My final stop on Saturday’s Museum Crawl was the Institute of Contemporary Art, a small but lively museum part of Virginia Commonwealth University. I had visited once before, but all the exhibits had changed since then. Most of the current displays were connected to the Black experience. The center image on the bottom row was a collection of old TVs displaying a tape of a concert by Marion Anderson. The same strange audio clip played on an endless loop. It was dreadful. I asked the young man monitoring the room how he endured it, but he said he tuned it out. Just to show how imaginative the architecture was, the picture to the right is the inside of the elevator.
This was a good stop to end with because by the end of the day, I was overwhelmed by all I had seen. The building is dramatic but streamlined and took a backseat to the works on display. I loved the contrast to the architecture of the White House of the Confederacy. Like lemon sorbet after a rich dinner.
