art for laughs

I had June all to myself this afternoon. We started our date with lunch at Elmo's Diner. I was afraid June was ruining her appetite before her meal arrived as she was hitting the milk pretty hard and shoving Cheerios into her mouth like a squirrel stashing nuts for winter. Despite her pre-meal meal, she still made room for apple sauce and a grilled cheese. Elmo's provides paper and crayons for its young customers, so I drew some pictures and June drew what appeared to be some sort of baby hieroglyphics.
Art was a huge part of my childhood, so I'm really looking forward to June's future art projects. I swear, someday when she tells me she needs one of my old dress shirts to serve as her art smock, I'll be brought to tears. It's hard to beat art class.
But I digress, so back to our date. After lunch, we headed to the Nasher Museum of Art. It's a beautiful building, with beautiful art, and, best of all, it's free to Durham residents. Upon entry into the museum, visitors are greeted by the "great hall." The great hall is wide-open, has a glass ceiling, and, most importantly, has several small sets of steps for June to climb up and down. June seems to prefer the huge great hall more than most of the individual art pieces. Case in point, we spent at least ten minutes ascending and descending the steps, but June didn't give more than ten seconds of her time to Rothko's No. 46...

She did, however, take a keen interest in Lia Perjovschi's Globe Endless Collection. Lia is known to "create work that resides at the nexus of art, society and politics." Perhaps June could see that nexus more clearly than I could, but, like me, she probably thought the installation looked like a bunch of toys scattered on a table...

After 45 minutes of wandering about, we headed for the exit. Immediately outside the entrance is an enormous installation called Side Steppin' by Patrick Dougherty. It's difficult to see in the picture, but the sculpture is made of twigs and is designed to be walked through.

June and I spent over half an hour playing peek-a-boo with one another. I've never heard June giggle so uncontrollably. I'm not sure it's the emotion Patrick hoped to elicit with his art piece, but whether intentional or not, I'm now a huge fan of his work.

And with that, we called it a day and headed home. A fine date it was.