Tag: travel & blogging

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City of Richmond

Monument Avenue

This weekend team members went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts {VMFA} to take in the Treasures of Ancient Egypt: Sunken Cites exhibit before it leaving in January 2021. While on the way to the gallery they drove thru Richmond’s Monument Avenue, where statues have been removed as part of the ongoing protest against police brutality and racism.

  • Robert E. Lee monument is the last statue on the Avenue surrounded by Black Lives Matter signage.
    Robert E. Lee monument is the last statue on the Avenue surrounded by Black Lives Matter signage.
  • The Lost Cause of the Confederacy was a notion used to perpetuate racism and racist power structures during the Jim Crow era.
    The “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” was a notion used to perpetuate racism and racist power structures during the Jim Crow era.
  • Stonewall Jackson monument removed July 2, 2020
    The Stonewall Jackson statue was removed July 2, 2020
  • Former location of Jefferson Davis statue, which was toppled by rioters during the Goerge Floyd protest in June 2020.
    Former location of Jefferson Davis statue, which was toppled by rioters during the Goerge Floyd protest in June 2020.

Polls in summer of 2020 estimated that 15 to 26 million people had participated at some point in the demonstrations, making the Black Lives Matter protest the largest in US history. 

Stay safe,
Kathleen

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Da Vinci Exhibit

Musée du Louvre, Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France

1} Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci by Francesco Melzi, 1515-1518 2} Tete de femme, dite La Scapiliata- L’Echevelee , 1500-1510 3} Anatomie, Crane sectionne- Verso

An Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance ideal. The Louvre has marked the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci {1452-1519} by building upon their collection with additional paintings, drawing, manuscripts, and sculptures that will be on display until February 24, 2020 for the world to view.

Da Vinci is one of the most intriguing personalities in Western art, and I was completely captivated by the large number of drawings that recorded his thinking, along with the copious number of notebooks that were on display.

1} Study of Hands, 1474 2} Etudes pour une Adoration des bergers ou pour une Adoration des Mages, 1478-1481 3} Detail of a Centralized Church, 1488.

The way the exhibit is presented/setup, one cannot help noticing that da Vinci’s curiosity and insatiable hunger for knowledge never left him. He was constantly observing, experimenting, and inventing, and drawing was, for him, a tool for recording his investigation of nature and the world.

Kathleen

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