A Good Day

Today is Matthew's birthday. He's 31. He says it feels remarkably like 30. We met 2 years ago today. We will be married in less than 3 weeks. I'm so proud of him and I'm grateful that we get to spend our lives together.

We went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art (a whopping 3 blocks from our apartment and one of the best museums in the world). They have an exhibit of Takashi Murakami's work that we were planning to see, but when the 7 of us got there we found out there was a $10 admission fee for the exhibit and half of the group are starving artists... so $10 to see some Japanese pop art wasn't in the cards. Instead, we made modest donations to the museum and visited portions of the main collection.

My favorite was the current exhibits in the Sackler Gallery for Feminist Art. Normally, I'm not a contemporary art fan. Moreover, I'm never a fan of labels other than nationality or time period. Labeling something as "feminist art" makes me crazy and I shy away from galleries that promote that kind of categorization. It seems to counter intuitive to me. Anyway, I was very pleasantly surprised to have found not only 2 contemporary artists I can stand behind 100%, but one in particular that really spoke to me in ways I didn't expect. The Judy Chicago installation of The Dinner Party is amazing, and you should see it if you can. But, it was Ghada Amer who really stopped me in my tracks today.

She's an Egyptian-born, French-raised, New York-living artist who uses fabric, embroidery, text, and paint to create pieces that speak to marginalization of women and themes of typical gender roles. Pretty amazing stuff. If you're near Brooklyn you should check out her work. My favorite piece was a series of 4 panels, each painted a muted shade of CMYK, arranged in a grid, with intricate embroidery of the definitions of 4 words in Arabic - including freedom and fear, I believe.