Time on our hands

Hello everyone!

I am writing this post from the 10th floor lobby of the Gonda building at Mayo Clinic. There has been yet another change in Karen's chemo schedule this week. After meeting with Dr. Peethambraham this morning, the doctor determined that the neuropathy Karen was having in her hands and feet was too significant and that a third dose of Taxol today was not a good idea. She provided Karen with several options for how to proceed from here and I will have Karen tell you about those. However, Dr. P did recommend we meet with the surgeon this afternoon, so we have some time to kill before our 1:30 meeting with Dr. Boughey.


What does one do at the Mayo when one has time on one's hands?

There is certainly no shortage of medical information at your disposal. There are jigsaw puzzles to complete, internet access, live piano music with sing-alongs, and guided tours of the campus with the history of the Mayo Clinic. Lastly, there are daily guided art tours as well as recorded audio tours you can check out from the front desk.

Mayo is reknowned for its medical care, but its modern art collection is quietly on par with any small museum. I doubt most patients ever notice who the artist is, but there is no overlooking the amount of art throughout the campus. At first I wondered why it was all modern art, but then it occured to me that modern art reinforces that modern things take place here. Would a paintings and sculptures by Old World masters send a subliminal message of cutting edge technology and scientific breakthroughs?

Not surprisingly, the majority of the art is donated. It goes to show that this facility has touched so many others as it has us. We won't be able to donate a Picasso, but the amazing people here have our gratitude and appreciate all the same. What I can do is show off a bit of their amazing collection to some of you who will hopefully never have a chance to see it in person.

Here is just a little of what you will see from wandering around the buildings. I never took art history, so the information provided below the photos on the artist/work is coming from the posted placards.

Thanks again everyone for checking in on the blog and sending your supportive thoughts to Karen!





These are my favorite pieces - five wall size originals by Joan Miro - located in the lab where Karen gets her blood drawn before every appointment. I just love the titles.





Joan Miro, L'Halterophile (Dumb Bell Wielder)
La Folle Au Piment Rageur (The Mad Woman with Ill-tempered Pimento)
La Guerriere de Cents Aus (The Warrior of a Hundred Years)
Le Meneuse de Lune (The Moon Driver)
Le Grande Ecaillere (The Big Oyster Woman)

Joan Miro is a Spanish painter, sculptor and printmaker. His work, exploring worlds of fantasy and imagination, have made him one of the most important and best-known artists of the twentieth century.
Miro's bright colors and playful images earned him the epithets "childlike" and "primitive." Actually he is a Surrealist artist, attempting to capture primary human experience in a direct and forceful manner. Miro draws his subject matter from memories and irrational fantasies. The images embodied in his paintings often represent women, stars, birds, or mythical animals. Subject matter varies from figural compositions to the totally abstract.

These are in a hallway across from a cafeteria:

Andy Warhol, Flower Series, Silk Screens, 36 x 26 inches, 1970

An important development in American art, which became well known in the 1960s, was called Pop Art. Many "Pop" artists used common, everyday commercial illustrations or objects as the basis of their subject matter. Andy Warhol is one of Pop Art's most famous practitioners. He began his career in the 1950s as a commercial artist. His first Pop Art classics, overscaled sculptures of Campbell soup cans and Brillo boxes, were his attempt to take the mystery out of art. While showing the influence of the machine and of commercial products on art, Warhol believed that art could be reproduced by a machine and even called his studio, The Factory.

This is in the main lobby of the Gonda building:


Jennifer Bartlett, Four Houses, Oil on Canvas, 2001

Jennifer Barlett is an artist whose probing imagination has brought her into the ranks of today's finest painters. Her work is versatile, thoughtful and energetic. It has undergone a dramatic evolution from the hightly controlled abstract pieces of the early 1970s to the realism of her later work. To a certain extent, her career is a continual rearrangement of a limited set of motifs= the house being the most common and recognizable. Her penchant for juxtaposing images, media and points of view allows the viewer to create a whole by piece in together the many parts. In Four Houses, we see a house motif at different times of the day; morning, noon, dusk and night. We have placed this painting near the entrance of Mayo Clinic as a way to welcome patients and visitors; "Our house is your house."

These are also in the main lobby:


Dale Chihuly, Untitled, 2001
(I don't have the placard notes for this, but I have seen exhibits by Dale Chihuly whose work is truly phenomenal. This is an enormous display - perhaps 13-14 constructions that are easily 6 feet in diameter each. I can't even begin to imagine what the cost was for the single donor (!) who had them commissioned especially for this space when the Gonda building opened six years ago.)



