"The Accession Table"

If you've read some of my posts, or if you know me, you know that books and reading are my second love next to art and history and I love when they come together.  I recently finished reading Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and museums and museum collections made an appearance!  Unfortunately, it was completely made-up, not just as in this was a work of fiction, but the description was so absurd as to take on a level of comedy.

The intersection appeared when the main narrator of the book, Clay Jannon, uses "The Accession Table" at a local museum of yarn and crafting to help solve a mystery hundred of years in the making.  "The Accession Table" is described as a universal collections database that connects all museums everywhere, enabling the staff of each to see the holdings of every other museum in existence.....

BWAHAHAHAHAHA, that's just hilarious since some museums don't even know what they have in their own storage rooms let alone what one across the country might have.  I have to imagine that Sloan was attempting to describe something so unbelievable that it would be impossible to take it seriously but regardless, I know someone out there will take it as truth.  This reminds me of this post on one of my favorite Tumblrs, "When You Work At A Museum." 

Later in Mr. Penumbra's, Clay takes a trip to a high-level artifact collection storage facility where the shelves whiz around and move on their own, just so everyone knows, this is also false and does not happen.  The book itself was an enjoyable, light read and this shouldn't discourage anyone from reading it, just pointing out a little fact from fiction.

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So here's the part of the post where I explain why I haven't been posting in a while!  I'm about to have a baby and as many people who have done this know, it's busy right before and after this event so I probably won't be able to post as much as before but I will try to post as museum as possible about art, museums, travel, food, books, crafts, and will add KIDS into the mix and we'll see how it all turns out. Thanks!

Polka-dotted Pumpkin Painter

With Fall upon us and Halloween closing in I got incredibly excited about this exhibition of the work of Yayoi Kusama up now in London.

Kusama is known for her polka dotted environments like this one:

"View of the "I pray with all of my love for tulips." installation at the Yayoi Kusama Special Exhibition at the Osaka National Museum of International Art" by Samuel Mark Thompson - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org

And I'm very happy to say that I got to see not one but TWO of her rooms when we were in Pittsburgh at the Mattress Factory.  I wrote more about that in this post.  But I love that Kusama has also brought her signature to this symbol of Fall, this season I love so much, but also she uses the pumpkin as a form of self portraiture. 

Is there more contemporary art that evokes Fall?