Four Hour Vacation

One of the great things about living in Washington, DC is that on a Saturday you can say to your spouse, "Let's go downtown and look at some art", and you can, and it is free.  I wanted to check out the one million bones installation on the mall because I had worked with my students creating clay and paper mache bones for the display.  One Million Bones is an art installation created to raise awareness about human genocide.  My husband thought that this was a little grisly, but he is a good sport, so he came along.  This is what it looked like:

  Afterwards, he wanted to visit the Hirshhorn sculpture garden, which is a lovely and cool place to visit; it was getting rather hot.  That led to a visit inside the museum, where we saw an exhibit of mixed media art (my favorite kind of media!) from the collection.  It included Braque collages and Joseph Cornell boxes as well as more contemporary artists like Mark Bradford and unexpected works like print and paper collages by Louise Nevelson and stained glass assemblages by Josef Albers.  Then we puttered around the gift shop and bought interesting things that we didn't need.
On our way back to the metro we studied the plants in garden walkway next to the Arts and Industries building.   My husband looked at me and said, this was fun, we got to be tourists for a few hours, it was like a little vacation.  True, except we didn't have to figure out the public transportation, and neither of us wore fanny packs.