In Progress - #22: Visit a different museum every month for a year

This month I opted to visit one of my favorite Smithsonian museums - the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden - in my efforts to visit a different museum every month. I could spend hours looking at sculptures, and the variety in the Hirshhorn collection is astounding. My personal favorites are Henry Moore's smooth, shining reclining figures and Juan Munoz's "Last Conversation Piece," which greets visitors in the garden.

Yesterday, though, I was surprised to have such a great time exploring some of the Hirshhorn's non-sculpture pieces. I'm not usually one for installation art, but two of the pieces I ended up enjoying the most fell squarely into that category.

Mario Garcia Torres' "Je ne sais si c'en est la cause" uses a slide show to compare the Grapetree Bay Hotel's mosaic murals at the height of the hotel's operations in the mid-1960s with the decay and disrepair that have struck the site today. I could have stayed for the swinging music alone.

Han Op de Beeck's Staging Silence, which is on display in the Hirshhorn's downstairs Black Box theater, is the first museum film to ever capture my attention so thoroughly that I sat for the full 22-minute play time - as did most of the other folks in the museum with me. The artist takes viewers fluidly from one silent scene to another, each crafted in miniature, but looking so real that one forgets the scenes aren't real - until a hand enters the frame and slowly shifts the landscape, taking the viewer somewhere new entirely. The film is only showing until March 27, so if you're in DC, I highly recommend making a visit before it's gone.

Of course, neither of these pieces lend themselves well to photos. Below are a few highlights from my afternoon (before the camera's battery died):