Mint Museum Response 

 

          I enjoyed the Mint Museum. The gallery itself is huge, five stories and multiple stories housing galleries and certain areas holding multi-story art pieces. In the heart of the art area in downtown Charlotte, it sits above ground beside the Bechtler Museum and the Harvey B Gantt Center and almost doesn’t seem like an art museum apart from the art in the museum. 

           The gallery walls and layout are very simple, unlike places like the McColl Center. The lighting was so well done where the light either dim and fades into the darkness without much trouble or the room is very well lit with equally spaced lighting among the walls. There were also multiple rooms with projected images, which definitely accentuate those art pieces, like the two project orbs in the Panama Canal Exhibit or the randomized moving trees during the seasons, constantly moving as a part of their normal collection. 

           There was so much art and so many different types of art in the Mint Museum. Pieces ranged from more impressionistic pieces in the Panama Canal Exhibit to the arts and crafts gallery in the museum for larger three dimensional architect and design pieces. The first pieces that I really liked was in the Panama Canal Exhibit, Morning In The Tropics by Frederic Edwin Church. 

            Church was one of the staples in the exhibit, one of the few artists who had extended stays in Panama near where they built the canal, living in the wilderness in sometimes developed and sometimes makeshift towns. 

             Morning In The Tropics is a landscape piece of the wild-looking trees, apart from two men in a boat. With the rising sun in the upper middle portion of the piece, trees and thick vegetation reside on the right against a lake leading to the more open left side, almost as if the POV was coming from land looking out toward a seemingly never-ending jungle. 

I could probably write another entire paper about the colors and tones of the piece. When I first saw the painting I thought it looked a little monotone but after looking at it more closely, it is very detailed and accurate in depicting the vegetation and the light against the trees, leaves, and water. A pale, burnt orange color coming from the sun filters the rest of the piece, while the underlying colors are prevalent and the backside of trees and bushes are a deep black. 

              When I first saw this piece I had to stop and admire just the detail and descriptive colors, but did start wondering about the two men. There are two men on the boat in the picture, the only sign of human presence in the entire piece. However they don’t seem to be fishermen or going on a casual boat ride. One of the men, who seems younger, is shirtless and rowing the boat himself. The other man is wearing white with what looks like a loose red kimono and a black hat, or has long dark hair. There is also a box on the boat with leaves on top of it. The first thing it reminded me of was a coffin, and I haven’t been able to think of anything else it could be considering what seems to be the circumstances of the piece. 

              I think I’ve talked about my experiences in Jamaica in past museum responses and this reminded me of those situations again. On those missions trips to Jamaica, we fly into the south-side of the island, and take about a three and a half hour bus ride to a small place called Harmons in the middle of Jamaica. While Jamaica is basically an ocean-locked mountain, there is not water features internally on the island. But the sun sets and rises the same way against all the nature there. When we were there, I used to get up before sunrise to watch it in the morning and always tried to watch the sunset in the evening. 

               The last day we spend in Jamaica is spent in Ocho Rios, a tourist city near the international airport we leave from the next day. The three times I’ve been I still get up before sunrise, having done it for a week and a half or so preparing for the trip, and the sun rising over the water is something else. As many times as I’ve seen a sun rise or set over water, none of them seem to compare to the colors that come between so many trees, clear waters, and an orange sun. 

                The second piece that really caught my eye was in the arts and crafts gallery. It sits as the first piece in the gallery as well as the biggest piece in the gallery. Titled Threshold by Danny Lane, it was commissioned by Project Ten Ten Ten, where the Mint Museum commissioned ten individual pieces by their own respective innovative craft and design artists in 2010. 

              The piece was basic in design, just 800 stacked sheets of glass undulate in front of other colored glass objects. However the glass modulated up and down combined with similarly-toned objects stacked in front of and behind each other created a different art piece from every angle, as the breaks in the glass created different magnified angles of each piece behind the glass. It was neat walking around the piece, feeling like I never saw the same piece twice. Changing the distance between the point of view changed the angles as much as moving side to side did. 

              Uniqueness was a big factor in me picking this piece. I thought the arts and crafts gallery had so many pieces that were unique and extremely creative in design or the how they were created to seem like something completely different. The gallery also featured a wide variety of pieces, from stone, wood, and glass work to product design. However this piece, made entirely of glass and LED lights, seem to interpret art as not a fixed picture but rather a concept of colors and distortion. 

              The idea that one’s final product doesn’t need to be something fixed is something I appreciate a lot. To create something like that one doesn’t go through the normal processes of creation, but rather works through the process backwards. While a large portion of art is created with the final product in mind, however Lane had to have worked from the concept of picture distortion and how the piece was even going to be viewed before being concerned about the final product, meaning the actual final product didn’t matter as much as the process of the distortion of the piece. It’s that kind of conceptual and reverse thinking that can aid all our walks of life. 

             I enjoyed the Mint Museum a lot. Sometimes when there is a lot of art, it seems overwhelming but the different focuses and types of art helped me transition from section to section without feeling like I was seeing the same type of things over and over again. Variety is indeed the spice of life.