While I don’t have a collector’s innate drive to categorize, classify, and catalogue, I must be a collector-of-sorts at heart. At this life stage, I’m well beyond “nesting” and prefer to winnow, rather than accumulate more things. While I lack any desire to collect stamps, coins, not even seashells – which were mesmerizing during our seven years near Florida’s Sanibel Island – I do love to collect stories.
Thoughts, impressions, observations, and fond recollections are welcome views of what Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum visitors love, appreciate, and are inspired by during their time here. Visitors’ insights, interactions, and reflections about artwork in the galleries, the sculpture garden, and Art Park – the Museum’s interactive family gallery – can be illuminating. These commendations often can be the best invitations, too, encouraging others to visit.
Yet, if not gathered, those good words waft away like evaporating mist into thin air. Constantly and in varied ways, I feel as though I’m swiping the air with a butterfly net, striving to capture even a sampling of these comments before they flutter away.
That’s why I invite you to take a few moments to explore the Digital Guestbook touchscreen in the main entrance during each Woodson Art Museum visit. By answering a few questions and entering your zip code, you can “leave your mark” with a virtual pin on the world map that contributes to revealing the Museum’s global appeal. The answers to a few queries help us discern from where visitors travel and what prompts their visits.
Those few Digital Guestbook questions include an optional one, inviting visitors to leave comments in response to “What about the Woodson Art Museum and/or exhibitions and programs inspire you?” Here’s a sampling of responses from recent weeks.
- The Tiffany Glass exhibition and Andrew Wyeth attracted me. The hand-blown glass vases were an unexpected treasure.
- The chance to learn more about art
- All, but especially sculptures
- Birds, origami, crows, eagles
- Great exhibitions, inside and outside!
- The talent of the artists
- Peacefully meditating
- Quality of the Birds in Art artists
- Beautiful collections
I invite and encourage you to contribute to the Museum’s beautiful collection of comments and stories, too.
Consider the Museum’s more than four-decade commitment to always-free admission – a crucial part of all visitors’ barrier-free access to the array of ever-changing artwork, visiting artists’ presentations and workshops, hands-on art making, and programs for all ages and life stages – from babies, children, and families to students during class visits and teens and adults – offered at the Woodson Art Museum, the only full-service art museum in the northern half of Wisconsin.
Recall that the Woodson Art Museum was one of only seven art museums to be named a 2016 National Medal finalist by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency supporting the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 35,000 museums. Remember that the Woodson Art Museum was the 2016 winner of the Wisconsin Governor’s Arts, Culture, and Heritage tourism award. Reflect on what creative pursuits in your life were sparked or inspired by your visits to experience the artwork and programs enlivening recent or current exhibitions – Birds in Art, Tiffany Glass: Painting with Color and Light, Victorian Art Glass Baskets, Enduring Beauty: Art Nouveau Glass, Making Marks, Audubon to Wyeth: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures from the Collection, and more.
What about the Woodson Art Museum inspires you?
Share your impressions via the Digital Guestbook during each visit; posting, tagging, and sharing comments and photos via the Museum’s social media channels on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; via TripAdvisor reviews, and in your conversations with friends, family, colleagues, and associates.
Visit often with others this holiday season and throughout 2017, and pause for a few moments with the Digital Guestbook each time. During your visits, you’ll assemble a treasure trove of inspiration that we invite you to share and that will prompt you to return to experience the Woodson Art Museum again and again.
