Renwick: Exploring Ghost Crafts
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| Also listed in: 2008 Social Capital |
Last summer, during the endless job hunting months, I became rather obsessed with an obscure topic: American craft. People negotiate the difference between art and craft - by many accounts craft indicates the application of a technique as well as the object's ability to "function". Weaving baskets as generations of one's family has done, bookbinding and book design -- these are creative expressions as well as functional links to human history.
The Renwick Gallery has stood across from the White House for years. Though a few metro stops away from its "parent gallery" - the American Museum of Art in Chinatown, the Renwick houses the Smithsonian's collection of American crafts and decorative art. While the Renwick enjoys travelling exhbitions from time to time, it is its permanent collection that persists in my memory.
The Renwick Gallery has stood across from the White House for years. Though a few metro stops away from its "parent gallery" - the American Museum of Art in Chinatown, the Renwick houses the Smithsonian's collection of American crafts and decorative art. While the Renwick enjoys travelling exhbitions from time to time, it is its permanent collection that persists in my memory.
I won't ruin the surprise of Ghost Clock by explaining what it IS exactly, but this installation is a true crowd pleaser. I've found that the best way to get people to come see it with me is to repeat "Ghost Clock" over and over again, making my way toward 17th and Pennsylvania. After awhile, everyone wants to join the fun. Ghost Clock is located on the second floor of the gallery.
How to get there? Take the blue and orange to Farragut West, or the red line to Farragut North. Walk up 17th to Pennsylvania and you’ll see the gallery. If you want to check out a historically relevant AND off-the-beaten-path museum, the Renwick is a great choice.
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My sweet tooth knew no bounds when it came to that all-night - and day, and the next day – candy bacchanalia. It was candy carnival, drums thumping, dancers shaking, feathers and fireworks filling the sky with molted flame. When I say that I had a sweet tooth, I do not exaggerate. If a candy was sour, I couldn’t hang. I was – and I still am – a chocolate fiend. Leave it to me to drop jaw and prove Magellan wrong, because if the world were made of chocolate, I’d munch it flat. However, my Halloween routine had nothing on the Trick-or-Treater’s coding system these folks in Sacramento, California created. They have a chalk-marking system where the kids leave codes for each other in chalk at the foot of the driveway telling the other kids everything from, "no one home" to "full size candy bars" and even "mean dog." With those kinds of clear signals, I would have saved my parents and myself a lot of time. I wish that families who were facing temporarily rough financial times back then would have considered timely personal loans to help them score some good chocolates and candy bars. They’re affordable and easy to pay back over time. In fact, they’d have paid off their loan before I even finished all the candy in my bag!
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