A trip to the LACMA

One of my favorite things about Los Angeles is all of the museums, and one of my favorite things about the museums is that there's almost always some way to get in free. We signed up both of our kids for the LACMA NEXGEN program, which generously allows one free adult escort per child. And you can sign up any child under age 18, even a four-month-old who sleeps most of the time. So our whole family went for free!

This time, we visited the exellent pop art exhibit:

Huge, insane sculptures by Jeff Koons, image found here.

And then we toured the Richard Serra installations. Multiple times:

A Richard Serra piece. It looks a lot like the one we visited (titled Sequence), and though my source for the image above indicates that it is, I'm not sure it is.

Inside Richard Serra's Sequence, grabbed from flickr.

These giants are made of 12-foot-tall sheets of steel, and as you walk through them the curves lean at varying grades toward and away from you. At some points the open top is only a few inches wide and sometimes it's maybe ten feet. But the tilting is mostly subtle, gradual. So as you walk through your mind expects the walls to act like all of the walls you know, parallel and perpendicular in all the right places. But the negative space that surrounds you is always changing as you move forward, and I had an intense reaction to it my first time through. I felt dizzy, imbalanced, and what I imagine to be a little high. I don't know what that actually feels like, though, so take that with a grain of salt.

What I'm trying to say is that these are dang powerful pieces of sculpture.