Field trip? Yes! Field trip on a Saturday? I don’t know about that! We agreed as a class that we all wanted to visit the Baltimore Museum of Art and I was a huge fan of the idea but unfortunately, because of the museum’s hours and our class’s availability, we had to go on a Saturday. When we set the date, the trip was still three weeks away so I didn’t give it much thought and just figured it would be a few hours out of my day. As the day got closer, the list of other things that I needed and wanted to get done kept growing and I became more anxious about how much time this trip would take. I had projects due, tests to study for, friends that were having mental breakdowns and needed my help, but I had to leave all of it to go to a museum with my class. On a Saturday.
When I woke up on that Saturday morning, I opened my window to a dark, cloudy, overcast day. Good start. I had woken up especially early that morning so that I could get work done to compensate for the time spent at the field trip. We had agreed to meet at the museum at noon and it was about 35-40 minutes away from my apartment so I left at 11:00 A.M. I wanted to give myself sufficient time to compensate for traffic and parking. On my way out the door, it began to drizzle and eventually rain. Looking at my day ahead, I was not excited. I had grown up going to art museums pretty often, specifically in DC, as I was born and raised just outside the city. Having gone so often, the prospect of going to yet another museum was not thrilling. I wanted to pump myself up and change my attitude, so in the car I put my favorite playlist on and sang along to some of my favorite songs. Alright, I could feel it. Things were starting to get better.
As I drove closer to the museum, I could feel my heartrate start to rise as city drivers were cutting me off and weaving through lanes at high speeds. I finally made it onto Art Museum Dr. and turned into a little parking lot. Full. I saw one of my other classmates get lucky and find a spot but she took the last one and I had to make a three-point turn out of there. I left and pulled into the next parking lot. Full. Another three-point turn. I repeated this cycle of disappointment two more times until I finally came across a parking garage. Expensive parking, but parking nonetheless so I took it! I pulled right in, checked my phone and found seven new messages from one of my classmates saying that she was in the main entrance but that no one else was there. I told her I would be right there but on my way up I quickly realized that I had no idea where I was. It took ten minutes of wandering around, exploring the Johns Hopkins campus until I finally found a main entrance to the museum. My stress levels were through the roof.
The minute that I walked into the main entrance, everything changed. Seeing my professor’s familiar face in a foreign place was the first thing to help calm my heartrate. I was in the right place. The main entrance was the next as it displayed one of my favorite exhibits. The ceiling was filled with over one hundred chandeliers containing over four hundred lights. The chandeliers were individually hung at varying lengths and the installation as a whole was meant to represent moon dust. Throughout my life, there has always been something so calming to me about lights that puts me at ease. Not a bad start. My negative outlook on this trip was starting to turn around, but I still wasn’t convinced.
I walked around the museum with my classmate, Bianca. She had just visited the museum a few weeks before so she was somewhat familiar with the layout and exhibits but hadn’t seen everything. Time to explore. The first few rooms we walked through were filled with European artifacts and masterpieces, things that any history nut would find thrilling. I didn’t feel anything. Bianca and I strolled through a few more rooms, blankly looking around at our environment without truly taking it in. What was I supposed to be looking at? Nothing really caught my attention or made me say “wow”. I was trying my hardest to find something that I could relate to, something that spoke to me, something that inspired me or evoked any sort of emotion in me—anything! After scouring the entire first level of the museum, neither Bianca nor I had found anything that had made enough of an impression on either of us to want to write about it. We had spent the whole time commenting on a few pieces that we found strange but mostly made conversation about the fact that we weren’t connecting with anything.
The more we walked around, the more interesting my conversations with Bianca got. We had never really spent any one-on-one time together before so most of our walk through the top floor was spent on small talk about what we saw. Once we got down to the lower level, we got deeper—literally. As we walked around, looking at the artwork that surrounded us, we started to reveal more and more about our lives. In a way, we were able to relate to a lot of the pieces that we saw, even if we didn’t feel the connection. It happened countless times. We saw a piece, made a comment about it, and then shared something about ourselves. Most of our stories weren’t directly connected to the art that we saw, but our observations served as a starting point that branched off into deeper, more meaningful conversation. The art seemed to lead us and we were just along for the ride, enjoying each other’s company.
Walking around together, we realized that we had much more in common than we had originally thought. Even our “taste” in art was simpatico. When we walked into Mark Bradford’s exhibit, we both fell silent. The two adjacent rooms had 30-foot high ceilings and matte white walls that seemed to absorb every noise that was made, but it didn’t matter because neither one of us wanted to say anything. It was the first time that our conversation had come to a stop and we split up, going own ways without saying a word. For the entire ten minutes that we spent in that relatively small exhibit, Bianca and I were both touched by Mark Bradford’s art, so much so that we were both moved to write about it. Although we talked about different pieces and different aspects of his art, we had found one more, very specific thing that we had in common. We continued to walk and talk, finding more things that we had in common, and getting more and more comfortable with each other’s company.
At the beginning of the day I was expecting to have a mediocre time walking around an art museum for two hours with my class. By the end of those two hours, I left the museum feeling satisfied and content knowing that I had made a friend in a very unexpected place and in an unexpected way. I didn’t foresee this Saturday field trip to change me or my perspective on life, but it did. On my drive home I reflected on what had just happened and I realized that the best experiences happen when and where you least expect them to. I kept waiting for the art around me to relate to me, to speak to me, to inspire me, to evoke an emotion in me. It turns out what I was looking for was walking right next to me the whole time.
