The First Ladies Exhibit at the Museum of American History in Washington DC

This April I was lucky enough to visit Washington DC, and see some great museums. One of my favorite exhibits in the Museum of American History was definitely the First Ladies Exhibit. At this exhibit many of the first ladies' dresses were displayed from inaugurations. Along with dresses, shoes, bags, and other belongings were displayed with the collection. I really enjoyed this exhibit, it was a really great experience for a fashion lover, and you could actually take hours going through everything here. The gowns were incredibly beautiful, and of course made by the best designers in the world as they are good enough for a first lady. It was a really interesting experience to go and learn a little bit about the personality of all of these first ladies, as you can tell a lot about a woman from her choice of clothing in my oppinion. Mamie Eisenhower stood out to me as a very well dressed woman with her clothes being so characteristic of the time that she wore them, and absolutely gorgeous. The sillhouettes were so typical of the 1950s from what I have studied of fashion history. They were gorgeous, and made me want to try on the clothes. All of the clothing were displayed beautfully and the exhibit was well organized, some of the items perhaps needed to be labeled more clearly because some were hard to keep track of what belonged to who. It wasn't a horrible problem for the dresses, just for some of the smaller objects in the collection. Also perhaps they should add in the year that the dress was worn, although this should be somewhat general knowledge, it is hard to keep track of the inauguration year of every president.
The exhibit also contained some great information on the side walls that told a little history of the first ladies. This seemed to be good and not too wordy. It was concise, but also with enough detail. There were a few videos that you could also watch off to the sides to learn a little bit more about the women who wore the dresses as well as the making of the dresses.
I would say the biggest problem with the exhibit was the crowd. It was extremely crowded and really hard to get through. If there were less people there it would have been easier to see everything and read everything, however it wasn't really their fault, it's a popular exhibit, and it's popular for a reason- because it's great.
One of the highlights of the exhibit was seeing Michelle Obama's inauguration dress. As I find Michelle a great role model for women as well as a beautiful person with excellent taste in clothing, this was very exciting for me. I also love the designer Jason Wu, and to see the precise detailing that he put into Mrs. Obama's gown was really fascinating. The dress was absolutely gorgeous. The exhibit as a whole was great and I would definitely reccomend seeing it.

Hard Rock Cafe Gatlinburg

Perhaps most people do not think about eating lunch of dinner in a museum, but that is exactly what one does when they visit the Hard Rock Cafe. The Hard Rock Cafe is a restaurant with many locations all around the world that houses artifacts of some of the greatest rock bands in the world. Luckily for us, we have a Hard Rock Cafe pretty close to us in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The Hard Rock Cafe in Gatlinburg is a pretty cool experience for those interested in music especially rock. The restaurant's walls are decorated with memorabilia of Rock and Roll icons everywhere you look. These items can include costumes, guitars, other instruments, lyric pages written by the musician, autographs, and records to name a few. It is like a history museum for lovers of rock music.

The Hard Rock Cafe in Gatlinburg has a great collection of rock and roll artifacts such as Joe Perry from Aerosmith's guitar, a jacket from Elvis Presley, and a guitar from Bob Dylan just to name a few. The collections are really great for a music lover to go and browse. This place is not just an ordinary restaurant, it's a great museum experience. The items in the restaurant are clearly named and identified so that you can know what you are looking at. Most of the items seem to be categorized clearly from artist to artist so that you have some organization as you look through the walls of memorabilia. It is a great way to learn about the history of rock and roll and to see some really cool items worn by Rock and Roll icons and touched by them. I would definitely reccommend a visit to this museum especially if you enjoy rock music. It is really fun to go see some of your favorite bands artifacts and browse the walls to learn about some great music. The website for the Hard Rock Cafe in Gatlinburg is also really great. You can browse through the collection and look at details of the memorbilia.

