Museum Sunday with steel drums and Oaxacan folk art figures

After hearing the Tucson High Magnet School steel drum band outside the Tucson Museum of Art I began to wish that there had been a steel drum band when I was in high school. Playing a steel drum would have been much more fun than playing Sousa marches on a clarinet…or as the woman standing next to me said: “Better than playing a flute”. But back then, most people in Oregon barely knew the Caribbean existed, let alone steel drums.

The band provided a high energy welcome to a Sunday afternoon Open House at the Tucson Museum of Art. While the Open House was for the new arts education facility, I skipped that in order to see what the museum was exhibiting. It was my first visit and I came away enthusiastic.

First up was the Western landscape exhibition, which turned out to be more interesting than expected. Among the expected: works by Ansel Adams and John Moran. Among the unexpected were these…

Six landscapes by Walla Walla tribe member James Lavadour opened the landscape show.

The oldest painting of the West in this exhibition, above, is “Basin at Rio Gila” by Henry Cheever Pratt. Dated 1855. I’ve shown two details. How different it appears than the area around Gila Bend today.

Karen Kitchel’s group of panels are, at first glance, oil painting close-ups of the ground beneath our feet. Looking closer–and at the title, “Hiss”–I recognized that a rattlesnake slithered through some of the images. Not everything in the Western landscape is sublime.

Chuck Forsman’s painting, “Chasm” done in 1983 reflects an even bleaker view of the Western landscape, marred by human beings, no longer transcendent.

So downstairs I went to discover works of art that are very much in my taste, like the painting and an excellent glass sculpture by Jamex and Einar de la Torre, above.

Then came the thrill of the day for me: an entire gallery devoted to Oaxacan folk art figures. Well, one is Navajo. Here are just a few…

The art in my home is almost all Mexican or Mexican American, which is why I loved seeing these. And I’ll be back to the museum one day soon.

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