Alexander Calder, Untitled, Lithograph
American artist Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was born into a family of artists. He received an engineering degree in 1919. He worked as an engineer and took art classes in New York before he went to Paris in 1926.
In Paris, Calder made paintings and toys. Encouraged, he turned to wire as a medium, creating portraits of celebrated people of the day as well as his friends. This was a new medium with no precedent. The wire sculptures, described as three-dimensional line drawings, brought him notoriety and recognition in Europe before America.
Under the influence of Mondrian and the Constructivists, Calder's work becomes more abstract and geometric. Calder was the inventor of the mobile, which he created as moving sculptures. He also began making stabiles, stationary works made of large sheets of metal connected by bolts.

What does one of these "mobiles" look like, you ask? Well, go to the lobby of the original Mayo building and lo and behold, you'll find one:


Alexander Calder, Fish, Painted metal and wire, 60 x 30 inches

Here's another piece in the lobby of the Mayo building:


Zophia Butrymowicz, Autumn, Wool tapestry, 8 x 13 feet, 1983
Autumn by Zophia Butrymowicz is one of the finest tapestries in the Mayo collection. Woven in wool, the warm spectrum of colors seems to glow from within, suggesting the shimmering play of sunlight on a tree-colored hillside in the fall. Subtle variations in hue and value indicate various levels of space and the interplay of light and shadow.
The tapestry Autumn was originally commissioned to conceal a weather map that used to operate in the Mayo Building lobby.

This tapestry is in the elevator bay on 10 Gonda:

Chilkat Ceremonial Dancing Blanket, Goat hair, cedar bark and wool, Circa 1870s, Tlingit Tribe, North America

The men furnished the pelt of the mountain goat, the cedar bark, the frame, the painted pattern board, and the few tools required. The women prepared and wove the materials. The finished blanket was used as a ceremonial robe by the wealthy and every chief or prominent Tlingit possessed one or more. They were used at ceremonies and dances, worn over one or, generally, both shoulders, and secured by thongs sewved to the head (top) of the blanket. Blankets might be given to the more honored guests at potlatches or ceremonial feasts.




David Hockney, Red Wire Plant, Etching, 30 x 36 inches, Edition 8/35, 1998
Chair with Book on Red Carpet, Etching, 38 x 30 inches, Edition 18/35, 1998

David Hockney is one of the most revered artists working today. For a contemporary artist of serious aesthetic purpose, he enjoys immense public visibility. Hockney's success was so rapid that he became independent very soon after leaving the Royal College of Art in London and did not have to rely on teaching in order to make a living. In 1963 he moved to Los Angeles where the lifestyle and landscape of the city became important features of his work.

Hockney's vision ranges from the grandiose to the intimate, often embracing both at the same time. His drawings, paintings, and prints are readily accessible and reflect the scope of his talents and his ebullient personality. They are brightly colored and fun to look at. Hockney's art reflects his need to communicate directly with the viewer. It is his need to be heard plainly and understood clearly that is the basis for his phenomenal popularity.



Jim Dine, Red Etching Robe, Etching 29/36, 42 x 30 inches, 1976
The Sky & Lillies, Intaglio and silkscreen with hand-coloring, 40 x 30 inches, Edition 25/25, 1998
Brite Tulips, Intaglio and silkscreen with hand-coloring, 41 x 29 inches, Edition of 25, PP, 1998

From its avant-garde beginnings in the late 1950's, Jim Dine's work has become firmly rooted in tradition. He has produced more than 3,500 works in an astonishing range of mediums - above all in painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking and photography but with occasional excursions into performance, state design, book design, poetry and even music.

He is a keen observer of nature for whom draftsmanship serves as the most precise tool of expression. The depth of expression and precision are reflected in his botanical drawings and paintings. Major decisions about the direction of his work are made subjectively rather than rationally. Dine emphasizes that his art is an expression of his sense of self, a desire to reach a profound understanding, through his own experience, of what it is to be human.

In another elevator bay:

Embroidery (suzani), Silk, Early 19th Century, Lakai, Uzbekistan

This type of Uzbek embroidery is called suzani, which comes from the Persian word for needle. Suzani can take many forms, from large decorative wall hangings and curtains to small functional household items such as bags to hold tea or spices.

For weddings, pieces of embroidery formed a particularly significant part of the dowry. Tradition defined the number and type of embroideries needed for a bride's dowry. A mother began to embroider soon after she had given birth to a girl in order to finish a set of suzani in time for the daughter's wedding. When the daughter was four to six years old she learned to stitch from her mother. Eventually the daughter took over what the mother had started and went on embroidering nearly until her wedding day. The pieces she created then revealed her diligence and skillfulness as well as the wealth of the family. A small section of the suzani was traditionally left unfinished. This area represented "never-ending marriage, never-ending life, and never-ending joy."