A (Half) Day at the Museum

Linda, Duane and I had been planning to hit the 'In Living Color' exhibit currently at the Tampa Museum of Art.    Actually, the full title of the exhibit is "In Living Color: Andy Warhol and Contemporary Printmaking."  We went to the museum last Friday and viewed the exhibit before having lunch downtown.  Though there was mostly Warhol's work, there were also some pieces by Keith Haring, Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Anish Kapoor, and others.

It was a nice day to visit since weekdays are pretty quiet and we took our time browsing the exhibit before heading down to check out the gift shop (Duane bought a set of paint brushes) and then heading out for lunch.  One thing we noticed was how shiny the minarets at the University of Tampa looked in the sunlight.  Tampa U is right across the river from the museum.

Tampa Museum of Art

   

University of Tampa minarets across the river.

I wish I'd gotten a better pic of the minaret on the far right -- the big fat one.  It looked like someone had just hand polished it.  I didn't realize the trees were blocking my view.  Duh.

After we found a local sandwich shop where we decided to have lunch, Linda and Duane were nice enough to accompany me to a local jewelry store.  I had won an auction at a charity event recently for a gift certificate to the Hayman Jewelry Co.  I hate to admit that I'd never heard of them before I won the gift cert.  They're a family-owned company that's been in business since 1933.  Very nice people helped me in the shop.  I selected a pair of turquoise and 14 karat yellow gold earrings.  I love the way turquoise looks with yellow gold.  The Victorians wore turquoise this way.  I own an antique band ring with full English hallmarks from 1880 that's 18 karat yellow gold and has turquoise stones.  Actually, I have quite a few pieces of antique and vintage jewelry -- particularly rings.  I sure hope my nieces are into jewelry when they're older...

As usual, we had a really nice day and managed to get home before some serious thunderstorms moved in by the afternoon.

My new earrings.

The Andy Warhol Exhibit at the Salvador Dali museum

Yesterday, Linda, Duane, and I decided that we needed to get on the stick and get over to St. Petersburg to visit the Andy Warhol exhibit before it leaves the Salvador Dali museum.  It was originally supposed to end on April 27th but we got an extension when the museum announced that it would continue through June 1st.  Boo-ya!

I had been to the 'old' Dali museum which was nice but smaller but not to the new and larger one.  Linda had only been to the new one and Duane hadn't been to either so we were raring to go.  Plus, all three of us like Andy Warhol.  The new Dali sits on the bay and is gorgeous.  I took a few pics of the outside and the areas I could look down on from the second floor.  There is no picture-taking allowed in the actual exhibit halls which is understandable.

The Salvador Dali museum -- view from the parking lot.

The helical staircase -- taken from the second floor.

View of the bay from the second floor.

Look up!

We went through the Dali exhibit first then started our Warhol tour with some selfies with Andy.

Linda with Andy.

Duane with Andy.

Me with Andy.

Then the fun really started.  First of all, some of Andy's films were being projected onto walls along with pieces of his art and photos from his childhood that were on display.  My favorite was an almost all-white with off-white collage of the Mona Lisa.  Second fave had to be an iconic Debbie Harry piece from back-in-the-day.  Of course, since Warhol died in 1987, just about everything was from that era, anyway.  Some nice pencil sketches of Mick Jagger, Princess Diana, and Sid Vicious.  Various pieces from the Jackie Kennedy series -- all in blue tones.  I was glad to see that a few of the 'piss' paintings were included, too.  I remember reading that Andy and one of his assistants used to try out different vitamins and supplements in order to change the color of their urine while working on these paintings.

Now the piece de resistance!  A camera was set up so that visitors could have their own 'screen test' made just as Andy did with so many of his subjects -- living and otherwise.  (Remember the long film of the Empire State building?)  You could choose a white or black background -- all three of us went with white -- and adjust the lighting to your taste.  The filming ran for three minutes but the finished projects run slightly longer.  Part of the process involves slo-mo'ing the filming at different points.  I went first and tried to just stare at the camera the whole time.  Let me assure you, three minutes is a LONG time when you're doing that.  Linda went next and then Duane.  Both of them looked over at the other two of us while being filmed and can be seen laughing a few times.  I should have done that but I was afraid if I looked at the two of them, I'd laugh and not be able to stop.  It's interesting the way that black and white throw shadows on the face.

