Our recommendation for today is a day late, which is pretty on-brand for the last Saturday of February – a doleful month if there ever was one. By the way, the name February comes from the Italian word for fever: apparently, February was the month when disease would creep out of the Tiber River and ravage Rome in the past. We can take joy in the fact, though, that our numbers are going down, and in the fact that it is going to be a rainy weekend – a perfect time for this weekend’s expedition to the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden.
The Sculpture Garden has a wide array of sculptures, something for everyone. There’s Henry Moore’s “Seated Woman,” a curiously equine female, and his “King and Queen,” which is also curious, but I think very cool. Rodin’s “Walking Man” and his “Crouching Woman” are powerful studies of motion and muscle – quiet rebukes to those of us who have done too little of the former and lost to much of the latter during the Pandemic. Jean Arp’s “Evocation of a Form: Human, Lunar, Spectral” is fittingly meditative and “Are Years What? (For Marianne Moore)” by Mark di Suvero remind me that my understanding of modern art is super limited, because I simply don’t get it!
There’s a bunch more and all worth seeing!! And today and tomorrow are optimal times! The rain will keep the crowds away (yay!). Also, it will make the metal glisten and lend a sense of texture that the sculptures lack in the sun. So celebrate February’s last weekend by heading on down to the Mall and getting a bit of culture!
