Museum of Fine Arts

I flew into Boston and spent the afternoon with my mom at the MFA. It looks like they're trying to move further into contemporary art with the new wing they are constructing. We saw a nice exhibit of black and white photos - some quite striking and beautiful, others rather less impressive. (I've taken some rather uninspired blurry photos of my own in my time, but neglected to make them into silver gelatin prints.) There are some lovely distorted views of the human body, including a stroboscopic photo of the photographer's eye reflected or refracted into falling drops of water in front of her face.

Perhaps the most striking one is also the most famous: Sinead O'Connor's shaved head resting on a horizontal surface. The head is slightly elongated, so it looks like an urn or vase (with the face as the top). If you turn your head 90 degrees to see her face the right way up, it looks distorted and not nearly as beautiful. This would probably be the most arresting image in the collection anyway, due to its size, subject matter and starkness, but they left nothing to chance: it stands alone on a yellow wall in the middle of the room (the rest of the walls are painted with a dark color).

Self-portrait with non-reflecting mirrored exhibit:


Famous John Singer Sargeant painting of four sisters. The very cool detail is that the giant urns depicted in the painting are actually present in the corners of the room. The artist took the liberty of simplifying the design on the urns - in keeping with the feeling of isolation in the painting.

Sunset over Boston: