An Art Tour!!

Good morning All,

It is raining here and mild (44 degrees).  Most of our snow is gone.  There are still a few clumps in the yard here and there, but for the most part it vanished overnight.

Today I want to show you some of the art that we saw on Monday.  Fair warning - there are quite a number of pictures, so if art is not your thing or you just are not interested, please skip this post.

Al West, the former CEO of SEI (Colin's employer) has been a huge collector of art.  When he started, his daughter was studying are in NYC and he gave her funds to acquire pieces she thought were important/good/interesting, etc.  She mainly focused on artists who were not that well known (though many of them are now very well known).  Over the years a collection of around 4,000 pieces of art have been amassed and the West Collection was formed.  

The SEI campus is pretty large - there is both a North and South campus and we toured both.  Some art has been there from the beginning.  Other pieces are rotated out and new ones brought in.  One interesting thing:  There is a "Hot Hall" where art that is found offensive or unpleasant (for any reason) can be placed.  When a new piece of art is placed in one of the buildings, people are free to say that they find it offensive, or they don't want it near where they work, etc.  It is then moved to the Hot Hall.  Sometimes someone will request that a Hot Hall piece be brought back out.  We did see the Hot Hall and though I did not care for the works of art I didn't really find any totally offensive (I also didn't spend a lot of time studying them...and did not take any pictures).

I didn't take pictures of everything (there was so much!!), but here are some of the works we saw:

Shark Tank - sharks are made out of tires.  I should have taken a picture from the outside of the "tank" or room so that you could see both sharks...but I didn't.

A sculpture made entirely out of phone books.  I wish I had taken a picture of the backside where the pages are visible.  This artist has also sculpted busts of famous composers and they are scattered throughout the building.

Origami Cranes

Kamper Kart.  The artist, Kevin Cyr, has a web site (https://www.kevincyr.net/) and there is a page about Kamper Kart (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1719609460/camper-kart-project).

Everyone is familiar with the painting by Vermeer...his one looking upside down is made out of something like 5,000 hanging spools of thread.  But, when looked at through the sphere in front of it, the work appears right side up!

A life-size Lambroghini - everyone's dream car - made out of used lottery tickets.

Of course I loved this one!  A paperbag puppet.

Mad Cow!  Please click to enlarge and look at the pink helmet hanging on the right handlebar.  This motorcycle does run and is covered in real cow bones to resemble a running (or flying?) cow skeleton.  Our guide told us that the artist sometimes wears a cow costume when riding this!

There were a number of embroidered pieces in the collection, but I found this one to be simply beautiful.

If you are still here, thanks for sticking around for the art tour!  I found it fascinating and a lot of fun.  Although Colin is a "permanently remote" worker, he has a very interesting and beautiful office to go to on occasion.  Most of the employees are back to work 3 days a week and both campuses are entirely open spaces - there are no individual offices.

And now, I suppose it is time for me to get to work on my stuff!  Have a wonderful Thursday everyone.