Tag: blanton museum

Birthday girl!

I headed down to the University of Texas campus today to meet up with a bunch of friends to celebrate Laura’s birthday. Not all the ladies could make it, but we had a great lunch at Gabriel’s Cafe in the AT&T Hotel and Conference Center, just down the street from the UT Tower. We all enjoyed catching up with eachother. Afterwards, we walked the few blocks to the Blanton Museum. Tuesday’s are free!

UT Tower – funny story… I was down here a month ago in May, right before graduation…the groundskeepers were spraying the grass on the medians with green spray paint. 🙂

I haven’t been down to the museum district since before COVID. And things sure have changed! There is a new pedestrian-only mall that goes all the way from the Capitol Building, up to the Blanton – and huge new office buildings where there used to be only a surface parking lot.

This is a pretty cool feature – the new Capitol Mall. The Bullock Museum is on the right.

The Blanton has done much work on their grounds, and this pretty awesome feature consists of a dozen 3-story tall structures that they call Petals. They provide much needed shade.

The new Petals architectural feature at the Blanton Museum. I LOVE this.

I need to come down more often to enjoy the exhibits.

Happy Birthday, Laura!

Happy Birthday…

… to our Laura!

We celebrated Laura’s birthday by a visit to the Blanton Museum, played ping-pong at SPiN, and then shared delicious nibblies and drinks downtown.

A really fun night!

Colorful.

We popped over to free Thursday at the Blanton museum today. Ellsworth Kelly is an American artist who designed “Austin,” a stand alone art gallery, and artwork in its own right, for the Blanton art museum. He died a few years ago, but his building was recently finished. We visited the museum today to see this exhibit, and the other rotating collections on display.

Afterwards we celebrated National Margarita Day at Chuy’s. Cheers!

The Blanton museum, revisited.

In a post earlier this year, I shared a visit to the Blanton Museum that we took, to see an Andy Warhol visiting exhibit that ended in January.  When we went, we didn’t know that the museum’s permanent exhibits were temporarily closed, due to a total revamp of the permanent gallery areas upstairs.   Even so, we enjoyed the visiting exhibit.

The museum’s permanent collection galleries are now open again, so I stopped by this week to check it out.  They have an interesting mix of art – Latin American, early American Western, Contemporary, European, Native American, Modern, Spanish American, Ancient Greek and Roman, Film and Paper/Documents.   The gallery remodel was nicely done.

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I recommend a trip to the museum.  I enjoyed it.  Check out their website for days & hours.  And keep in mind that every Thursday admission is free, and every 3rd Thursday the museum is open late – until 9pm.  Parking is easy at the nearby Brazos garage.  If you bring your parking stub into the museum, they can give you a discounted parking rate.

 

Free Thursday at the Blanton.

The Blanton Museum downtown currently has an Andy Warhol exhibit, running through January 29th.   It is called “Warhol by the Book.”   It contains his artwork associated with bookcovers, album covers, playbills, books that he published, and other of his works associated with authors.  I enjoy Andy Warhol’s art, and saw things in this exhibit I’d not seen before.

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Hands-on album cover exhibit.  You can handle the albums and even play the LPs.

There was another visiting exhibit by Xu Bing called “Book from the Sky,” which runs through January 22nd.  I knew nothing about this artist nor the work, but thought it was interesting.  Over 4 years, Xu Bing hand carved thousands of wood blocks with non-sensical chinese characters/words of his own design, and then crafted traditional-format chinese books and scrolls made up with his hand-crafted characters.  So, if you know Chinese, it looks like gibberish.  If you don’t know Chinese, it looks like, well, Chinese.  🙂  I guess it’s supposed to get you thinking about the power of words, and also the beauty of Chinese calligraphy.  It was a beautiful exhibit, nonetheless.

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Their permanent exhibits are currently not open, as the museum is doing construction on the 2nd floor.  But those will reopen mid-February.

I enjoyed learning something new.  After we fed our minds, we had lunch downtown.   A nice day.