Museum of Man
Timken Museum
Balboa Park, San Diego
April 22, 2018
We used our Explorer passes and visited Balboa Park. As part of the Explorer program we receive a monthly email bulletin telling us what is new in the park. We had picked out three things to see, but in the end saw just two of them.
We parked in Hillcrest and walked across the Laurel Street bridge, stopping in at the Museum of Man. We went there to see its new Post Secret exhibit. Post Secret is an ongoing project, created by artist Frank Warren. On his website new cards are posted weekly.
The museum website describes the exhibit, which displays a selection of cards submitted over the years:
Would you share your secrets with a stranger? Secrets are the currency of intimacy. They reflect our darkest thoughts, brightest hopes, and every emotion in between. They’re deeply personal, but extremely relatable. They allow us to feel alone, together. For over a decade, millions of people from all over the world have been anonymously sharing their secrets with Frank Warren, founder of the community art project, PostSecret. Each postcard submission is a unique work of art handmade by people who needed to share and release their secret into the world.
These submissions range from the trivial to the profound, sometimes funny and other times very sad. Some writers struggle with suicidal thoughts, and Warren worked for a time as a volunteer on a crisis hotline. The exhibit and his website both give links to suicide prevention resources.
It was Earth Day, so the park was hosting the annual fair. We saw many booths set up along the way we walked, from the Museum of Man to the Plaza de Panama. (And we understand there were other booths, scattered throughout the park.) There were many food tents set up on the plaza.
We tried to get in to the Museum of Art to see a new exhibition, but that museum was closed. We thought that was a little curious, thinking that Earth Day would been a good outreach opportunity for the museum. Stymied in that attempt and needing to kill some time before the Timken Museum opened at noon, we bought some pierogis and beignets from the food tents and sat by the koi pond to eat an early lunch.
The Timken Museum – possibly our favorite museum in the entire Southland – was hosting an exhibit entitled The Romantic Impulse in the American Landscape Tradition in its special exhibit space. (This exhibition runs through June 3, 2018.) There were about a dozen works, mostly oil paintings. They included Thomas Moran’s Opus 24, Rome from the Campagna and Albert Bierstadt’s Weser River, Minden Germany. We particularly like Bierstadt’s use of light in his painting. Nearby we saw William Keith’s painting In the Santa Cruz Mountains, a beautiful depiction of a waterfall. Most of the works displayed were from the 19th century, but there were several more recent works. We enjoyed the background music, a half hour loop “soundscape” of Romantic music, including Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Admission to the Timken is always free, and they have a very good permanent collection. Do be sure to drop a contribution into the box at the entrance, though.
After we were done we dropped by our favorite Hillcrest watering hole, the Brew Project, and enjoyed some tasty beers.