The museum makes its home in Traverse City, Michigan and apart of the Northwestern Michigan College. A one-story building, the structure itself consists of mostly tan and off-white walls. However, this small place contained multiple rooms containing various exhibits dedicated to various contemporary eras of art.
They had a small exhibit from the Bodies in Motion show. I have this show seen years ago at the Discovery Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. Walking through it again, I think about how very Renaissance this exhibit feels. The way they pose the bodies as if alive and active, reminded me of Leonardo Da Vinci’s anatomical drawings and the posing skeletons of the same era. Not to mention the Greek reference to Myron’s Diskobolos in one body.
Also, the way the show displays organs reminds people of how packed in we are on the inside.
However, I felt unsettled by the room that showed humans and organs sliced up. Especially, the sliced face, which made me think of ham and the way people cut it.
Other exhibits featured standout artists such as Lee Nam Lee. When I first learned about Asian landscape paintings in art history survey classes, my teacher emphasized that the artists wanted the viewer to sit and contemplate these works. Lee combines this with the technology of animation. It helps that he adds a Miyazake style whimsy, art history references, and a sweetness that calms the viewer.
The film I Wanna Go There depicts Western art ranging from Michelangelo’s David to Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass in an Asian painting and swamped by the grand environment. Interestingly, the film also depicts a helicopter dropping a Greek temple. In a way, Lee puts the East-West duality under an equal setting in this living collage. The film Moon Pot observes the season changes with butterflies fluttering about. The pot itself fades in and out with the changing season. Waterfall of Park Yeon depicts calligraphy going down a waterfall and forming a sentence while a family looks on. It also depicts the life and death of waterfall. In two works, Lee focuses more on art history with his Van Gogh animations. I wrote earlier about his whimsical which rings especially true with Portrait of Van Gogh and Story of an Ant. In two flat screens, Lee depicts an ant deconstructing a Van Gogh portrait and reconstructing it piece by piece. Another entitled Portrait of Van Gogh with Pipes shows the man’s many self-portraits smoking a pipe that reveals his other paintings of landscapes and still lifes. This counts as the second time I have seen an Asian artist reference Van Gogh.
Then again, Asian art (specifically Japanese) has influenced Van Gogh’s work. In a way, Lee Nam Lee and Akira Kurosawa closed a circle.
In his last work, he shows The Girl with the Pearl Earring go from young to old with morphing technology. Here, Lee challenges the viewer with this work because the original painting forever captures a girl in her youth. Similar to his nature animations, Lee shows an iconic woman growing older long after Vermeer completed the portrait. If anything, Lee uses his work as a teaching tool on the history of art, seasons, and aging.
Michael Tetherow’s portraits of stretched faces hearken back to Edvard Munch. His work Untitled unsettling with its lack of mouth
Other art exhibits left an impression, but not in a good way. The installation entitled Anti-Gravity Mirror does not pull off the intended results, but I think I did not follow the instructions right. The rest of the exhibit showed a plethora of musical instruments that makes sound when detecting movement, abstract-minimalist sculpture, and photographs of universes from NASA. Welcome to the future.
The last exhibit had work from the Inuit community from past to present. The subject ranged from depictions of animals, mythological beings, and everyday activities. Often with a sense of humor. One thing I have noticed come up in the paintings by artists such as Kenojuak Ashevak, Kananginak Pootoogook, Napachie Pootoogook, Lucy Qinnuayuak, Pitaloosie Saila, and Felix Roulin. They have small red signatures that share similarity to red seals found on Asian paintings.
This museum celebrates abstract ideas and the future, and how we can easily take ourselves apart to show our core selves.
ETA: Changed a word.
Art History Ramblings 
