Last month, I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It had been awhile since I visited a gallery and found that only after an hour of wandering through the place, I was tired and needed a nap. When I took an arts and cultural policy class, our professor, Michael O'Hare, discussed a bunch of things regarding the way we experience museums and art and thought me to think critically about things I previously took for granted, like the layout, curation, and admission prices. I also saw a collection of paintings another one of my professors, Robert Reich, enjoyed: Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life.


There are three paintings that stuck with me the 5+ weeks after my visit. The first is Jean Fragonard's A Game of Hot Cockles (and its companion paintings: Blindman's Bluff, The Swing, and Game of Horse and Rider). They're really fun scenes of people having fun with their friends outdoors in the summertime, and it made me smile because it reminded me of the memories I'm lucky to have made with my own friends and family. Fragonard's The Happy Family also made me smile because the dog reminded me of Appa. The last painting I found thought-provoking was another work that features a dog, Little Girl in Blue Armchair by Mary Cassatt. The inscription mentioned that the work of women impressionists was often confined to domestic scenes because it wasn't really socially acceptable to go out by themselves and paint outside.


A seal swimming somewhere near Alaska

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