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Okay, I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, I know I sure did! I always stress out about seeing my family, but I was pleasantly surprised this holiday. Anyways, it wasn't Thursday I was looking for, but the day after. For those of you that don't live in the Detroit area or live under a rock The Detroit Institute of Arts had their Grand Opening which they celebrated by being open for 32 hours straight!
I met up with Jasmine at her house along with her friends Katie, Jeremy and Stos. We hung out for a little bit and it was great because she only lives about two blocks away from the DIA. And thank goodness for that because it was PACKED. I don't know if we'd be able to find a parking space anyways.
Photo credit of the Great Hall belongs to excusemysarcasm @ flickr. It does a good job at capturing just how amazing the DIA looked. I don't know how to describe it, but I just felt magical in that room. It was so warm and ambient and the decorations twinkled. And in retrospect this room reminds me of The Beauty and The Beast. This room connected to Rivera Court (Photo credit: anikarenina @ flickr)
and serves as the main vein of the second level of the museum.
There was just so much to take in I can't even comprehend it. There were drinks, there was music (they had a D.J.) and there were just so many people. I think I could have sat and people watched for hours. We arrived at the DIA at about 1:30a and left around 4:00a and it was still packed and people were still showing up. It was so amazing to see that many people partying and celebrating art and culture in Detroit. We just did the second floor and we could have totally spent way longer wandering around. I think its kind of funny, once we went into the museum proper we promptly decided to lose each other and all headed in five different directions.
I lost myself amongst all the religious paintings. I love love love paintings from the Renaissance. I guess I just love all the rich colors that are representative of a oil paints. There was a really great painting of Mary Magdalen entitled The Conversion of Mary Magdalen. I think I could have stared at it all night. I guess not a lot of people share my opinions because there weren't a lot of people in that section of the museum, which I kept freaking myself out about. It was all decorated with dark colors on the walls and dark wood frames and lots of pictures of the crucifixion and I'm sure some postmortem paintings of children.
And I love nothing more than a contemporary sculpture which the DIA has a ton of cool looking ones. There was this cube structure made of white (wood?) that had a really cool and interesting play on light and shadow. And the 1967 self portrait of Andy Warhol was way color in real life.
Its really tall!
I don't know what else to say. If you didn't go you're a fool, it was free! And if you want to go I'll go again, I needed way more time and way less people so I could meander and contemplate the art and discuss it. I also kind of want to hit up their gift shop. And the only reason I didn't was that I was saw tired by the time we finally left. I ran into Matt P and Michel, which makes me happy because on my way over to Jasmine's house I contemplated calling Matthew and inviting him along. Even though we were coming and he was going it was still nice to see him. (We met adjacent to the Warhols.) We talked about getting together to go to Cliff Bells sometimes before Christmas. It would make for a great holiday party, get dressed up get together and get drinks!
All in all it was an awesome time! Hooray for the DIA! Hooray for art! Horray for Detroit!