Lux Center for the Arts

I had skipped practice to see the art gallery, I was sweaty and stinky from the haul in the blazing sun with my notebook in one hand and my pencil in the other when I sauntered into the air conditioned building. I took a look around and then walked into the first room that contained glass sculptures and as I admired the hand-crafted items before me I felt pressure build up in my body and couldn’t hold on, leaving a resonated rumble throughout the halls. “Great, I thought, not only am I hot, stinky and poorly dressed due to the fact that I didn’t care what I looked like, but now I was embarrassing myself. I shrugged it off, though the thought of what just happened lingered in my mind and searched for my favorite sculpture.
I found it at the end of the specifically placed on its pedestal around the room. The piece was named Vicious Circle and was a sculpture of a man’s face with a dog on his head. The man’s face was about a foot in height and had an elongated face. The man’s face was of curiousness and contemplation as one of his eyes was down and the other cocked up to see the dog, who at the top of his head was what looked like chasing his tail or getting ready for a nap. As I moved on into the next room, I saw the widest variety of art I have ever seen in one small building. There were leather scrap journals, hand-crafted cards, jewelry, quilts, pottery, almost everything a person could think of. I then walked up the old, rickety steps to find myself surrounded by dolls of all shapes and sizes, from about two feet tall to about half the length of someone’s pinky. There were dolls from all around the world and some dolls, I will admit, that I never ever want to see again.
The dolls that I could see creeping up into my dreams to create nightmares were called Topsy Turvy Dolls and like the cartoon Cat-Dog, had two half upper bodies sewn in the middle so you had two dolls in one. A doll that made me feel like I was a little girl around Christmas time, however, was a Japanese doll that had different ‘wigs’ that you could put on the doll so that she had multiple hair dressings. It was the coolest doll that I had ever seen, and that is a lot to say for a girl who was never really fond of dolls to begin with. I could spend all night describing all the different types of dolls that I encountered but let’s move on to the pictures.
My next stop was the picture floor, in which there were photographs, paintings, collages, lithographs and so on. My all time favorite exhibit was a lithograph named Shadows. It was a powerful image of a large group of soldiers marching in a scene of destruction and turmoil, with there heads bent down in prayer or sadness. That picture said a lot to me. I can’t really explain what I felt when I examined it for all the details and the story that it told, but it definitely told me one and for that I am grateful. I strongly recommend going to the Lux Center for the Arts to get lost in thought and in art.