Museums with Marjo

The Frost Museum of Science and the Perez Art Museum share a parking garage and wonderful views of Miami harbor. On Marjo’s birthday, January 12, we visited both museums and learned new ways of looking at the world. Here we are at one of the oculi in the Frost Museum that allow contrasting aspects of the gigantic aquarium that extends from the first floor to the fourth. A hammerhead shark just happened to be cruising by. We saw exotic jellyfish up close. With many excited children, we stumbled our way through a mirror maze to find a fascinating exhibit, Numbers in Nature.

First we reviewed the Golden Ratio, that I try to employ in my photography:

After comparing ourselves to Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, we saw that Golden Ratios have important exceptions. If I had hands as large as Rachmaninoff’s, I might be able to play his music! And if I had Michael Phelps’ wingspan, I could swim a lot faster!

Next we learned about fractals. The branches of trees and the veins of their leaves were familiar examples, but fractal branching in clouds and human lungs? Hmmm.

The Symmetry displays showed how butterflies and beetles have managed to develop beautiful patterns, while maintaining individual beauty.

Examples of spirals were fascinating.

But the most amazing subject to us were Voronoi Patterns.

Glad I was wearing the honeycomb necklace David and Leslie gave me for my birthday–I felt right at home! Marjo looked up Voronoi and found that Georgy Voronoy was a Russian mathematician who died when he only forty. His son Yuri Voronoy performed the first human-to-human kidney transplant in 1933.

In the aviary on the top floor of the Frost Museum, we discovered a live Roseate Spoonbill you could almost pet. Marjo recalled that one of her son Colin’s first words was “roseate spoonbill.” She must have been reading to him from her zoology textbooks!

After a tasty lunch at the Frost, we walked cross a beautiful plaza to the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAAM). On the plaza we encountered work by an artist new to us, Teresita Fernández, recipient of a MacArthur genius grant in 2005 and many other honors. Born in Miami, she now lives in New York. We liked her lacy metal construction screening the downtown skyline. Inside the museum we would encounter more of her works.

The most exciting of Fernández‘s works was termed “Elemental.” It depicts a nation coming apart and a world aflame, just as Australia burns. This exhibit was exciting, beautiful, terrifying, and thought-provoking. I bought the catalog and need time to study it.

Wow! What a lot we crammed into three hours! After the hour-long trip home, we both took naps.

On Monday, the last day of Marjo’s visit, we spent another three hours at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. At the entrance the building embraced an enormous century-old Banyan tree; Claes Oldenburg’s “Typewriter Eraser” sculpture perched above the endless shallow pool. Inside Dale Chihuly’s ceiling fascinated, as did the exhibit of Georgia O’Keeffe’s art, fashion and photographs. That exhibit is so extensive that it deserves its own blogpost. Stay tuned.

Marjo and I have been traveling together for more than six decades–in recent years to New York, to Michigan, and to the Near East.. It’s so wonderful to have a friend who loves to look and to learn. We love each other like sisters. We felt our mothers smiling down on us, somewhat envious of the good health and travel opportunities their daughters are enjoying.