Weekend Field Trip: Boston

I spent the weekend in Boston (mostly in Cambridge) gobbling up architectural and art inspiration. The whimsical massing of shapes of the Stata Center (above) on the MIT campus makes me want to sit down with odd-shaped blocks and design a similar structure for myself.

Throughout Cambridge, former factories have been converted into offices for genetic engineering, pharmaceutical, and other high-tech companies. The building shown above seemed vacant and "age proof."

Just up Massachusetts Avenue, at Harvard, the classically inspired buildings are more somber but just as inspiring in their ornate details and fine stone forms.

I spent Saturday morning at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum, most of it in the Asian gallery admiring the Buddhist statues and Persian ceramics and manuscripts. Persian artisans decorated bowls for everyday use with verses of romantic poetry around the rims. I love how Persians served up their poetry every day with the soup course. And these ceramics have proven to be enduring forms for literary transmission: some Persian poetry has survived only as inscriptions on these bowls. 

The Sackler also displayed beautifully illustrated pages from the Persian epic poem, Shahnama (The Book of Kings). The level of detail in the pages is astonishing, with gold paint forming patterns on top of blocks of boldly colored opaque watercolors. The layout of the pages is complex, with some of the illustrations forming horizontal bands that break up the vertical columns of Arabic text. Other pages have a large central image surrounded by an ornately illuminated pattern, with a more subdued decoration forming the background for both. If you're at all interested in the history of the book, take a look at the Princeton Shahnama Project to see digital images from various editions of the manuscript.

Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which I visited on Sunday, had its own Shahnama exhibit. The well-curated exhibited focused on the women in the narrative. To appreciate the level of detail in these paintings, use the zoom function to take a look at the secondary figure of a woman soaking her feet in a stream on this page (lower left). Her dress is decorated with gold, and the flowers that surround her are tiny and detailed, with varied shapes. Hers is a story I'd like to know.

I soaked up enough inspiration to last me several decades on this trip. As I was browsing the magazines at the newsstand in Harvard Square, the latest edition of American Craft caught my eye with its colors of the sea. The feature article, "Weaving the Sea," profiles revered textile artist Kay Sekimachi and her latest work. After decades of collecting seashells, coral, bones, and other items from a beach in Hawaii, she transformed these found forms into art jewelry. I'm sure her work resonates with artists and crafters who value traditional crafting methods and use natural objects as a sustainable source of materials.

I'm thankful for the time I spent in Boston immersing myself in such striking visual imagery. This coming week will be inspiring in a different way. My focus will be on the art of gratitude as I celebrate Thanksgiving with my extended family.

Have a wonderful week!