Monday, June 24, 2013

RVA Day trip: Wesselmann and Sticky Rice

Sean and I have a bad case of forgetting to take advantage of our proximity to Richmond, a great city for art and culture. We hadn't been to the city together in 2 years (!!!), but on Sunday I decided we should go to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to see its Tom Wesselmann retrospective. Wesselmann was one of my favorite artists in college...he's not as well-known as his contemporaries, but the show blew me away. It does an amazing job tracking his development, showing the natural evolution of his subject matter and mediums. The truly most amazing part, for me, was seeing his cut steel and aluminum "drawings," which looked like sculptures of doodles on a page (including the sneaky pic I took above). It was love at first sight.

 Here I am, with one of the paintings from his famous "Smoker" series.

It was hot as hell on Sunday, but a great day at the museum. We had great fun checking out African, Egyptian and East Asian art, too, and we saw it all within 2.5 hours.

Despite the many times I've been to Richmond, I've really only been to the same 3 places. So our friends Samieh and Ali gave us a little insider tour, and we saw their sweet neighborhood, ate excellent sushi and tater tots at Sticky Rice and had the smoothest, creamiest ice cream at Boyer's Ice Cream. It was a perfect day, even if the supermoon didn't look that super from our vantage point.

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