Road trip Saturday

Road trip Saturday with two fabulous ladies – Sloane and Louisa (my favorite niece) to southern Minnesota to visit the Minnesota Marine Art Museum. A nice museum with a good collection of Impressionists and Postimpressionists, including van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Cassatt, as well as a Picasso, O’Keeffe, Cole, and Wyeth. I was most interesting in seeing Washington Crossing the Delaware by Leutze. They also had a exhibit with cuttlefishes by Ryuta Nakajima.

For kids they had a museum bingo card game and as you might expect I also asked for a bingo card and got coverall. Louisa turned in her card and got a prize. Its weird to find so many famous artists in such a small town and I think thats why their security monitors are not trained very well. A rather young security monitor seemed to shadow us through one of the galleries and yelled at Louise and me for being too close to the paintings. Really? We were not that close. I also heard her yell at two other ladies and they were also not that close, but interesting a male senior citizen with a walker was just an inch or so away from a painting and no one said anything to him. Also as we were walking into another gallery that had a larger fire door they still had its keys hanging on the door. Apparently they want someone to steal the keys to the room. They also have a rather archaic and old fashion notion of photography in the museum. Allowing photos makes visitors happy. They show their friends, post on social media, etc. I guess they don’t want free PR. Also if the Smithsonian, Louvre, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art can allow its visitors to take photos (and they have bigger and better collections), then I think one museum in Winona can.

We were hoping for peak color on the leaves along the river, but they were definitely past peak. We did get a chance to stop at an apple farm on the way home and purchased way too many yummy apple items. A fun, but very long day of driving.