The National Gallery of Art online museum

The National Gallery of Art has an excellent website which allows you to tour the collections of the museum in depth. The museum in general is one of the great museums of the country and features some excellent works or art.You can locate the website at NGA.gov. When you get to the front page of the website you select on online tours which takes you to categories that you can choose to tour. Once there you get the option to tour different mediums of artist work as well as tour by artist, specific art work, and themes. You can also select several languages to read about the collection. For example choose on painting for the medium, and you can click on modern and contemporary. Once you are there you recieve information on modern and contemporary art as well as a list of artists or already set up tours to click on to view collections from this subcategory of art. For example from here you can click on a Matisse collection and from here you can view all of the art in the National gallery of art from Matisse as well as a lot of really interesting information on the artist and his works. You can also click on Collections of modern and contemporary art and view several of works from the collections. Here you can see great works from Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock as well as many others. This is a great tool to see some beautiful works of art.

The National Gallery is a great museum to visit if you are in Washington DC, but if you can not make it there, the online tour is really great, informative, and contains some stunning works of art. The information on the website is really great and tells you a lot about the artist and the work. It is really beneficial for people that want to look at art, and can not go to washington DC. The works of art are portrayed beautifully and the information is great. I would definitely reccomend a visit to the website to view the fantastic collections and learn a lot about art.

The Biltmore

The Biltmore is located in Asheville, North Carolina, and upon driving to this area you realize why the Vanderbilt family would have selected this area for their home. Everything is beautiful and you are surrounded by lovely mountains and lush landscapes. Upon entering the gate of the Biltmore house you are greeted with trails and forested areas filled with trees, flowers, and some animals. It is very charming. As you drive to the house you realize just how much land this family had, It takes some time to get up to the house. Once you drive up and park you are able to see the gorgeous Biltmore house. It is absolutely huge and unbelievably beautiful, a mixture of different architectural elements of famous european buildings, which there is a display on inside the house.
Once you enter the house you are immediately drawn in with the lavishness of it. The decoration and the design are just gorgeous. If you are there for the day you typically have to buy a pass for the hours in which you will be viewing the house, but if you are staying in the beautiful hotel or have an annual pass you can go in when you please. The tickets can be pricey, but for all there is to do at the Biltmore estate it is well worth the money, this is an all day kind of museum. While we were here it was the festival of flowers meaning the house was decorated with beautiful and colorful flowers from the garden, as well as the gardens being decorated beautifully for the spring and summer. The whole estate smelled of sweet flowers.
Inside the house you can begin your tour, there are some tour guides and some guided tours with an ear piece, or you can go off on your own and read about it in your guide, which is what we did. Every room is decorated and furnished with the furniture of the family, and you can see the luxory that this family lived with. Libraries, dining rooms, billiards rooms, bowling alleys, swimming pool, staff quarters, and a huge kitchen with many pantries are just the beginning to what you see. The walls are lined with lithographs of art work, most of which were 16th and 17th century northern european art. Everything decorated and furnished so that you feel like you have stepped into the past. The house is just gorgeous and really fun to walk through it's a great museum, and it really gives you a look into how this family lived.
Also at the Biltmore estate, which is like a museum on its own is the winery. Everyone who has a pass for the day is able to visit the winery for free, and even do some tasting. The winery houses the biltmore's wine, and you get to see the barrels being prepared. It is a very interesting view into the way wine is made, and you even get some history on the family's wine and which kinds were their favorites and when they started making the wine. It is very interesting, and the wine is delicious.
A visit to the Biltmore is something I would reccommend. There is so much to do, and so much to learn about. The house is a wonderful museum filled with furniture and stories, the gardens are gorgeous and smell so good, and the winery is very fun as well. Its really a neat place to visit, and absolutely beautiful

