I love lists. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as making a to-do list, working on a project and tghen slashing a big black Sharpie line through it to mark it as done.
If you love lists as much as I do, you’ll appreciate the thrill I had a few summers ago during a family vacation to Washington D.C. when I stumbled across an exhibit that was devoted entirely to lists.
The lists at the Smithsonian Institute’s Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture weren’t just any lists. The lists in the exhibit, all part of the museum’s Archives of American Art, were created by famous authors and artists, including Picasso and Alexander Calder. Not only did they provide a window into how those creative geniuses worked, they were works of art themselves.
But why take it from me. Here are some of my photos of lists in the exhibit:
The “Lists” exhibit made stops in New York in 2011, and at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art earlier this summer, but there’s nothing listed on the website about future showings.
Until that changes, you can see more in the exhibit’s website: Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
Or buy the book.
Do you love lists?