By Katie Koenig
The Museum of Fine Art could easily be considered one of the best-known museums in Boston. It’s a gorgeous neoclassical style building with a large staircase leading up to the front entrance. It’s actually one of the 20 largest museums in the world, with one of the largest collections of art in the Americas.
Whether you’ve been to the museum before or not, there’s always something new to see. Instead of going through some of the major exhibits—there are certainly too many to give justice to in a single post—I want to highlight some of the exhibits that attract my attention.
I personally love the French Salon exhibit. It’s a period room displaying numerous French silverworks. The exhibit is made of a series of metal containers, vases, utensils, pots, and more. I will admit I like the exhibit primarily for the shine of the silver, but the intricate detail and floral designs along the metal also make it an amazing display of metalworking.
Another great traveling exhibit is “Thinking Small: Dutch Art to Scale.” The small Dutch paintings present such expressive detail in tiny spaces that it feels like there’s always something more to find within the artworks. The museum page on the exhibit, linked above, does a much better job describing this effect, but from my personal perspective, it allows for a quiet investigation of the sheer skill and effort this kind of detail requires. This exhibit will stay in the museum until December 4th, so check it out if you have time!
A smaller gallery in the Art of Asia wing is the Arts of Islamic Cultures. It was developed over the course of several years with the help of Muslim, artistic, and scholarly communities for the explicit purpose to illustrate the richness of Islamic artistic traditions. Again, the museum’s gallery description does a much better job explaining it than I could ever do, but one thing I want to highlight is the multimedia nature of this gallery. From audio recordings of the Qur’an, to ceramic glazing and painting, to more traditional forms of paintings, the collection spans much older art works to more contemporary creations.
My highlights are absolutely biased by my love for metalwork, tiny paintings, and audio exhibits in museums. The MFA, though, is a museum that hosts such a wide array of art works from an incredible range of years that also incorporates more contemporary works. I can easily spend four hours visiting and still not explore even an entire floor, the museum is that big.
Admission is on the high side, compared to the other museums I’ve mentioned throughout Museum Meanderings. For adults, it costs $27, although for members it’s free. However, Emerson is a participating member in the MFA’s admission program, so undergraduates, graduates, faculty members, and staff at Emerson College get free admission.
Hopefully, even if you’ve already been, you take the time to visit again, and again (and again). I love revisiting museums, and the MFA definitely qualifies. It delivers with so many exhibits that sometimes I feel like even three or four visits isn’t enough to glance at everything.
As a cultural center, its collections are amazingly diverse, and if you are tied to Emerson, it’s absolutely worthwhile to take advantage of the free tickets!