At the Museum

Life in the galleries, possibly coming to a museum near you.

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My first museum was the Philadelphia Art Museum. It would have been on a Sunday and it would have been with my dad, brother, and sister. Sunday was the day we had our dad all to ourselves. Every other day he was busy helping people in our neighborhood: he’d come home for dinner but often left soon after to attend a community board meeting or to bail someone’s son out of jail. Most of his Saturdays were taken up supervising the neighborhood’s youth sports leagues. But on Sundays he kept the world outside and that almost always meant taking his young children out so our mom could have a peaceful afternoon to herself. He took us to many landmarks and historical sites that were so obscure we always seemed to have them to ourselves. But museums were a speciality, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Rodin Museum, the Barnes Museum, Franklin Institute, Elfreth’s Alley Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. These were the places his mother would send her kids in order to show them there was more beyond their poor neighborhood. Sometimes there were specific exhibits my dad wanted us to see. Usually we roamed unsupervised through the rooms and halls jammed with art and archeological relics. Our dad would often tell us about the artist or talk about the history of what we were seeing, but mostly we discovered things for ourselves. He didn’t mind us examining depictions of nudes or violence. I’m not even sure he thought about the effect they might have on impressionable children and teenagers. I do think he firmly believed that museums were places where his children would absorb the great and fearsome beauty of life.

Suzanne Valadon, “Nu allongé sur un divan,” 1921. From the current exhibition, In Her View; Highlights from the Keith and Jim Straw Collection at the Philadelphia Art Museum.

My love of museums solidified in high school when I became friends with Clare. Her artistic talents were recognized as early as the third grade. By the tenth grade, art imbued every aspect of her life, including her sophisticated fashion sense and extensive sexual experiences. Her boldness and desire to be exceptional pushed a shy girl toward an intoxicating world beyond my Catholic upbringing. All our spare time was spent going to museum or gallery exhibits, and then wandering downtown far beyond the time our parents insisted we’d be home. Our favorite place was a small run-down French café where we could afford the onion soup and the waiter never denied a couple of teenage girls’ request for a carafe of red wine. Even after Clare started fading with heroin, she insisted we should spend our time together in one of the city’s museums, maybe two if she was up to it. Afterwards, I would walk her to the French café where she would sit across from me and explain what interested her about what we saw.

I left Clare to transfer to a college in Connecticut and immediately picked up a boyfriend who soon dumped me because he said I was lousy in bed. I drank for two straight days and then took the train to Manhattan and consoled myself with a long walk around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After I graduated and moved to Atlanta, the High Museum of Art was a haven where I escaped from a dead end job that left me little time to write. Years later, as an exhausted mother of rambunctious toddlers and preschoolers, I discovered that neither the Guggenheim nor the Modern Museum of Art were good places to pretend to be an exemplary mother by setting my children free in them. Much better was the Brooklyn Museum, especially during the week when its large galleries were often empty and the Egyptian mummies enchanted children.

In the last years of my aunt’s life, when we became especially close, it was a special treat for us to spend an afternoon at one or the other Philadelphia museums. Our last excursion was to the Barnes Museum. We followed the crowd from one small room to another, as gobsmacked as everyone else by the museum’s vast collection. But, soon exhausted, she began to use her charm and walker to forge a path to the restaurant in time for lunch or afternoon cocktails. Museum restaurants are a species all to themselves, simply designed, with understated menus that provide a calming reprieve from visual overload. Our order never varied, a charcuterie board, cheese plate, and glasses of white wine. The afternoon drifted along in her telling stories about her life—such as the time a Russian spy taught her how to drink Guinness.

One of the Barnes's rooms and, right, its restaurant.

I went to the Brooklyn Museum last Thursday. The day was brilliantly cold, the kind of day where some people, even hardened introverts, lose their minds if they stay in doors any longer. There were just enough people wandering about to quell any restlessness. Aside from the museum’s astonishing permanent collection, there were two new exhibits, Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art and Christian Marclay: Doors, which turned out to be a good place to rest for awhile.

Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. Photo credit: Paula Abreu Pita.

Hours later, I looked for the restaurant where my aunt was once thrilled to find that they served a Sauvignon Blanc from her favorite California vineyard. It was closed for renovations. I crossed the vestibule to the café, situated in a triangular space before tall windows. The wind rattled the glass and whipped about the tall trees in the museum’s plaza, but the winter sunlight warmed the café’s scattered tables. The offerings were minimal, pared down to different varieties of croissants, coffees and tea. I ordered a spinach croissant and coffee and found a seat at a small corner table. All around were young mothers and their racing toddlers; teenagers who were probably cutting school; couples, some rumpled as if they had just fallen out of bed; and women, most like me past their prime, who with their companions energetically discussed life’s burning issues that only they had the wisdom to solve.

Left, the Brooklyn Museum's main restaurant, closed for renovations. Right, its cafe.

I sat eating my cold croissant and creamy coffee, taking pleasure in eavesdropping and affectionately watching the children’s havoc. Hopefully, their bellies were as full of the great and fearsome beauty around them as mine was when I was their age.

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