Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Independence and 7th st SW
ww.hirshhorn.si.edu

Washington DC is just lousy with museums, from the Museum of the American Indian, to the International Spy Museum to a bevy of Smithsonian museums that bloom in the city, but one for me rises to the category of must see, and that is the Hirshhorn Museum of contemporary art. Here you can submerge in the genius of Bradford, Anderson, Kusama, Kruger, and Bhabha who’s large scale works will simply astound you. What’s more dizzying is that since it is a national museum it is completely free to enjoy, making it all that more brilliant. First I got to take in Barbara Kruger who is an artist that understands the power of words but definitely doesn’t understand my hair. I’ll let it slide. Gliding onward I passed into the Laurie Anderson Porthole and entered her world saturated with multimedia art. Anderson is perhaps the most prolific avant-garde artist of our time and to experience her expression up close and personal is extremely transformative. The Hirshhorn is a perfect vessel for her work given its flowing, circular layout, allowing you to drift from one immersive piece to another seamlessly like dialing in radio stations in an old car. Here you literally become a piece of the art as it consumes you, having a very Alice in Wonderland experience as Anderson welcomes you to play with scale in her work. I closed out the mindwalk being blown away with one of my favorite anti-artist, Marcel Duchamp, the pioneer behind the Dada art movement in the early part of the 20th century. Since his playful saltiness that cracks the concept of what art should be is a foundation for so many well known modern movements,  I was completely surprised to find a brilliant piece that I’ve never seen before, a display with the art completely void, so simple and such a brilliant example of what the Dadaist stood for, that I was completely crestfallen to discover the piece was just on loan, and not on purpose. Hey I’m a travel writer not an art critic, sue me.