National Portrait Gallery & Others

I went here not really expecting a whole lot since I'm not that big of a portrait person, but it was a little surprising with everything that was inside. I'm just going to try and post some favorites from my trip since there was so much here to actually see and try and get through, I didn't know that it was such a huge space. First was just the stairway, I thought it was just a fun space to be around on the inside of a building, it seemed out of place. What was great about the whole area is that you could pretty much be as close as you wanted to be for everything, to see construction, frames, brushstrokes, and so forth. They had some nice photographs there, but were hard to get good pictures of from the glass reflections. The Lynn Fontaine painting was one of my favorites here, there was another done of Juliette Gordon Low that I also liked done in a similar style.

I then stumbled into a more modern art section that I didn't know about being there. This piece by Lowe I thought was pretty funny. They piece by Paik was more interesting to see in person than the books because of all different sounds from the televisions. It did make it a little hard to kind of zone into one area to follow them through a cycle, but I suppose that's part of the point of the piece too.

Some of the sculptures were really interesting like this one, but others that were pretty much a modern art painting extruded into 3-D weren't as impressive to me. I like how it's reminds me of a frozen explosion in time, and being able to see the light coming out from the middle emphasizes it. 

This last sculpture looked really familiar in comparison to one I saw at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but a little different from the space it was in and the scale. Overall there was a lot to go through and I'm sure I missed a bunch of things too, but it was a fun and exhausting trip.