Kemper Museum

I used to take my kids to museums a lot. Especially the Kemper and the Nelson because they are both awesome and free.

Repetition my have been a factor, but somewhere along the past couple of years, my kiddos have decided the museums are less awesome than they really are. I still sometimes take them anyway.

One such occasion, after surprising them with a visit to the Kemper, we came out with Em saying, "We should come back here every couple of months!"

Exactly. Though that was a couple of years ago.

This paid off big, though. First, there was a Frederick James Brown retrospective in addition to 'The Map as Art.'

I was kind of surprised, pleasantly, by a pair of pieces, one Willem de Kooning did as a portrait of Brown, the other a Fredrick James Brown portrait of Willem de Kooning.

I read a biography of de Kooning a couple of years back, and I had the impression he'd alienated pretty much everyone he knew to the point where such mutual portraits were unlikely. But I guess before you can alienate someone, you have to get them into your orbit at least a little bit, right?

Mo still enjoys mocking the facial expressions in paintings.

And of course we visited the spiders.

As far as the map art, I sometimes think I'm a creative person and then I am confronted with the real thing.