What a day! Other than the pouring rain (I've not been this soaked in ages), it was a lovely day!
We started in Love Park and walked the beautiful Parkway towards the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Along the way, we enjoyed the flags of every country, beautiful trees, sculptures, and fountains. The kids' main objective was the Rocky statue and Rocky Steps (which are the steps for the PMofA). It was dumping buckets, but the kids ran up those steps! We then retreated indoors for donuts until the museums opened.
We got to enjoy first the Rodin Museum. Rodin is one of my favorite sculptors ever. He had such a grasp of the human body. His sculptures are beautiful and intimate and lovely. The garden at the museum was full of spring time blooms. I wish it was sunny - I'd have spent hours there soaking it all in.
After that, we went back to the Museum of Art and met up with our friends Sharaya and Alison. Sharaya and I work together in the Kellogg/Shorecrest ASB world and Alison and Charlotte are friends at school. We toured different exhibits and I was impressed by the collection of modern art and saw several works by my favorite artists. They had extensive collections of all kinds and a ton of room to display. Even creating whole rooms to walk through.
After a really enjoyable time touring the exhibits, we had a nice lunch and then walked to a completely different kind of museum - the Eastern State Penitentiary. It originally was conceived as a positive prison reform that would allow prisoners time for penance and reflection. But it turned into a really awful experience of largely solitary confinement. The extension of touring the former prison was a museum highlighting the injustices of how much of the population the US imprisons and the devastating impact on people and communities. It reminded me of the movie 13th and that we have the responsibility for totally rethinking incarceration, etc.
