Spring Break Museum

For my Spring Break I went to New Jersey on a Habitat for Humanity trip. On our last night there we went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was my first art museum outside of the Milwaukee Art Museum so it was an interesting experience. Im so use to the white walls at the art museum here in Milwaukee that I was not expecting what I saw. The museum had a Greek architectural look and I can just feel its vastness when I first walked in. I was told that it was one of the largest art museums in America and with only 45 minutes to spare to look around I practically ran through as much as I could. The big exhibit that was on at the time was the Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392-1910.

Here are some pictures that I took of the overall museum. We werent suppose to be taking pictures and I was so engrossed in what I was seeing that I kinda kept forgetting that I was suppose to be taking pictures.

Entry room

They had a Japanese exhibit too that was just amazing! They built an actual tea house inside the museum which was really pretty neat! The plants were alive and you could see just how much time and energy was put in to making it. 

This is what the label read on the wall just outside the door

Label:

This ceremonial teahouse was built in about 1917 by the Japanese architect Ögi Rodö. Designed in the rustic tradition or "artless style" of the fifteenth-century artist Oguri Sotan, it also incorporates eighteenth-century elements. The Sunkaraku teahouse originally stood on the grounds of Rodö's private residence in Tokyo. He sold it to the Museum in 1928, and in 1957 it was installed at the Museum, making it the only work by Rodö outside Japan. The garden setting you see now was planned by one of Japan's foremost contemporary garden designers, Matsunosuke Tatsui.

The apparent artlessness of the teahouse in fact conceals acute attention to detail and to aesthetic pleasure. The architecture of both the waiting room and the tearoom reveals a special delight in natural materials such as cypress shingles (for the roof) and bamboo. Proximity to nature is also emphasized by the garden, visible from both buildings. Everything inside the tearoom has been planned to stimulate the mind and to delight the eye. Rough, unfinished vertical posts remind guests of their imperfections and their oneness with nature, and the tea utensils enhance their sensitivity to natural textures and artistic creativity.

Label:

The tea ceremony offers a temporary respite from the complexities of daily life. This mood perhaps inspired a famous devotee of the tea cult, Lord Fumai Matsudaira (1750-1818), when he autographed the tablet over the teahouse with the inscription "Sun Ka Raku," or Evanescent Joys.

I also loved the granite pillars in the South Asian Section! Being inside this amazing building complex was surreal and it made me feel so small on this planet. 

Label:

The granite pillars, brackets, and slabs that form this temple hall (mandapa) come from the Madanagopalaswamy Temple, a sixteenth-century building complex in the south Indian city of Madurai. (The complex is dedicated to Krishna, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, and is still used for worship today.) The architectural elements installed here were purchased in 1912 by Adeline Pepper Gibson of Philadelphia while on a visit to Madurai. They are believed to have come primarily from a freestanding hall that once stood in front of the main shrine and was probably dismantled in the mid-nineteenth century.

The eight stone slabs between the pillars' lion brackets depict scenes from the Ramayana, the epic tale of the hero Rama, another avatar of Vishnu. The slabs were originally part of a larger relief series that ran around the inside of the hall and narrated the entire Ramayana. The life-sized figures projecting from the central-aisle pillars are deities and characters from both the Ramayana and another major Hindu text, the Mahabharata. These include Garuda (the bird-man vehicle of Vishnu) and Hanuman (the monkey-general of the Ramayana). A variety of small relief images of divine and human figures also ornament the pillars, including Krishna as a baby, a couple making love, royal donors, and even the temple architect with his measuring stick

I wish I could have taken more pictures but there you have it! I loved everything I saw there and the amount of history it held was just incredible. I hope to visit it next year if I can!