Day 44 – Bilbao (2 of 3)

This museum has been in the back of my mind since it opened in 1997. I just wanted to experience that much sheet metal all in one place.

 The museum includes several separate galleries including the largest single collection of Richard Serra’s work.  While I was a student at Western Washington University, a patron purchased a work by Serra for the school campus that garnered a lot of controversy.  Serra works in pieces of 2″ weatherized steel about 10 feet high and positioned or curved into giant geometric forms of which one can walk around and inside.  There are 7 of these inside of one wing of the Guggenheim.

  

The other collections focus on modern art in its various forms and sizes but keeping with the Guggenheim’s (and all of Bilbao’s for that matter) larger-than-life persona, BIG art is emphasized. 

  

This giant book is not in front of a museum (or a library as I first suspected) but in front of the federal office building.  The title is  “The Recovered Memory: Traces in the History of the United States”

 

Today’s entry in the inscrutable category is this life size statue of an Native American Chief in the window of a shoe store in downtown Balboa. 

  
Tomorrow I will try to catch a bus out to a local vineyard for a tour and lunch.

  
Buen Camino,

-jgp