Another museum party

Last night I went to another museum party, only this time at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. $5 for students, $10 for everybody else, free for members. A really good deal. It's sponsored by Starbucks, so there were girls with green aprons handing out the newest frap. Unfortunately by the time we got there they were running out of drinks and handed out coupons for a free tangerine frap. My friend didn't want hers so now I have 5 free fraps! I hope they're good. There were a LOT of people there in the main lobby and the ajoining patio. Almost everyone looked to be part of the hip 20-something midtown crowd. Good people-watching. They had a number of musicians and DJs thoughout the night. I didn't like the music, so I it was a little boring for me. It was just like being in a club.

Unlike the science museum, the art museum didn't have the whole museum open. But the one art exhibit we could see was the Quilts of Gee's Bend. It was SO cool. I saw the documentary on PBS (of course) a while ago and it's a really neat story. So, there is tiny tiny tiny town called Gee's Bend. It is made up of the decendants of slaves on former plantation land. At one point in time, around the depression, Gee's Bend was the poorest town in the whole country. It's still very poor. Before some of the women were "found" they had no electricity or running water. Now, as the quilts they used to cover their beds are selling for thousands of dollars, they are proud owners of refrigerators and washers. But she still hangs on to her old washboard, just in case. So, what happened was, an artfully minded outsider came across the town and saw these quilts hanging on the clotheslines and was just taken aback by the color and modern art-like design of these quilts. The most amazing thing is that all of the women in the town who make these quilts and have been making them for generations, don't know a thing about modern art. They took inspiration from their surroundings. It's all a priori. For example, a common pattern is called "housetop" and is taken from what you see when you look up to the underside of a roof.

I haven't been to an art museum in a long time and I forgot how much I LOVE it. I was with someone who doesn't get modern art, so I kind of felt like a giddy nerd, especially gushing over any quilt with red cloth (I love red, lol). But the colors were so vivid and the patterns and different pieces of cloth were so varied, it can take a long time to look at one piece. You can get lost in staring at patterns and colors (well, at least I can). But I think the best part of this exhibit, or really any art exhibit - classical or contemporary, is the story behind the art. The quilts of Gee's Bend are more engaging when you realize where they came from. But quilts, in general, kind of take it one more level further, because each piece of fabric has a story. You can see it in the blue quilts- the strips of fabric have a soft color gradation from dark blue to white. None of it's intentional. The strips of blue were made from well worn denim pants or workshirts. You can just imagine how hard these people worked. Everything was spared, nothing thrown away, just transformed into what would become internationally acclaimed modern art.