Museum Gift Shops: Marching to the Beat of your Own Drum
The Museum of Fine Arts, Saint Petersburg, Florida. Image Source
By Story Pennock
“Marching to the Beat of your Own Drum”
MFA Gift Shop, 2023
Trophy-fied
Refurbishing the technical skill of old masters with thrift-couch inspired patterns and black urban streetwear, Kehinde Wiley (1977 - p) gives us exquisitely real people astride fantastical backgrounds. This early 2000s artist harkens back to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam with his Leviathan Zodiac (whose hand is now printed on a signed basketball) and 18th century portraiture with Dacia Carter in a cold shoulder dress (printed onto a tote bag). Showing reverence for traditional technique, Wiley’s classically inspired Black sitters seamlessly unwind white predominance in the fine arts while also spotlighting contemporary beauty.
Indeed, this basketball would look perfect on your shelf. Visitors may wonder if you play, but in reality you have avoided eye contact with basketballs since summer of eighth grade when you were picked last for teams and got a concussion in the same game. It’s more than a decorative element for you: it’s an intellectual bastardization of athleticism.
You are no longer a wobbly eighth grader but a worldly, wealthy patron of your local museum. At dinner parties you can casually lie, “yeah I play from time to time,” followed up with a small truth and a smug smile, “it’s not a toy though… it’s poignant commentary on Black athleticism.” If you’re really hoping to impress (or repulse), you may stumble to regurgitate the didactic you half read, “it’s an - err - immersive tapestry of heroic mark making.”
Yeah, it sounded a lot better on the museum wall.
But why create - or even think - anything new when other genius can be your crutch? At least you know about Kehinde Wiley; that immediately elevates you above the average person.
…Right?
“Marching to the Beat of Your Own Drum”
MFA Gift Shop, 2023
Stationery
Your phone is unyieldingly abuzz; moments which should be contemplative isolation pulse with an uneasy undercurrent of constant communication: anticipation surrounding plans ‘up-in-the-air’, gluing the time between this text and the next with frenzied scrolling on an app you swore off.
The best solution? Self discipline. But you’re disciplined enough during the insurmountable work day convoluted with deadlines, meetings, caffeine, irritations. Any more self restraint and you’d be ready for a cloister - or an asylum! Consequently, the easiest solution? Throw your phone into Tampa Bay and respond ad hoc only by letter, with stationery from your local museum.
Stationery at the St Petersburg MFA, photo by Story Pennock. Back to front: minimalist watercolors on card, Maranmekko floral prints on card.
Stationery at the St Petersburg MFA, photo by Story Pennock. Left to right: Maranmekko floral print on card, Stuart David on card.
Multi medium - watercolor, print, photography, wood, lead - with equally varied themes, Stationary relays the eclecticism, but also inter-connectivity, of encyclopedic museums. The minimalist watercolor stills of Florida’s finest are poised behind a bouquet of Maranmekko’s floral prints. The Maranmekko’s simplistic vibrancy, evocative of 70’s flower power, links arms with the jazzy post-cubist abstraction of Stuart David. Finally, William Weyman’s photograph series Nice Dogs on Furniture grotesquely harkens back to the Florida still lifes. Although of animals, there are some uncanny-valley images, such as a half-dog half-woman languidly lounging and smoking.
Stationery at the St Petersburg MFA, photo by Story Pennock. William Weyman’s photography series on card.
After solitarily sauntering through the galleries, languidly gazing at our Monet or O’Keefe, you can apathetically order an espresso from Clementine while composing your new thoughts on new stationery; it’s all very mysterious and French, which we all know sets you apart and above the average American. For writing, you are welcome to invoke the old masters with Rembrandt pencils (no pens in museums!)
However, buyer beware: your newfound uniqueness and life-devoid-of-technology will qualify you for pretentiousness. Although, some more forgiving audiences will simply paint you as “Marching to The Beat of Your Own Drum.”
Stationery at the St Petersburg MFA, photo by Story Pennock. Rembrandt pencils.
“Marching to The Beat of Your Own Drum”
MFA Gift Shop, 2023
Raise ‘em bright, raise ‘em right
(Viewers should apply whichever pronoun configuration they use).
Boy meets girl; boy asks for girl’s number; girl has thrown her phone into Tampa Bay; boy sends girl letters; girl responds with pencil-ashed watercolor stationary- it’s manic-pixie-dream-girl honestly; love; marriage; a baby in a baby carriage; montessori (or a similarly expensive) preschool; baby reads; baby needs a book.
Why march to the beat of your own drum alone when the rhythm is so steady? Rope your kid in as well. If they're going to be an impassioned ivy league scholar someday, they must start building their resume now. You wouldn't want their college essay centered around hobbies they found after elementary school - that would just seem fake!
Works on paper juxtaposing a saturated transformer-esque wooden toy are a visual exposé on the evolution of The Child. Mindless fun is gone: The Child rejects transformers for “Go Photo” activity books; they aspire to be curators rather than superheros, “Making a Great Exhibition”; The Child reads, learning of Pollock's journey to unapologetic abstraction, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s visionary societal rejection, and RBG enacting legislation for women.
Perhaps counterintuitively, this exhibition lauds rather than criticizes that evolution. With age, superman and unicorns, and the joy they encapsulated, sink into the unreal and The-Once-Child-Now-Adult is stranded in a demure, faded world of adulthood. However, these vibrantly real people - cartoon faced RBG or bug eyed stick figure Pollock- divulge reality’s unique wonder onto The Child, staving away disillusionment. Like any good philosophic artwork, Raise ‘Em Bright, Raise ‘Em right slings an arm around your shoulder and advises that you prepare children for life’s ugly but also to expect life’s beauty. If they believe in artists to create art, people to incite positive change, and themselves to find happiness behind a museum desk rather than under a cape, they will be fortified from impossible expectations, free to march to the beat of their own drum.
Story Pennock is a college student and co-founder of the Rosebud News. As her name would suggest, she loves telling stories and giving her unsolicited opinion about literature, history, and current events. Her pastimes include going to museums, reading, researching historical fashion, playing guitar, listening to Brit-pop and maintaining her Duo Lingo Italian/Turkish/Portuguese streak (just dont ask her to say anything other than nouns).