The Knoxvile Museum of Art

The Knoxville Museum of art is a great experience and really beneficial to the city of Knoxville. The museum is located in worlds fair park which is an excellent location for such a museum. On the outside the building is modern and really appealing. It is a nice building in the location and fits right in as part of the cultural center of Knoxville. The location is also ideal for the parking. Parking is easily available and very convenient for visitors as they can park fairly close no matter how crowded, somewhere in worlds fair park, or around the building, and it is free. It is a great location and very convenient. It is also in a beautiful area that is so unique to Knoxville and so iconic to Knoxville as well making it a great place.
Upon entering the museum you are greeted with a nice and understandable layout to the museum. Upstairs houses the permanent collections and downstairs there is the current exhibitions. Although the museum is quite small it is a very nice part of the city of Knoxville and a wonderful place to look at art as well as learn more about the culture of East Tennessee and about the history of the city. It is a great way to show some city pride for the citizens of Knoxville as well as educate visitors on the cities history and culture by showing some beautiful art by artists from East Tennessee. It is really nice to see the great talent of these artists and the beauty of the images themselves.
The collections consist of contemporary art as well as Art of East Tennessee. It has a small, but fantastic collection that is appealing visually and educational in learning about history and art together. They have some beautiful works of art, and it is really fun to go look at the collections. They have a great organization and are displayed really nice to give them a great effect.
To keep things interesting for the people who live in the area, and to keep everyone coming back the museum has some exhibitions on the ground floor currently there are series of photographs by Baldwin Lee, Walker Evans, and Eudora Welty entitled Vision, Language, and Influence: Photographs of the south. I have also seen exhibitions by Anne Wilson. These have always been great and keep things new.
The museum also plays an important part in the art life of Knoxvilles public. They participate in first Fridays as well as having parities and concerts as well. This all keeps people coming to the museum and emerging in the great experience that one gets when visiting the museum. The museum also rents out the facility for weddings and parties which I can only imagine would be beautiful.
The Knoxville Museum of Art is a great experience and a wonderful art museum located in downtown Knoxville. I would reccommend a visit to anyone in town. Its fun to go back and look at all of the exhibitions as well as revisiting the permanent collections.

The Hunter Museum of American Art

The Hunter Museum of American Art located in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is really a suprisingly wonderful experience. Before I had been to the museum, I thought that it would be very small based on the size of the city of Chattanooga. I thought it would have a nice, small collection, but I was definately in for a great suprise when I pulled up to the museum. The museum is very interesting on the exterior. It is a very modern building attached to a historical mansion. The look of the building is unique, and reflects the collections inside completely. It was an different way for a building to look, but it works in a strange way for the hunter museum. It is a historic mansion made of brick and white corinthian columns surrounding the outside connected to a modern building made of metal and glass, a combination you don't see everyday, but one that was intriguing. walking from the parking lot to the museum you are greeted with many sculptures that are spaced around the front entrance of the museum furthering the intriguing and lovely first impression of the museum.

Once inside the friendly staff told us their reccomendations for where to start the collection. The collection is made up of only American art and runs from the colonial period through present, it runs in an organized fashion seperating colonial through 19th century art in the historic mansion while late 19th through present day is housed in the modern day building creating an interesting dynamic and giving you a good idea about the art and where it may have been housed for the colonial period. The historic mansion portion housed a great collection of early american art in such a beautiful space. You walk up the stairs which gives you an odd transition from modern day to going back in time. Everything changes including the smell, and you feel as though you've stepped back in time, especially on a slow day like we went, where no one else was in the room with us. This collection housed some great early American art, some examples which were very typical of their time, and beautiful by great artists who are very famous.

Down the staircase we started at the other portion of the building, the modern side. This collection housed the 20th century American art. The collection starts at the early 20th century with some great examples by Ashcan artists and impressionistic styles of early american art. As you move along the collection the years you are looking at increase and give you a sense of moving through history. you start to see paintings by artists from the Stieglitz circle, the Harlem Renaissance, Regionalism, early abstraction, abstract expressionism, neo-dada, pop art, contemporary. The history of American art just begins right before your eyes leading you to the current day. It was very exciting and a wonderful collection wth examples that fit the period teaching the visitor about the history of painting and the new styles that came along throughout the centuries of America.

Also in the museum there was a great exhibit on glass art. This was an extremely beautiful exhibit that had some amazing works of glass. The colors and sculpture were truly amazing. The museum housed some very talented glass artists works and exhibited them beautifully. My favorite of the glass works was a larger than life size dress reclining. This was remarkable. The dress was so convincing with the folds of drapery and the weight that was portrayed. It was beautiful and captivating, a must see in the collection.

The Hunter Museum of American Art is truly a great museum and a wonderful way to see and learn about American art. The collections progress in a great way that allows you to see history unfold before your eyes. It houses great artists such as Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, John Marin, Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, Marsden Hartley, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. This museum is a great experience and I would reccommend a visit. Everything about it was wonderful even capping off the visit with a trip to the gift store was fun. The gift store contained some really nice items including beautiful jewelery and books on many of the artists from the collection. It was a great experience.