Red Grooms at The Frist

I just got back from a day at the Frist Center where they are holding a gallery of the works of Red Grooms.

There was something about his work that I really did not appreciate until I saw them for the first time in person during the Art of Tennessee gallery. Since then, Red Grooms have always stuck in my mind as a favorite artist, if ever there was one.

And now I see why.

His pieces have a whimsy about them that I love. Kind of childlike in nature, the ones in the gallery, yet full of detail that goes unnoticed by the casual viewer. The kind of things like including a reflection in the hot dog cart that we just take for granted. It is those little details that make the piece so enjoyable. I loved hunting for little things that you couldn't see with your naked eye. In fact, there's one piece that was in the gallery that pleased this side of me to no end.

It was a small box of a piece called Tarzan's Theater, I think. It was pretty much the front and side of a normal theater, but if you looked in the window pass the ticket booth, you saw the movie the people were watching inside the theater! Draw on a small square sheet of toilet paper was a cartoon picture of Tarzan and Jane from the old black-and-white days lit only by the reflecting light of the wall on the other side.

Now, most of the viewers that I saw in the gallery today never saw what was inside. In fact, the little write up never even said to look inside the piece. I just found it simply because I like to look inside those kind of things, and it was a reward I was happy to receive.

Speaking of the other viewers, I found it odd that most of the people going to the gallery today were kids in the single digits. They were being corralled like small versions of cattle by babysitters and day care workers that obviously didn't know how to teach them art let alone handle them in a museum setting. In other words, they were loud. Really loud. And if anyone knows about the acoustics in a gallery, that volume does travel at an amplified rate. It almost made some parts of the gallery unbearable to be in.

Overall, though, the gallery was amazing! I don't remember feeling so giddy looking at any art before. Just seeing some of Red Grooms pieces made me feel very much carefree and childish. Kind of like going to Disneyland for the first time, where you are so happy you just want to do everything all at once.

Ah, the power of art.