Maya Goo: June 2015

All over tumblr lately has been the assertion "I am a #arthoe" or just in general, the term arthoe has been everywhere. It means the girls who go to museums and get a friend to take photos of them in front of the art. Muted clothing colour palette (aka all black), art museum regular, Matisse lover, art socks owner. I feel I fit the stereotype.
So, I have two groups of photos from when I went to these two amazing shows with my mom in one week. The first was the Flowers to Art exhibit at the DeYoung. The exhibit is only on for a week and a bunch of different flower arrangers make arrangements based on, or to go with a peice of art in the DeYoung museum. It's a really amazing exhibit and such an interesting idea! It completely inspired me to start taking Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging). My grandma has done it for as long as I can remember and her stuff is amazing! I'm hoping to take the class that she actually has taken in the past and learn!
The other show my mom and I went to was the Ai Weiwei @large on Alcatraz Island. This was another show that was up for a period of time (much longer than five days, however). Ai Weiwei is an activist artist. He played off of the history of Alcatraz prison connecting the history to his work about imprisonment and freedom. Ai lives in China and is currently not allowed to visit the U.S. This presented quite a challenge for the curators who had to take the pieces of what Ai Weiwei had and assemble them for him in places based solely on his direction. This was especially difficult when it came to the Trace installation, which holds 176 lego portraits of people from around the world who have been imprisoned or exiled because of their beliefs or affiliations with a belief system (relatives of 'criminals' etc). The curators had to hand assemble each of these lego portraits based on the direction of Ai. Ai Weiwei has never even been to Alcatraz, so all his instruction in the Trace exhibit, and all the others like With Wind and Blossom was based on photos and video calls that allowed him to visualize the space.