trip report - Pérez Art Museum Miami

We took the bus and two trains into Museum Park in Miami to visit the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).  I had reviewed the current exhibits and none particularly called out to me, but I found I enjoyed most of them.

Museum Park is a large complex right on the AICW, south of the MacArthur Causeway. I would have loved to explore it more, but there was a massive construction project going on for the new science museum and when we finished touring the art museum there was a huge storm bearing down on us. We barely made it to the train platform. I need to go back.

Just inside the beautiful wooden doors to the museum was a collection of model boats hung from the ceiling. We liked the variety of boats. We found one that looked vaguely like our ketch, Red Ranger.

Also fun, was a collection of photography, titled Image Search, taken from the museum's permanent collection that had been arranged on the walls in groups that had common themes. There were artist self portraits, celebrations of the human body, architecture and industry. All the information about the photographs were accessed on iPads on the benches, so the text cards wouldn't disrupt the flow of the photographs on the wall.

The other exhibit that I liked was something I wouldn't have ever gone out of my way to see, but really found it interesting. It was called, A Human Document: Selections from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. Huh? 

It was over "200 language- and text-based works drawn from the Miami-based collectors Ruth and Marvin Sackner" (as described in the program). There were papers with typewriter art. There were regular books that had been altered with pages painted and ripped and cut. There were books of poetry in which the words 

         were

                   placed 

                              irregularly  

                                            on

                                                 the 

                                                       page.

There were original books from the De Stijl and Bauhaus schools of art. There were examples of Russian Constructivism, similar to the ones we saw at the Getty a few years ago. The volume and the range of work was amazing. My favorite was an altered book by Tom Phillips, called A Humument.

The exhibit renewed an interest in fabric books that I've been thinking about for years. Perhaps some tiny quilts may become book pages.