City Museum!!

Research Road Trip first day: Left Ohio for St. Louis, MO to visit the City Museum. FYI...I just downloaded the blogger app and this is my first attempt at blogging from my phone. My apologies if something doesn't look right as this is a challenge in itself. Now on to the post. 

For those who don't know...I just finished the requirements for my MFA at LSU and as celebration; Jeni and I are road trippin through the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains (Colorado). Since we are always trying to better our careers, as artists we conduct a lot of research and since we both enjoy our research this trip is a mixture of pure pleasure (camping, hiking, and visiting friends) and research for pleasure (visiting museums, farms, and anything related to our artistic practice as well as contemporary ceramic art). Specifically I am visiting interactive museums and exhibitions as a way to further influence my interactive art. 

Yesterday we left Ohio late and drove straight to St. Louis to visit the City Museum at night. On my Facebook Simon Levin's comment sums up the place extremely well. "The best and hardest place to explain to people." In short it's a giant playground for kids and adults. It's a fully interactive museum and everything is built to play on. There are hidden caves and paths to craw through, a million (a couple dozen) giant slides (including a ten story slide...yes 10 stories high!) as well as giant ball pits old airplanes, fire trucks, buses, and steel structures to crawl through that are so high off the ground that they will make even grown men want to piss themselves (I almost did), and so much more. 

We visited two years ago during the day and had so much fun that we will visit the museum anytime we are near. On the weekends the City Museum is open at night until midnight. Within my own art, I am constantly exploring the carry over from child's play to adult play and am curious where does one line end and the other begin? I am specifically interestd in adults that continue to play throughtout their whole lives and therefore was very excited to visit the City Museum at night. And sure enough it was better than I expected. There were some kids and teenagers but compared to last time there were far more adults at night. It was  amazing to see adults stand in line to ride on a slide! It was hard to take pictures because it was so dark but I hope you enjoy the pictures we were able to take. If anyone is ever in St. Louis or near you have got to stop in to play and relive your childhood. 

    

After the museum we slept in our car at a hotel parking lot and woke up early enough to catch the sun rise over the Missouri River. Next stop Kansas City. Bye for now.