A Tale of Two Ladies: Part Two – Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

I arrived in the Fenway on an afternoon that was colder than appearances let on. The sun broke in and out of the sky as I pulled up to the entrance of the Gardner Museum I’d used the two other times I’d come to the late lady’s house for a visit. Things had changed since my last visit though. In fact, it was the changes that prompted me to visit Gardner again.

To give some context if you’ve never been, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is one of those places that Boston tourist literature refers to as a “hidden gem.” Publications that locals actually read suggest otherwise: Not that it’s not a gem, but it’s hardly hidden. The pre-renovation Gardner Museum consistently appeared on Best-of-Boston lists. The reason is obvious enough: Equipped with a breath-taking garden in the spring and an interior garden year-round, the art is almost secondary to the architecture and interior design. At first glance, the visitor wonders how Mrs. Gardner – a famous philanthropist and contemporary of the previously written about Mary Baker Eddy – was able to accumulate all the statues, balconies, windows, doors, and other building parts without having an army loot most of Europe on a scale equal to the Crusades or Sherman’s March.

I was surprised to find the entrance was closed. Traffic had been rerouted through the new “wing,” so around I went to the recently opened glass box behind the historic Fenway Court.

A Tale of Two Ladies: Part I – The Christian Science Center

For this excursion, I planned on hitting the life’s work of two prominent women of the late 19^th-early 20^th century: Mary Baker Eddy and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Eddy’s Christian Science Center, which is comprised of a reflecting pool, the Christian Science “Mother Church,” and a Library holding the Hall of Ideas and the Mapparium was to be the day’s first stop.

Riding there on a bike from Roslindale, I looked forward to a day mostly in doors, as the sky revealed all the colors of dirty snow and was spitting at me unmercifully.

On arrival, I entered the Mary Baker Eddy Library and I was greeted by a very plainly dressed, attractive, pleasant, and direct woman. I told her I’d like to go to the Mapparium, and she sold me a $6 ticket to go inside. I needed to check my bag quickly, as the tour started in less than a minute.

The Mapparium

Following my bag check, I walked into the “Hall of Ideas,” where I was instructed to wait. There was a video introduction of Mary Baker Eddy just ending as I walked in, and our guide – an equally plainly dressed, attractive, pleasant, and direct person – instructed me and a couple from New York to follow him.

I was surprised and pleased to be in such a small group as I followed the young man. At the doors of the Mapparium, he gave a brief overview of what we were about to see and what the format would be like. He introduced the architect of the Mapparium, a man named Chester Lindsay Churchill, and explained that the map might look a bit strange because it was the borders of a world that no longer existed – that of 1935.

A Political Art Adventure: Wherein the Author Stumbles Upon A Great Exhibit

Sometimes you find cool stuff by accident. Often, it’s stuff that you don’t know much of or care about. So it was in my expedition to the “Colleges of Fenway” area, which I was crossing through to get to the new-and-improved Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (more on that in a coming post).

Cutting through to the Fens from Huntington Avenue on my bicycle, I rode by the Museum of Fine Arts, noting that, though it was a weekday, they were bumping. The “parking lot full” sign greeted me as I rode by. On the other side of the road, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA), there was a banner on the building that read “Histories of Now: Six Artists from Cairo.” I know very little about modern Egypt, less about modern art, and (embarrassingly) virtually nothing about the revolution that recently took place in that country. Regardless, I was out to check out new things, and I was frankly not doing so well, resorting to updated versions of things I’d already seen. This was an exhibit in a place I’d never been, and better yet, it appeared to be free. I decided to bite.

I locked up on a spiral bike rack I imagined was made in house. It was attractive, but not terribly utilitarian: The spiral was too short for my 53 cm Surly, so I had to sort of lean it diagonally to get my lock to connect. Walking through the mini-courtyard toward the school entrance, I was met by about two-dozen art students, all rebelling by dressing almost identically. About half of them were smoking. I brushed off my self-righteous inclination to indignantly question how people were still doing that.

Security’s pretty lax at SMFA. Or maybe I just looked like another art student. The guard at the door wouldn’t have questioned me, but I approached him and asked where “this Egypt exhibit” was.

He pointed it out, and then refused my offer to sign in somewhere. I took a right and entered a few rooms full of mostly-digital media.

There are, as the subtitle of the exhibit states, six Egyptian artists featured. To the layman (read: me), it was not clear that there was much of a different between the pieces. The majority were video projections of Egyptians on walls, or video on plasma screens. Immediately at the entrance, there was an Egyptian man yelling on a screen about being Egyptian. I went to the room on the right first, where I was face-to-face with a classroom full of Egyptian women (there were a few men) projected on a wall, repeating “My mind is” in Egyptian Arabic, followed by a series of poetic non sequiturs.

This was accompanied by another projection on a standing screen of a man scribbling on a chalkboard, and a poster of what appeared to be a subway map on a human’s head, along with the title of artist Shady El Noshokaty’s room-sized contribution, “Stammer.”

The next sub-room ran an old movie on one screen and an impromptu speech on another right next to it. The video for the speech was being run in negative. The words between the speech and the film, according to the subtitles, seemed to coincide. This was called “The Echo,” by Moataz Nasr.

On the main wall, there were three projections of men in flowing robes, one blue, one red, and one green, spinning continuously. The provided literature explained that this is a traditional Egyptian dance that allows Sufis to reach a “higher state of consciousness which raises them above difference and conflict into a perfect state of peace and balance.” It looked to me like it would make you very dizzy.