Since “free” continues to be my favorite price, I visited three museums for Austin’s annual free museum day. Initially, I was disappointed a temporary installation had not arrived at the first museum. Nonetheless, I went upstairs and this sign rewarded my efforts. A few months ago, I declared myself an adult fairy tale writer. Since then, I’ve been reading several critical works about the fairy tale structure, including my current thick book, which is Maria Tatar’s annotated collection of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. My “discovery” of this haunting collection felt like the fairies rewarding me for faithfully climbing all those stairs despite my initial disappointment.
I was the resident expert, giving a brief summary of some of the lesser known fairy tales that were represented such as “Six Swans.” Catacorner to the first museum I’d visited was my second stop. One vendor’s table had an interactive artists’ board. They invited the public to write our favorite Austin thing on a rectangular swatch of cloth with a fabric pen and/or permanent marker. I used a silvery pen on my chosen swatch, adding my creation to the board. Then I toured the temporary exhibit about a failed French colony off the Texas Gulf coast.
Even though I enjoyed hearing the story of the La Belle via the short video lesson, my perfectionist thoughts about the unreadable Austin Writers Roulette sign preoccupied me. I finished viewing the special exhibits room then added more to my AWR sign. I’ll just see if that increases my audience.
At my third and final museum visit, I’d just missed the drumming, but still enjoyed the installation, which consisted mostly of broken tile mosaics on a box with some intact square tiles that had been painted on. The artist’s other works were wall-sized pieces, depicting racially charged scenes, involving law enforcement, minority males and white supremacy.
In another part of the museum, teens who had entered or who were at high-risk of entering the system were given the opportunity to write poetry, create songs, take pictures and make paintings to bring their narrative to the public. Juxtaposed with those creative works were annotated statistical facts about marginalized youth who had a higher probability of entering the system rather than a wraparound service during their school years.
All in all, I felt the day just reconfirmed my chosen path of combining my art with teaching.