Looking up 67 feet, into and out of the Vortex. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Richard Serra, 2002. Cor-ten steel.
It’s been years since I lived in Fort Worth, but it’s where I’m sheltering in place. I miss Houston, my new home, but I can’t complain that my long daily walks, when I head south, take me to the grounds of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Kimbell, and the Amon Carter. Not a bad neighborhood for an art person to hunker down in, except for the fact that I can’t walk into these fantastic institutions to take in so much glorious art. A month ago, I found this strange and scary, but understandable, given our collective circumstance.
Now it’s just painful. Not getting to see art in person has gone from feeling like a temporary and honorable discomfort to a kind of psychic pain I didn’t predict. We often take for granted the thing we do for a living, and a big part of my job is to look at art. In person. Now, I cannot wait to wander the upstairs galleries of the DMA again. I dream about it.
The Five-Minute Tours we’re running have given me and the Glasstire staff and I know many of you a sense of comfort, and an ongoing connection to the art and art spaces across our state. New video files come into my email inbox every day, and I do a fist pump.
And while I can sit back and enjoy some of the brilliant and funny art coming through my laptop or phone screen (K8 Hardy’s takeover of our Instagram last weekend cheered me to no end), I can’t deny the full-body, therapeutic power of going out to see art, and standing in a physical space with art. Brandon and I talk about this, and a lot more, in last Sunday’s Art Dirt podcast. Art is a form of communication, and we are social creatures. What is the future of art?
– Christina Rees
If you would like to see Glasstire’s weekly Letter From the Editor (not usually published to our homepage), please subscribe to our regular newsletter here. There are three newsletters per week, and it’s free. The Letter From the Editor comes out each Tuesday.
