Remember last week at Hirshhorn when I said,

“It’s very nice to have an interactive tour instead of the kind where you just listen to the guide drone on and on about where the artist was born or how they died and you have to follow them around silently through the gallery. Seldom do those tours actually talk about the art itself …”

Yeah…

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I began the day early at the Smithsonian Natural History museum. As one of the most popular Smithsonians in D.C., it houses classic museum exhibits featuring dinosaur bones, fancy rocks and diamonds, taxidermy animals, ...etc.

It also has a computer lab in order for Michael to teach us about the Smithy computer system and how we could use it to be informed info sources for visitors.

I was running a bit late (stupid weekend track work), but luckily this was not the first time I’ve been there so I knew exactly where to go as I ran across Constitution Ave.

Upon arrival, Michael herded all of us volunteers down into the depths of the museum in order to get to the computer lab. The tunnels smelled like mothballs, which shouldn’t have surprised us as much as it did. All those preservative chemicals and what not are used in the museum in order to preserve specimens,… and they have a distinct odor.

There we reviewed what we learned last week some (got a 93% on my review quiz! I just didn’t know the secretary of Smithsonian was Wayne Clough) and then were taught how to find things in the Smithy staff and volunteer intranet and extranet. It wasn’t very difficult for the younger computer savvy individuals. However, considering many of the volunteers were retired, we ended up using all 3 hours of the training to go through all the links and search functions available to us.

Some of it was boring, but it was nice to look into the internal workings of Smithsonian to see what events were coming up. Apparently they have a lot of movie screenings in the museums and Imax theaters (my one movie a week is going to come in handy for that) and also various classes you can take. I’m personally interested in the Japanese flower arrangement class I saw at Freer. And oh, btw, Clint Eastwood is coming sometime in the near future to open up a new exhibit. CLINT. FREAKING. EASTWOOD. Crazy! Michael talked so casually about it but I secretly fangirled in my brain about it. I’ll have to find out how to stalk him later once I start volunteering for realz.

After the training, I raced over to the Reynolds Center, which houses both the American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, in order to complete a tour for my volunteer homework. I specifically wanted to do these museums because 1) I had never been to them before and 2) because I marked it down as a volunteer choice of mine (so I better know what’s in it).

By the time I made it there I was starving, so I figured I would grab some lunch before the tour. Guess what the cafeteria looked like…

It’s like outside…but really it’s inside...*mind blown* I was really surprised. They had a “river fountain” and the trees …inside! EEEEEeee! Honestly, it looked like an outdoor courtyard.

Unfortunately I burned my tongue on over priced soup and coffee as I rushed to meet up with my tour group for the American art side of the museum. There we were introduced to our docent, Nancy. She was kind of an older lady and apparently she has professionally taught art history before. So I thought, “Hey, she must be really interesting.” To be honest though…I didn’t really enjoy this tour at all. Maybe it was because I was spoiled with having such a good docent in Meredith at Hirshhorn and I had high expectations. Or maybe I’m just really picky or something. This tour was just filled with Nancy talking…and talking …and talking about things, that I didn’t care about.

Now understand that generally speaking there are two types of tour guides: the ones that focus on a few of the special pieces in the museum and talk a lot about those, and the ones that go through the whole museum and talk very little. You can guess that Nancy was the prior. Not to say there is anything wrong with that type of tour guide. One of the things that peeved me off about the talking was that she kept talking about pieces and things NOT in the museum. She literally had a set of laminated flash cards that had prints of paintings NOT in the museum she handed out to us throughout the tour to look at. I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE PAINTINGS NOT IN THE MUSEUM! I came to this one wanting to know about the art shown HERE. (Plus she didn’t even know whether or not I could take pictures of stuff during the tour. Uhhh every guide should know basic stuff like that! So sorry for lack of tour pictures, I didn’t know whether I could take any at the time so I didn’t take a lot.)

It can be argued that those flash card paintings acted as background info for the paintings we were going to see. And let me make this clear, there is nothing wrong with talking about the history/background story behind the paintings. That’s the purpose of the American Art Museum; to show us the history of America through art. But I don’t believe that is ALL THAT YOU SHOULD TALK about. And I believe that it distracts from the art itself.

