Renwick Gallery

If you live in the Washington DC area and find yourself bored at home with nothing to do, I have the scoop for you here. A lot of the time we take advantage of the cities we are living in and don’t appreciate the different amenities it can offer. For a major city like Washington DC you would think there is an endless amount of sightseeing and general recreation activities  and you aren’t wrong, but it’s hard sometimes to stumble upon it yourself.

So here you go…

This weekend I went to the Renwick Gallery, it is a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It is known as the “American Louvre” with different American craft and decorative arts from the 19th to the 21st century.

To be honest with you, I don’t know much about art, but I can appreciate it. Walking into this gallery was mesmerizing. You walk up a large staircase with red carpeting, it itself being art, and walk up to a giant room with the most breathtaking piece of art on the ceiling. Yes, you read that right, on the ceiling.

You walk into this room and notice that everyone is laying down on the carpeted floor and you realize that you have to look at this art piece lying down. That’s pretty awesome. We tend to look at art pieces through the same perspective, standing up at eye level. It was nice to look at this art piece known as “Wonder” by Janet Echelman in a different way.

“Wonder” is a colorful, hand-woven sculpture that is meant to correspond to a map of the energy released across the Pacific Ocean during what is known as the most devastating natural disaster in recorded history, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March of 2011. What I loved most about this art piece is that every couple minutes or so, it would change it's colors. Very bright and beautiful. 

I don’t want to give too much of the art pieces away because I do want you to take a look yourself, but you essentially circle around the museum, it’s not very big, and take in the different art pieces and their descriptions. Some pictured below. It won’t take you too long to walk through, but all the art pieces tell their own story.

I will say, right before you make your way to the exit right back down that staircase, make sure you are at the top or near the top and look across the way. More likely than not, you missed the upside hanging Christmas tree on the ceiling.

Now you have one more place to explore in one of the best cities in the world: Washington DC.

-MGL