Yelling at teapots
The more museums you go to, the more you get bored of big museums. This happens. The crowds are too much, the collection is too vast, you get fatigue within 45 minutes. It is always better to be focused, small, intentional.
The big hits lose their sheen. You know what American Gothic looks like. The original is in the Art Institute, the second most-visited museum in the country, six miles from where I’m writing this. You go with a friend. You stand next to them, next to the painting, blank-faced, trying to look a little unhappy. One of you puts your hand out, holding an imaginary pitchfork. A stranger takes your photo. Everyone does this. There is sometimes a line to do this.
For the moment when you have graduated beyond the brand names, when you crave a sense of wonder, when you become that specific age where weird mid-century furniture hits in the same way as any other artwork would, there is the Kirkland, which is probably the best museum in America.
The tl;dr with the Kirkland is a local-famous artist died, left his studio to be turned into a museum, and had a trust written that got it filled with a bunch of 20th-century furniture & ceramics, salon style, stacked five high and several deep everywhere. Everything is original; many pieces are limited or unique. There are six primary rooms and a few side galleries. You can do the whole thing in an hour if you’re rushed, two if you’re not.
Of course, the artist’s work is everywhere, and the art is trippy-but-good in that sort of way that clearly relegates it to permanent local-famous status. His original studio is preserved in amber, too, with an unfinished painting sitting in the middle. You are not really here for the art, though. You are here for dozens of the weirdest tea sets you have ever seen. You are here to imagine a dimension wherein you have a couple of friends over, and you pour some absurd-grade darjeeling out of a pyramid into two smaller upside-down pyramids, and they marvel at both the darjeeling and the pyramids. Everyone does this while sitting on ribbon chairs, of course – because there’s a giant purple one, with matching ottoman, over there in the corner.
I first visited the Kirkland in 2013, shortly after my business started to take off and right as I was starting to plan to buy this house. For someone who was already starting to host big gatherings, who could easily envision a forthcoming era of more gentle interaction, the Kirkland came as a minor revelation at the exact right time in my life. It helped that the Kirkland hit the center of all the things I like: opinionated, staunchly independent, weird but legible, unapologetic of what it is at any given point in time.
Part of me wants to believe that the Kirkland is packed with so many things because it just has them, and it would be a crime to keep them all in storage. The real test came when Kirkland announced a major expansion and move a few years after my first visit. Their gallery space would triple in size, in a mostly-new building. (The art studio was dug up, hoisted, moved a few blocks over, and grafted onto the new structure.)
I visited the new space for the first time in January of 2020, and if anything it only became more overwhelming, because I think they took the Kirkland’s larger size as an opportunity to increase the volume of everything. Now you’re looking at hundreds of teapots instead of dozens, with a reduced risk of bumping into any of them. It is now the ideal of a museum: something you can do in a couple of hours without being overwhelmed, zero crowds, light jazz & classical music on the PA, with a strong enough point of view that you come out changed, thinking of things anew.