So, without further ado, here we are in our not quite 15 minutes of fame.

Lee Ann's Screen Test. 

Linda's Screen Test.

Duane's Screen Test.

By the way, I was told by a member of the staff of the Dali museum that Dali got mad and walked off during his screen test.  He lasted about 26 seconds.  How 'Dali' like!

Carpet -- Could it be any more disgusting???

I'm pretty sure that the first place I read Andy Warhol's opinion on wall-to-wall carpet was The Andy Warhol Diaries. He likened it (I'm paraphrasing here) to being sewn into one outfit of clothing and being stuck with it. You could only wash or treat it on the outside but you'd never feel like you got the dirt, dust, etc., out of it.

That pretty much sums up my feeling about carpet. And I do mean wall-to-wall, of course, not a really large rug that can be taken up and cleaned professionally. The carpet on our stairs and in the upstairs hall and bedrooms is looking worse for wear after 22 years in our house. I'm sure that the only reason the carpet upstairs has held out for this long is due to not having children and only having very small dogs (and never more than two at any given time). Our downstairs has absolutely no carpet although we do have rugs in certain areas for shoe wiping and decoration.

I would love to have bamboo flooring put in upstairs but after listening to my husband, George, during his weight-lifting routine in his man-cave (located upstairs directly above the kitchen), I'm afraid nothing but MORE carpet will have to be installed due to the likelihood of what a barbell would do to bamboo (no matter how hard it's supposed to be). Besides I already know that we'd have to have carpet on the 'bridge' -- that's what the architect called it on the floor plan -- that begins at the top of the stairs and leads you into the upstairs hall. You can actually look over each side of the bridge and see the formal living areas on one side and the family room on the other. I've already experienced the chest-clutching horror of watching my young nephews and nieces attempting to peer over the bridge, so the thought of having any type of slippery floor there is not an option. Same problem with the actual stairs.

Some type of Berber would probably be the best option but why does it have to be so ugly and industrial looking? Not that it's not an improvement over past styles like the high 'shag' of the '70's. Ugh. Seriously ugly stuff. When harvest gold and avocado green were in, my mother was right there to jump feet first into the fad that so many people embraced. My parents went with harvest gold shag on most of the floors in the house. To anyone unfamiliar with REAL shag carpeting, there was also a plastic tool called a 'rake' -- yes, similar to what you use outside to gather leaves, etc. One of my chores as a teenager (and the oldest) was to 'rake' the shag at least once or twice a week. Talk about a thankless task. I'd rake over it after it was vacuumed and as soon as someone walked on it... well, I'm sure you get the idea.

I've never understood why wall-to-wall carpet took off the way it did in the '60's. You're living in a house with nice wood floors or terrazzo and you cover them up with carpet nailed into them? In the late '60's, we lived in a two-story house in New Hampshire. It was a row house on an Air Force base but it had very nice wood floors including... drumroll... on the stairs! And these stairs, unlike the ones where I live now which have a break with a landing, went straight down.

My sister Pam and I figured out pretty quickly that if we sat on them in our cotton pajamas, we could push off from the top step and thump on our bums down to the next step and the next one. We'd gather momentum as we went down and were going pretty fast by the time we hit the bottom one on the first floor. Then, as icing on the cake, we discovered that if we rubbed the wood steps with wax paper, the steps got REALLY slippery. Ah, nirvana! At least until the day we came home from school and discovered our parents had had the stairs carpeted. (Boo! Hiss!)  My loathing of carpet began early.

George really hates the idea of having to have everything moved out of the upstairs bedrooms and living through the mess involved with replacing the carpet. I'm with him on that score. Our current carpet has a low nap and the color is a good one - a medium beige -- and we could probably have another professional cleaning done and, really, not that many people go upstairs. Putting of the inevitable sounds better and better.