There’s something special about returning to a place years after first encountering it. If the space remains unchanged, it gives cause for you to consider how you might have changed since the last time you visited it. If it has changed, you can take the opportunity to consider how you might reimagine your relationship with it in a different way from before.
The newly renovated Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art gives rise to both of these occasions: while the gallery designs and layouts have changed drastically since the museum closed for renovations in 2017, much of the collection has remained the same.
When I visited the museum for the first time in over two years after it reopened last month, I reveled in the experience of being both familiar and unfamiliar with the space. There were paintings and sculptures I distinctly remembered from before the renovation, like the complete collection of Marcel Duchamp’s wry “Readymades,” his series of manufactured objects repurposed as art, like the urinal he flipped upside down and called “Fountain.”
Even better than the artworks I’d acquainted myself with before the renovation, though, were the works I’d never noticed before but now seemed familiar because of what I’ve learned since last visiting the museum. For example, the huge, sweeping eighteenth-century European and American landscape paintings that feature mountains, raging thunderstorms, and vast forests never appealed to me beyond their beauty and extreme attention to detail. Now, though, I understand they’re the visual manifestation of the philosophical movement dedicated to sentimentality and the sublime—thinkers like Edmund Burke championed art and literature that elicited strong emotions from viewers and readers, especially displays of natural grandeur like these. In the American context, contemporary scholars like Mark Stoll have even catalogued the ways in which eighteenth-century American landscape painting was shaped by the enduring Puritan roots in American culture. When I gaze at these paintings now, these clues and meanings hidden in them appear a little more clearly to me than they did before.
What’s exciting is that there’s so much more to the museum than these few pieces, so there’s endless fascination to be found in visiting the museum again and again. With free admission, cool programming to take part in, and a collection that spans from ancient cultures to the past few years, the Eskenazi Museum offers something of interest to everyone, especially those who think art isn’t for them. Visit it from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays, and 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays.
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