Visually, this museum is a sleeper. Set in the exhilarating new civic-center campus in downtown Tucson, it looks good but ordinary--until you step inside. Then you thrill to a rectangular, inverted Guggenheim. The ramps don't swirl down like the ones at the New York showplace, but they ramp gradually, making an ideal viewing gallery for the Rauschenberg space series that was hanging when I visited.
The deep basement was full of Robert Indiana and Jasper Johns. The interior well, formed by this sequence of slanted right turns, is the venue for concerts and film showings, I was told by a University of Arizona art major guarding the ramp exit.
On the "top floor," a solid thematic exhibit of "Beasts and the Human Imagination," pieced together from Phoenix and other state collections, showed how mediocre art (I mean just to say there were few masterpieces) plus a lot of anthropological savvy can mount an exhibition with a lasting impression.
A high point is this museum's solid support of Tucson craftspeople. I can't remember when I've seen such a fine standard of crafts. If I hadn't been on my way to Fiji at the time, I would have carted home box loads of ceramics and textiles. Airline weighing stations being as tightwad as they are, I contented myself with quirky greeting cards put out by a local feminist collective.
Two other Tucson attractions make a day-long stay advisable. The state's first (and so far only) Mexican museum, La Casa Cordova, adjoins the grounds of the art museum. Its folk art is fey and fun. And the local history, admirably posted near its displays, is very illuminating.
The other must is a ten-minute cab ride away at the University of Arizona--the anthropology department's museum which specializes in Southwest history and prehistory. The university's art gallery is good, but the anthro is superb.
--from 20 Museums You've Never Heard Of/Horizon Magazine 1981
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment