I recently checked out Yayoi’s painting exhibit in New York City. Impressive!
How gorgeous are those colors? Her work is so interesting and full of life — I really enjoyed it. (The heat of the gallery made it infinitely more enjoyable, I’m not going to lie. At that point in the morning they could have literally been showing me photos of poop, and as long as I was warm I would have swooned.)
On my way out I noticed another, smaller line at a third entrance to the gallery. I had read about these, for lack of a better word, “tentacles” that were a separate part of Yayoi’s exhibit, and I was wondering where those were, but my brain was too frozen to ask. Luckily, this was the magic door that let me to that exhibit. So I braved another 10 minutes outside (teeth chattering the entire time), and was ushered into the “tentacle” exhibit. You have to take your shoes off to enter, and you get one whole minute in there.
Totally worth it.
This is Yayoi herself. In a room adjacent to the tentacle room, there was a video playing on loop of the artist reciting a poem, followed by a brief glimpse
of the infinity room.
So beyond cool.
This is the poem that is being read aloud by Yayoi in the tentacle room.
It’s hard to read, so I’ll pull out my favorite line here:
“Was the beauty of the end of one’s life nothing more than an illusion?
Would you give me an answer to this?
Devoting all my heart to you, I have lived through to this day
Hoping to leave beautiful footprints at the end of my life …”
All-in-all, I’d give the exhibit as many stars as one possibly can. Unfortunately the exhibit ends this weekend. I was contemplating heading back really early Friday to see if I can make it inside the infinity room, but I’ll have to play that by ear.
(P.S. I could go into detail on the exhibits, but explanations of how Yayoi put together her work are much more beautifully explained in the articles I link out to above. For more info on how she made everything, I’d recommend checking those out.) A little Christmas cheer as I made my way back from the exhibit.
Cheryl Lock is a former magazine, newspaper and website editor turned full-time freelance writer. She has worked on staff at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, More and Parents magazines, as well as for Learnvest, the leading women’s financial website. Her work has also appeared in Newsweek, Forbes, Ladies’ Home Journal, the Huffington Post, AOL Travel and more.
Cheryl was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up moving around every few years as an Army brat. The urge to travel has been with her her whole life. While she calls New York City home, Cheryl makes it a priority to travel as much as possible throughout the year. Some of her favorite places include Iceland, the Great Barrier Beef, Cabo, Rome, Calabria and Munich, although she hopes to never stop exploring. Cheryl blogs about her travel adventures (and what’s happening in and around New York City) at Weary Wanderer.
