When did you last visit the
Cleveland Museum of Art? If your answer is "summer of 2012" or earlier, you need to change this right away!!! A lot has changed over the past six months at the Museum-- the new atrium opened, there's a new cafe and a new restaurant, new art (of course), and most impressive of all, in late December, the Museum began to offer previews of their brand new Gallery One to its members!
N and I visited over Christmas break and had an absolute blast! As members of the Museum, we had the opportunity to preview the Museum's newest offering- Gallery One, which officially opens to the public today.
Gallery One is an interactive experience, with the Museum's entire collection available on an interactive touch-screen wall. You put your museum issued iPad (available for rental) or your own iPad on the dock, and pick your favorite pieces, and the artlens app (available for download on iTunes, but be warned, it takes a while to load that much info) will tell you interesting facts about those pieces. In the future, the app will actually direct you to where your favorite pieces are located around the museum, so you could do a very targeted visit to the museum if you choose!
The artlens app has other incredible uses as well: if you hold it up to a piece of art that is artlens activated, it will point you to things you should be looking at in the piece of art. For example, N and I were looking at a painting of a ship, and the artlens app directed us to the sails, and told us about the importance of the sail as a focal point in the picture. Very very cool, especially for someone who habitually fell asleep in Art History in college (ahem!).
The Gallery One section also has some fun features for kids- they can create their own artwork and build their very own gallery!
It was also my very first time seeing the new atrium-- wow, it is really impressive! It reminds me a little of the atrium at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, but bigger.
It was really nice to see people milling around the atrium, just enjoying the space.
N and I also checked out the new Provenance Cafe, where I was pleasantly surprised and thrilled to find they served....
The new restaurant Provenance has a really yummy looking menu, and although N and I didn't eat there, we both really liked the space. Its a safe bet that we're likely to enjoy dinner there some time in the very near future!
No visit to the museum would be complete with pictures of some of the art, and here are some of my favorite pieces:
I want this chandelier in my house.
Don't worry, I didn't miss the opportunity to bring a piece of the museum home with me:
Like I said at the top of this post- if you haven't been to the Art Museum in the past few months, I hope you make the trip out to University Circle soon. Additionally, if you're not aware of this, in the past year, the Museum of Art launched a new affiliate program called
Column & Stripe- In addition to behind-the-scenes looks at the Museum, they also host monthly social gatherings at the museum.
And finally, for those of you seeking to boost your civic involvement, Column & Stripe is seeking volunteers for positions in its various committees, so if that's something you're interested in, I urge you to visit the Column & Stripe
website and contact Christina for more information on how you might go about applying for these positions!
