Mint Museum Uptown on a Wednesday Evening, January 31st 2018
Mint Museum Uptown is the second branch of the Mint Museum, the first being off of Randolph road in Charlotte. Admission to get in is $15 for Adults and $10 for college students and seniors, except on Wednesdays when it’s free from 5pm-9pm. Upon walking up the steps to the Mint Museum Uptown, there is a restaurant hidden to the left. Thru the front doors, at the front desk, the receptionist will ask if you have been here before and request a zip code. After that, you are free to roam the 3rd and 4th floors. Because the escalators are quite high without any sizeable barricade separating my fear of heights from the possibility of falling over, we opted to take the elevators. The receptionist recommended beginning on the 4th floor and working our way down, so that is what we did.
Art is interesting in a sense multiple people can deem a work worth of art whereas the same art piece could very well be dismissed as ‘art’ to a separate group of spectators. I like different art for different reasons. I like trap music not for the lyrics, but for the beat and the ego boost it gives me. I like alternative-pop-punk rock because it reminds me of being naïve in high school. I also enjoy visual artists such as KAWS and Takashi Murakami because of their technique and how impressed I am with their composition of characters and colors. I enjoy Wes Anderson films because of how they are directed. I could go on and on but point is: art is art to the consumer.
On the 4th floor, there were oil paintings that were over 200 years old. 200 years old!! Being the lunatic obsessed with the concept of time that I am, I find it extremely interesting to read the stories behind these paintings and to think of what type of journey these works of art took to be on display for a 24 year old Cambodian kid to be viewing on a Wednesday in the year of 2018. Though these thoughts never benefit me from a productive stand point, it’s interesting and inspiring. There was a painting with a boy and his dog. The description said a dog at one’s side was a sign of masculinity and that kings and noblemen had portraits done with their dogs to infer symbols of hunt and fidelity. From a historical perspective that is true, but I wonder if there was more to man’s relationship with dogs than that back then. Could it be that they loved dogs? Or was showing emotion a sign of weakness? It makes you wonder.
Another exhibit they had included paintings from the Civil Rights Movement, the Industrial Age, and the Mid-America’s. There was a ginormous painting inspired by the march of Selma that left historians recalling that day as Bloody Sunday. With racism being an open discussion in today’s society, when I see paintings like these, it makes me thankful I don’t live in a society where racism is as widely accepted as it was back then. There were abstract paintings and paintings that had Coca-Cola in them (shows you how long Coke has been around, which is kind of amazing considering the majority of the formula stayed the same all these years). The incredible thing about art is it documents life, whether it’s beautiful at the time or extremely trivial.
All in all, the visit was cool. I wouldn’t pay money to get in, and some of the exhibits were boring such as the one on costume design. There was a neat wall of colored lights and a few antique pots I deemed to be ‘exciting.’ Going to the Mint Museum Uptown was a great excuse to get out the house on a Wednesday evening.
Check out 10 of my favorite photos up top, then click the link below to see all of the photos taken that night, compiling a visual impression from my perspective of Mint Museum Uptown.