After work ended on Friday, I was officially off for five days. That's right, five whole days. Most of the other interns got Monday and Tuesday off, but I also get Wednesday off since everyone from the FYI team decided to take an extra holiday and they figured I should as well. Additional exploring time!
On Sunday I explored the National Museum of American History, and today I explored the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
National Museum of American History
Like the African American Museum, there's no way I could make it through the entirety of the American History Museum in one day. I toured the majority of the top floor and one of the collections on the second floor before calling it a day.
The dates in each photo represent when each woman served as first lady.
The dates in each photo represent when each woman served as first lady.
I visited the Hirshhorn today not because I wanted to see art, but because I wanted to see a particular exhibit of art: Trace, by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
I only came to know Ai Weiwei this year because of a documentary I watched called Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. Weiwei is a 60-year-old artist who has been seeking to incite change through his art since the late 1970s.
History: Ai Weiwei
Born in Beijing in 1957, Weiwei lived in the U.S. from 1981 to 1993 before returning to China. His battle with the government really began taking form in 2005 when Weiwei launched his first blog on November 19. He used the blog to criticize the government and write scathing social commentary, but when he sponsored a grassroots movement to survey and film post-quake conditions following the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, the Chinese government shut him down in May 2009. In that year between the earthquake and the government suspension Ai Weiwei collected 5,385 names, forming a list of the schoolchildren who had died due to substandard school campus constructions.
In April 2011 he was arrested and detained for 81 days by the Chinese government, and following release had his passport confiscated. It wasn't until July 22, 2015 the government returned Weiwei's passport to him.
Despite this, Ai Weiwei was still honored to be a lead designer on the Beijing National Stadium, or Bird's Nest, for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
Ai Weiwei first presented Trace in 2014. In 2015, LEGO issued a statement that they refused to supply Weiwei with their merchandise, saying they did not want to support his work "for political purposes." However, in January 2016, LEGO changed their stance and permitted Weiwei to use their materials, but stressed that the political nature of Ai Weiwei's work should be seen as separate from LEGO.
Trace made it's East coast debut last week with a special guest appearance by Ai Weiwei himself. Unfortunately, I did not know about all of this until the day of and was thus unable to secure tickets, but I was determined to go see the exhibit for myself.
The exhibit is made of 176 portraits created entirely from LEGOs, portraying individuals from around the world whom Ai Weiwei and various human rights groups consider to be activists, prisoners of conscience, and advocates of free speech. To go along with this exhibit, Ai Weiwei also created a 700-foot, 360-degree wallpaper installation entitled The Plain Version of the Animal That Looks Like a Llama but Is Really an Alpaca. The wallpaper pattern is made up of surveillance cameras, handcuffs, chains, and Twitter bird logos, which allude to Weiwei's tweets challenging authority.
In other news, I discovered the terror of crabs. Never before have I attempted to eat full-size, undissected crab, and never again will I try. My friend cracked them open for me and I used a fork and knife to poke around at the meat, but the whole time I was paranoid one would roll off the table and land on me. |