Marie WheelerToday’s adventure is a blend of two earlier posts, my 2016 food goals and one on being a tourist in your own town. The plan was to hit the Rockwell Museum of Western Art, see the sponsored Rockwell Alley Art Project, meet the food goal of trying falafel at My Shawarma and then have a game night.
Alley Art Project
We elected to go out of the original planned order as it was a beautiful and warm 40 F out and we decided that walking around and seeing the Alley Art was best done in the heat of the day. The Rockwell Alley Art Project from the website:
‘The Alley Art Project is a result of a special collaboration between The Rockwell Museum and the High School Learning Center of the Corning-Painted Post Area School District. Each year, our educators host high school students at the Museum and use the art collection as a catalyst for creative writing and art making. Students create individual pieces of art that work as elements of a larger mural design to be painted in the Corning community as a mural. Students earn credits toward their high school diploma during the time spent with our educators at The Rockwell.
Students explore aspects of individual and community identity through designs for these murals.
The Alley Art Project supports students in learning about art, design, and the research associated with the process of art making – all the while cultivating a sense of pride in the community.’
That’s pretty awesome. I think the neat thing about it is the fact that many of the buildings back walls are exposed to the main road through city, and this improves the aesthetic of the city while keeping youth busy.
The Rockwell Museum of Western Art
Since the route of the alley art can end up right at the Rockwell Museum, we dipped in there to continue our tour. Now, the bonus of being a tourist in your own town is that, at least in our area, get a local rate which is about half of the regular rate.
I had a specific goal in mind for my tour of this museum as I’m not shy about the fact that Western art isn’t typically my genre. My goal was to look at the brush strokes and techniques first-hand so that I could better understand how to replicate them in my own work. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that there was a display of more modern and abstract Western art that really appealed to me.
The piece that I liked the most is an acrylic on canvas called ‘Spirit Assemblage’ by Dan Namingha. It is exactly the style that I love, with lots of color, thick, juicy strokes of paint and tons of texture.
This certainly wasn’t the Rockwell fare that I remembered from my youth.
After we finished at the museum, we had some time to kill before dinner and I’ll share that part of the adventure in the second half of this post on Monday.
