I am not a big fan of art museums. When my dad told me that I was going to the National Gallery of Art in his place, I was more overwhelmed by the thought of spending a bus ride with fifteen middle schoolers than excited about getting to see amazing art. The National Gallery of Art exceeded my expectations by far.

I never got bored which was an entirely new experience for me, considering the aforementioned fact. The sheer number of paintings and sculptures and prints blew me away. There was always something interesting to look at, but with a limited amount of time available with a bus deadline, lingering in front of a particularly interesting piece was not an option.

The sculpture garden was truly impressive. My favorite creation was a metal tree. The branches were so intricately shaped into perfection. From a faraway glance, you could believe it was real – just another leafless tree shrouded in ice.

Another interesting sculpture was an optical illusion of a house. Built at a ‘V’, the middle where the two sides met could either be pointing towards the sidewalk, or into the bushes behind depending how you looked at it.

Fun fact: the architecture for the museum was very deliberate, older, Renaissance era and Impressionist style art was housed on the side of the National Gallery with big, long hallways of columns and Greco-Roman statues flanked the entrances to different rooms. In other words, it looked like a castle. However, modern art resided on the opposite side, quite literally. Big windows, tall ceilings, vast white walls and lots of abstract, triangular shapes.

One exhibit on exhibition was “Shock of the News”. All of the art within that exhibit was focused on real life events, newspaper articles and the news itself. Some of it was funny, or poking fun at political figures and celebrities. Others were more serious. I remember one article about a woman artist. Her picture appeared in newspapers photoshopped, because in the original picture her skirt rose above her knee. Vanilla Nightmares by Adrian Piper from the Civil Rights exposes white men’s fears of black men, through a charcoal drawing of a black man strangling a white man. This is only one in a series to show unreasonable bias that controlled minds of many white people at the time.

In all the paintings, I was most astounded by the eyes of the subject. Somehow, with the use of light and shadow, artists could make the people and animals in their paintings come alive. I saw real human expressions on figures throughout the museum, and every time I saw a face so alive, laughing in the moment, captured, not by a photographer but by a painter, I couldn’t help but smile too.

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