Museums of Massachusetts

We hope you enjoy the reviews, thoughts, and reflections we have written of the five museums we visited during Innovation Academy Charter School's 2012 Endersession, Museums of Massachusetts.

Teacher: Mr. Pelham Students:Melissa Jedry, Alisa Lee, Maddie Saint Jeane, Shelby Branam

Day 1: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Day 2: Institute of Contemporary Art

Day 3: Worcester Art Museum

Day 4: deCordova Museum & Sculpture Park

1. "Really Timothy?!" - teacher yelling at small child at deCordova

2. Au Bon Pan being baffled by Mr. Pelham asking for no chicken on a wrap. 3. Melissa’s constantly telling negative stories about her dad despite the fact that he seems very nice 4. Alisa being WAY too loud all the time. 5. Maddie miss-reading the word "2000" and saying "Zooo"

6. Melissa is secretly an old woman that complains a lot 7. Mr. Pelham only drinks water. Fact. Deal with it. 8. Take 3 steps back 9. "What is this, air rice?" - Melissa complaining about her father's cooking 10. Mr pelham looking the same in a picture of him at the Worcester Art Museum from when he took part in Art All State in high school 11. Mr. Pelham keeps a merMAN in his trunk. Fact. Dont hate. 12. Mr. Pelham cant walk and breathe at the same time. Not a fact. 13. Shelby failing to climb a tree and owing us 100 dollars. Seriously, pay up. 14. Apparently Maddie said "the God’s are arising" about a painting. Its not funny. 15. Students doing performance art at the deCordova while Mr. Pelham makes phone calls and tries to forget he is at work. 16. Shelby is still trying to see the Alex Katz show at the MFA. Seriously. Right now. 17. Maddie is racist against people from England. 18. "A black chick dumped me" read a quote on a sculpture 19. Melissa does not use napkins. Gross, right?

20. Melissa wants to drill holes in people's heads cause she loves Jeffrey Dahmer 21. Maddie is riffraff. Fact. 22. Alisa still refuses to write about the worcester art museum. Rude. 23. When maddie couldnt subtract 1 from 5. True story. 24. Mr Pelham’s remix of m83. The cd was just dirty. I fixed it.

On Friday, we went to the Danforth Museum and I enjoyed the experience. Even though there are not much art pieces in this museum, we got to see the “Behind the scenes” of entering art to a museum and how the museum communicate with artist who lives far away. The guide told us that they do this digitally meaning artist would take pictures of their art piece and send them to the person who is choosing the art pieces. If an artist’s piece is chosen, they would mail it to the museum to have it set up. We also got to an art school and the what the rooms look like. We went into a dark room, a loom room, and a room just for kilns. We did see some art pieces in the museum and lots of the acrylic and oil paintings stood out to me. I really liked children’s room where the gallery showed artist’s work that are mainly directed towards children. All of the drawings and paintings are on cardboard trees and they were all colorful and had cartoons. I was told that these drawings and paintings were all included in children’s books. There is nothing I dislike about this museum except the fact that it should be expanded.

The Danforth museum was a very small one, but they had a lot of different art. I thought it was cool how almost every picture, painting, etc., was done by a different artist. But, they all related to one another and had similar themes. One of my favorite pictures was done by the artist Pelle Cass and was called Quincy Market. I like that picture because of how the people walking match the shapes of the bricks on the patio. It looks as if it was planned that way or something. I don’t know if it was or not but I think it’d be more cool if it wasn’t. I think it’d be cooler that way because then it shows how maybe people tend to walk along the patterns in the ground or something like that. This picture also related to many others in the room with the theme of geometric shapes. There were a lot of other cool pictures along with this one, but this one struck my eye a little more than the others.  

The Worcester Art Museum on Wednesday was bigger than I thought it would be. They had a pretty good variety in the artwork too. My favorite thing out of everything I saw was by an artist named Ron Rosenstock. He had a whole room and hallway filled with photographs that he took. I liked them a lot because of how they are all in black and white. He also has this certain style where he takes the picture at a certain angle and the lighting always seems to be perfect. All of his pictures look really dramatic and attract attention. I really liked looking at them because of that. The museum had a lot of great art as well, but my favorite thing was looking at the photographs by Ron Rosenstock.

The ICA had a lot less to offer than the MFA, which was good for me because I take forever in museums. A lot of work by Charline von Heyl was on display, and though I didn’t like her collages so much, her paintings were generally beautiful and visually stimulating. One of them made me think that I was looking at the back of a painting and that the front of it was facing the canvas. My favorite of hers, though, was Solo Dolo.

Normally I’m not really into photography, but one photo really stood out to me above the rest. It was part of Philip-Lorca Dicorcia’s series Hustler, a series where he takes photos of male prostitutes in staged places and positions, and pays them for the shot the amount they would normally charge for other services. The man in the picture looks almost sad, and if not for the description, you would not have known he was a male prostitute. The series does a fantastic job of humanizing the models, giving the viewer empathy where any other way would be sympathy.

On Tuesday we went to the ICA. There was a lot more work that I didn’t like compared to the work that I did. A lot of the work I didn’t like was by the artist Charline von Heyl. I couldn’t understand it nor did I like the way they looked therefore I didn’t like any of her pieces. There were some wicked cool pieces though. For example, a cube made entirely of pins just holding themselves together. And pieces of wood from a crime scene suspended from the ceiling at different lengths. One of the things I enjoyed the most was being able to watch a short film on how the ICA building was made and the thought process that went into building it. Architecture is also art, and you can see how that applies really easily in the building. I liked how because it’s right on the harbor, the architects in charge of designing the building took advantage of that and really wanted the water to be a big part of the design as well as making the building look contemporary and be able to keep looking contemporary for the years to come. So, not only did I enjoy some of the work displayed at the ICA but also the ICA building itself.