Art Museum

On Thursday Norman, Lucy, and I took a field trip to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. We went because they have a traveling exhibit of movie costumes called Sketch to Screen. It's leaving August 15, so we just barely made it!

Unfortunately for everyone, the museum did not allow any photography in the Sketch to Screen exhibit. (Booooo!) Otherwise, trust me, you'd be looking at the photos right now. They had some super-cool stuff. Some Gone With the Wind dress reproductions, a shirt worn by John Wayne, a dress from one of the Mummy movies in two versions (before and after the action sequence), Wolverine's X-Men uniform (hubba hubba), and some dresses from Titanic, among quite a number of other things.

The item I found the absolute coolest though, was Atticus Finch's briefcase (bag? more like a messenger bag), glasses, and glasses case from To Kill a Mockingbird. I haven't even seen the movie, but I wanted to just stand there all day and stare at it.

They also had an outfit worn by Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain. I had a tough time with this. I couldn't really look at it, and I teared up. Weird, right? I mean, at least half the items in the collection were worn by people who are now dead. I'm not ashamed to say, I'm still working through Heath Ledger's untimely death. It really affected me.


The other thing that stood out to me was how the "greats" (at anything, really) do their best and don't cut any corners. One of the dresses from Titanic (the one Rose is wearing when she and Jack stand at the bow of the ship) was situated so you could see the front and the back. In case you weren't a teenage girl when the movie came out and didn't see in 100 times in the theater, I'll remind you that the dress is a deep blue with embroidery on the chest. Well guess what? There's also embroidery on the back toward the bottom. It's kind of peaking out from beneath another layer of fabric. This struck me as crazy. No one was going to see it! But you know what? Someone did see it. I saw it. And it reminded me that if I'm gonna do something, I should do it. Because eventually, someone is going to see it.

UPDATE: Not 5 hours after finishing this post I happened across this website (while looking at something else), which has photos someone took of the dress at another exhibit. Here's what I was talking about:

[See?]

[Oh yeah, there was also Skeletor.]

I didn't get to linger at Sketch to Screen as long as I would have liked, but such is the life of the mother of a toddler. But since we'd already paid $20 to get into the museum, we thought we'd check out another exhibition that had been recommended to us: a collection of hand-blown glass by artist Dale Chihuly. (Whom we lovingly call "Dale Cthulhu", of course.)

Soooo gorgeous! The collection is dimly lit, and the only light shines on and through the pieces of glass and it's just lovely. Poor Lucy wanted to get down, look around, and touch everything, but as I told her, it was approximately the very last place in the world where she could get down.

[Norman took this photo. Doesn't he have quite the eye?]

When we came upon this section of the exhibit, I just knew we had to nurse here. It had been awhile anyway, and how could I resist? A room with a cozy little corner, where the only things to look at are on the ceiling? Perfect! Plus it's World Breastfeeding Week, and this is how we observe. :-)