We asked our staff, “What’s a memorable piece of artwork you have seen while traveling?” Find out our the artwork that made a lasting impression on us in this month’s Staff Sound-Off.
There is a rotating head of Franz Kafka in a busy area in Prague that has always stuck in my head. It popped back up this year when I was on a cruise with my family and saw a smaller version of that statue in the promenade area. I knew exactly what it was the first time I saw it. It was pretty cool to see something I had seen before in another place.
— Kyle Anderson, advertising account manager
While I was studying abroad in college, I happened to visit a small art gallery in Rennes, France, and stumbled across the painting “Children Playing on the Beach” by Mary Cassatt. It was a wonderful surprise because I had grown up with a huge poster of the painting in my bedroom, and it was surreal to see the real thing after so many years of looking at a print copy. Incidentally, I had the opportunity to see the painting again this spring at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville.
— Savannah Osbourn, staff writer
The street art on Beale street in Memphis.
— Daniel Jean-Louis, advertising account manager
My senior year of high school, I was on a class trip to Chicago when I saw “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. I instantly recognized it as a famous painting — I had seen the image of elegantly dressed Parisians relaxing on a grassy riverbank many times before. But in person, I was struck by the sheer scale of the work. The painting is about six feet tall and 10 feet wide, and it occupied an entire wall in the museum’s gallery. It gave me a new appreciation for Seurat, who filled that massive canvas with tiny dots of color to create a beautiful masterpiece.
— Brian Jewell, executive editor
One of my favorite pieces of art is the City of Presidents public art display in Rapid City, South Dakota. It features a bronze statue for each of our past presidents placed throughout the downtown area. While I was there, I made it my mission to walk the entire trail and photograph each of the 43 presidential statues. I loved seeing all the different statues, and they each managed to show the history and personality of each man.
— Ashley Ricks, graphic designer and circulation manager
Great art moves you emotionally, and despite seeing a lot of masterpieces across the world, my answer here lies close to home. On a trip to Oklahoma City a couple years ago, I was fortunate to see sculptor James Earle Fraser’s “The End of the Trail” for the first time. It graces the foyer of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. That remarkable sculpture captures the long, painful struggle endured by Native Americans as westward expansion changed their way of life forever.
— Mac Lacy, publisher
