Boarding Gate 101

During a visit to New York in July I was able to check out one of the most unique, and blush-inducing museums in the city - the Museum of Sex, aka MoSex. I visited it right after visiting another NY landmark, the Flatiron Building, which is nearby. The museum, which opened in 2002, aims to "preserve and preserve the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality." It covers the gamut of subcultures and preferences pertaining to the subject, including gay and lesbian, BDSM, pornography, and erotic photography. Because of its explicit nature, only visitors aged 18 and above can visit the museum.  There were several floors in the museum, each covering a particular subject. On the second floor the display was about the evolution of erotica and pornography throughout history, which is an interesting subject, as you don't get to see it covered in the academe (perhaps Anthropology 187, Sex and Culture, in UP Diliman, but that class was always ful...

Glass is an interesting material but is something that is taken for granted for its ubiquity. It can be shaped into something organic looking but at the same time exhibit shapes and colors that are not found in nature. It was  taught, in my chemistry class, that it's not actually solid but a super-viscous liquid that is resistant to flow . It's has been around for hundreds of years, and its properties enabled artisans and glassblowers to fashion it into useful objects, like goblets and jewelry, some of which ended up in museums years later. One of the main exhibition area One of the most fascinating use of glass as  objet d'art  that I saw was in Harvard Museum, when it was fashioned into  life-like representations of plants and flowers , but those were created for scientific use as much as for art.    There was a movement in art that uses glass as an artistic medium and not as something functional, like the stained glass windows of medieval ...

The primary reason why I wanted to visit the Art Institute of Chicago is to see the painting of Grant Wood called American Gothic . So I was disappointed to know after talking to the concierge that the iconic work of art, which shows two farmers in Iowa - a woman and a man with a pitchfork - was on loan somewhere else. Still the visit to the museum was not a disappointment at all. I got to see another favorite painting of mine and then some.  I only had the opportunity to visit the museum on my second time in Chicago, last fall. We were exploring the Magnificent Mile and the Millennium Park all morning, and we were able to swung by the museum after lunch, after visiting the Bean once again.  The Art Institute of Chicago is the second-largest art museum in the United States, second only to the Met. It was founded in 1866, and found its home at a Beaux-Art building along Michigan Avenue in Chicago [ 1 ]. We came in through the new wing that was added t...

I've been meaning to visit the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore since the first time I visited the city state. I've seen the building where the museum is house when I am around  downtown or in Marina Bay area, but I only was able to visit it during my business trip this year.  The museum, as the name suggests, specializes in Asian cultures and civilizations. It was established in 1997, and moved to its present location - the colonial Empress Place building - in 2003. The building itself is just by the bank of Singapore River, which lends further symbolism to the museum's raison d'etre . The river, after all, played an important part to the development of Singapore's (multi) culture (if you can call it that), and history. Basically the museum encompases the Chinese, Malay, Indian and South Asian cultures which all, at some point of the city's history, contributed to its development. Facade of the Asian Civilisations Museum I actually had ...

Isabelle Scheltjens:  Remember the name! I was just done with the first half of my tour inside the city’s Museum of Fine Arts when I headed for the centrum to check out this cool, new way of portrait-making using a technique called  glass fusion .  It’s the melting together of tiny, square bits of colored glass, one on top of another, to form a singular piece or “pixel” and thousands (yes, thousands!) of those pixels to form a picture.  In this case, the result is a portrait, that when viewed from a distance appears only in sepia.  Very fascinating AND intriguing. Finding the art gallery that housed Ms. Scheltjen’s exhibit was pretty easy.  It was located just across the town hall.  And even on that day itself that there were a gazillion of people who came to celebrate Ghent’s annual ten-day festival, I found my way. Facade of the gallery The moment I entered the gallery, I immediately realized that the artist herself was there....

I was inspired to finally post about the Cartoon Art Museum when I got the news  this morning    that Bill Watterson, the cartoonist of my favorite comics, Calvin & Hobbes, came back for a limited collaboration with the artist behind the comics Pearls Before Swine . Watterson retired in 1995, drawing the last Calvin & Hobbes panel. I am such as big fan of his comics that one of my nicknames in college was Calvin, and that my pitbull was named Hobbes. I've also read all the books, and for that I counted myself lucky that I was able to view a Calvin & Hobbes lithograph in the Cartoon Art Museum, donated by Watterson himself. The Cartoon Art Museum (CAM) is located in the Yerba Buena district in San Francisco. I really didn't have any fixed itinerary when I visited SF, only that a museum or two is on my list, and this is the second that I visited, the other being the Contemporary Jewish Museum . CAM, housed in the ground floor of an office building ...

T o celebrate the International Museum Day l ast year I run up a list of notable museums to visit in several cities around the world. I'm coming up another list for this year, featuring the museums that I visited in Mexico City, San Francisco, Cambridge, Los Angeles, Manila and Baler.  My picks for this year are: The Mexica gallery of Museo Nacional de Antropologia Museo Nacional de Antropologia , Mexico City  One of the most important museums in Mexico, the Museo Nacional de Antropologia houses Mesoamerican artefacts dug from several sites in Mexico and Central America. Among the famous pieces on display at this museum is the 24-ton Aztec calendar stone and a Mayan stelae from Tikal, Guatemala.  The museum is located between Paseo de la Reforma and Calle Mahatma Gandhi, and accessible via the subway.   Diorama of Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan Museo del Templo Mayor, Mexico City Just adjacent to the ruins of Tenochtitlan in the Zocalo ...