For example, we were standing OUTSIDE of the gallery that housed portraits of American Indians as Nancy was talking to us about the Louisiana Purchase (Btw, she didn’t know that TJ bought the land from Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars. She said he bought it, “…from the French because they didn’t know who they were fighting at the time…” Ummmm???) and Lewis and Clark’s expedition out west. She spent literally 10 minutes not even in the gallery talking to us about basic US history. Then when we went inside the gallery she didn’t talk much about the actual portraits. She talked mostly about the artist that painted them and how the government came about owning them now, but not whom the artist actually painted. It was so odd. Did she have to go all the way back and give us a history lesson on the Louisiana purchase for this? No. Why didn’t she talk about the outfits the Native Americans were wearing in the portraits? Why did she go on and on about the Trail of Tears when none of the paintings portrayed it? WEIRD!

The last point on the tour was this sculpture, which I thought was beautiful in a haunting sort of way.

It turned out to be a really big gravestone marker and she kept talking on and on about the woman who’s grave it was on. Apparently a love affair was involved and she committed suicide and Eleanor Roosevelt liked contemplating life in front of the statue. But is the statue portraying the woman who died? Who sculpted it? Why does the sculpture look so haunting like that and covered? She never talked about any of those things.

At that moment Nancy said that the tour was over and she was giving another one in 15 minutes that covered the other half of the American Art section of the museum. For one thing, WHAT?! We only covered half the museum in 1.5 hours? And we only looked closely at 6 paintings? Uh in 2 hours we covered every single gallery in Hirshhorn. She kept telling us to go back and look at things we didn’t look at because they were interesting. WTH! If they were interesting let us go in the gallery and look with you in the first place!? That ticked me off. So I ended up getting her to sign off on my HW and then running around touring everything we missed on the half I got the tour on and everything else in the American Art side before heading to the Portrait Gallery.

This is what I discovered on the 3^rd floor.

That woman sitting down there, she's not real.

Cool chairs are my favorite.

Hello Contemporary art! This gallery was called the Lincoln Gallery. It was kind of amazing. So glad I walked through here on my own.

This is a really cool maze we weren't allowed to go in.

I'll never understand video art, but this was very cool. Apparently Virginia is known for roller coasters and forests.

This would just be cool to have in my house.

Driftwood horse!

Across the hall was the Portrait Gallery and it was really fun and interesting.

Pro tip: A lot of museums allow photography in some exhibits but not others so keep a look out of various signage stating museum rules and regs. The newer exhibits in Portrait gallery were The Black List, which had large portraits of famous African Americans and another exhibit called Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter featuring (obviously) Asian Americans. (couldn’t take pictures of these) You know you’re approaching black history month and Asian Pacific Islander Month when…

Things I could take pictures of were the American Presidents exhibit. The most interesting thing about it was that you can glean various insights into the presidents by their portraits.

No offense Lincoln and Washington. You have an excuse for the classical style portrait. (George Bush...no excuses for not being cool and modern)

TJ didn't have a portrait. But he did have a large statue instead. He's so badass.

Upstairs, were the 20^th century portraits.

And OF COURSE they would have Andy Warhol stuff.

They had Katherine Hepburn's 4 best actress Oscars by her portrait (which you can see in the background).

Christopher Reeves post accident. I personally had no idea he had this commissioned.

LL Cool J.....random much?!

Oh hai Elvis. I have a massive crush on you.

And to get there, you would go through the Great Hall.

And what blew my mind next was the fact that further down the Great Hall past the contemporary portraits was the Luce Foundation Center.

This place acts as a storage center for all the art that couldn’t fit in the main galleries and you can just walk through them and look at everything. It was so cool. And you can also get a cup of coffee down there.

Ultimately I really enjoyed the Reynolds Center (American Art/National Portrait Gallery) despite my poor tour. This just proves that every tour guide at the Smithsonian is different and you definitely won’t get the same experience twice. That’s always very exciting stuff. If I end up getting to work at the Reynolds Center I would be very please. crossing fingers

P.S. Gift shop find! During our training break I found this in the Natural History Museum shop.

It’s a really expensive dinosaur backpack made out of cow skin (aka: leather). So cool, and yet, really odd and ironic at the same time. Lolz.