After gorging myself on soggy sandwiches and premium ice cream, I had planned to take in another campus attraction, the Chazen Museum of Art, located a decent walk from Babcock Hall. It had begun to rain, which made the idea of a museum perfect for this outing.
It's an impressive building both inside and out, and we'll spend a little bit of time in this first post (of four) looking at just that, the building.
It became clear that the building is actually two buildings connected on the 2nd floor with a walkway. In the walkway, you can get a great view of both "sides" of the museum, as well as the outside campus area, and even Lake Mendota off in the distance (probably easier if it's not raining).
I'm calling the portion below the "right wing", where you find the main entrances, lobby, special exhibit hall, and the gift shop.
This is the "left wing", which is chock-a-block full of art.
Below is a view into the main lobby from the steps above. It's truly a very nice museum space and I was a bit surprised at how nice everything was for being on a Big 10 college campus. It was a great surprise at that.
Here's a list of the types of art and a quick view of the entire museum from the map:
They indicate above that it's a four-story museum, however, I spent most of my time in the special exhibit on the main floor (which is a modest size gallery), and then on the 3rd floor walking around all of the different collections. I don't recall being on the 4th floor, or wanting to at that point, plus it will give me something to back and see at a later time.
They even had their own art on the walls and in this case, ceiling of the museum... here's a glimpse of something just painted on the walls near a large skylight...
Pretty frickin' awesome stuff.
That's it for this post. In posts #2, #3, and #4, we'll look at the special exhibit they had when I visited, and then some of the normal collection pieces.
