not giving a shit I was being eaten alive. The Walters also has some really wicked and fancy Roman sarcophagi, and some of the faces on them look like Elvis, complete with sideburns.
Also, this is specific to Towson, but I'm sure it applies to any liberal arts college--check out any on-campus art galleries. I know the people in charge of the ones at Towson work really hard to bring interesting and beautiful and sometimes even famous stuff to campus. We had Kwang Young Chun's "Aggregations" in our Asian Arts gallery for the fall, and he's been showing all over, which I thought was really neat. I'm looking forward to the spring semester, especially since the Asian arts director is the sweetest ever and she always gets me interviews with people when I'm doing Towerlight stories on gallery openings. I'll update when I know who or what is coming this spring!
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