It was turning into a rainy evening in Rome. The downpour was steady: persistent enough to slowly seep through my raincoat, but not aggressive enough to convince me to stop meandering through the drizzly streets, past intriguing old churches and lazily flowing fountains. Eventually, I made my way to […]
Read MoreOne of my favorite museums in the world is the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). Founded in 1852, it is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design. My last visit was in September 2012, when I was in London for a friend's birthday weekend. I may only have been in town for two days, but I [...]
Read MoreI visited the British Museum on an autumn afternoon a few years ago. The state of the ancient statuary struck me: most of these objects were scarred from their journeys through time. From small pockmarks to missing limbs, these statues had not escaped the passage of time unscathed. I reflected [...]
Read MoreI went to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition looking for calm. It’s been an intense week; the semester is halfway over, which means the projects for my seminars need to be at a certain point of completion. When I saw that I had an hour-long pocket in my schedule on Tuesday, I decided to fill it with some Toulouse-Lautrec [...]
Read MoreA year ago, I was preparing to move from Paris to Montreal. A major strategy in emotionally processing this big change was to visit as many Parisian museums as possible. One of the museums I visited was the Musée Picasso, recently reopened after being closed for a five-year renovation project. After following the dramatic saga of the delays for the opening, there was no way I could leave town before [...]
Read MoreElisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was a celebrated 18th century French portraitist and one of the most important women artists of all time. I had the pleasure of seeing the exhibition dedicated to her life and work at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (the exhibition also took place at the Grand Palais and the Met). This is the first retrospective and only the second exhibition devoted to Vigée Le Brun in [...]
Read MoreMontreal’s Château Ramezay has a fuzzy past. The grand house was originally built for Claude de Ramezay, the governor of Montreal from 1703 to 1724. But Ramezay went a little overboard, spending way too much of his own money on the building project. After his widow’s death in 1745, the heirs sold the property to the West Indies Company, which had a monopoly on the export of beaver [...]
Read MoreAlexander Hamilton played a major role in my three-day retreat in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As I wrote about here, I was nervous as I approached the Met on the morning of the retreat's first day. I literally started getting panicky as I crossed Central Park, feeling overwhelmed by the vast collection of the Met and worrying that I wouldn’t be able to structure my time well. That’s when [...]
Read MoreDo you ever find yourself in a museum, looking but not seeing? This happened to me recently on my three-day retreat in the Metropolitan Museum. On my second morning, I was wandering from gallery to gallery, and I couldn’t quite register what I was seeing. I was so inundated with beauty that it was all blurring together. That’s when I decided to go on a photo safari, a trick in my museum toolbox that [...]
Read MoreValentine's Day is upon us again. Commercial though it may be, I have always liked this holiday. I'll take any excuse to celebrate love! This year, I am organizing a Valentine's Day get together at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. I've crafted some love-themed activities and mapped out the paintings that depict love in various forms [...]
Read MoreMerry Christmas! One December, when I was living in Paris, I got the idea into my head to make a Christmas-themed audio tour of the Louvre. I recorded commentaries on artworks in the Richelieu wing that featured scenes of the Nativity, the Visitation of the Magi, etc. While the final product was less than [...]
Read MoreI assumed that my first winter in Montreal would be covered in snow. Prior to my move here this October, I obsessed with preparations for winter: I stocked up on puffy coats, heavy-duty boots, strap-on cleats for icy days... Friends, it is now December and this is the weather. Rain?! Perhaps this explains [...]
Read MoreThis month's creativity theme is CELEBRATION. For my first December museum visit, I went to the Redpath Museum, McGill University's natural history museum. The museum feels very old school: temple-like stone façade, lots of carved wood, the occasional hand-written label... The museum also [...]
Read MoreI was really excited about the butt tour. Let me explain. The Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) website promoted a guided tour called "Delightful Derrières", all about the nudes in the collection. It sounded wonderfully ridiculous; I mean, come on, this was the promotional image [...]
Read More"Niobides suppliantes". "Niobides en fuite". As I made my way through the Louvre one evening, it felt like every artwork that intrigued me was some version of a Niobid. I would be pulled to one Ancient Greek statuette, and then another, and each time the label would say “Niobid”. But what [...]
Read MoreThere is a fresh coat of paint this month at the Musée du Louvre! The Musée du Louvre recently renovated its galleries dedicated to 19th century French painting, complete with new colors on the walls and a reshuffling of the artworks. The paintings underwent acts of preventative [...]
Read MoreThis is an installment of Creative July on the theme of Love (f you missed it, check out a description of the project here!) One of the most beautiful expressions of love is touch. So, I went on a photo safari in the Louvre's Ancient Egypt galleries, on the hunt for touch. A photo safari is a visit to a museum focusing on details found [...]
Read MoreThis is the first installment of Creative June on the theme of the Outdoors. (If you missed it, check out a description of the project here!) When thinking about the outdoors, the first image that came to mind was the color green. And what better museum to scour for instances of green than the Musée d’Orsay? I first thought of the [...]
Read MoreThis is part of Photo Safaris, a series that focuses on details found in artworks around various themes, with the aim of looking at everything differently. In honor of Mother's Day, I spent an afternoon in the Orsay on the hunt for representations of mothers. I did not have to look far. Moms surrounded me: from symbolic figures of maternity to [ ... ]
Read MoreThis is part of Louvre Photo Safaris, a series that focuses on details found in Louvre artworks around various themes, with the aim of looking at everything differently. I know very little about Ancient Egyptian art. So during a recent stroll through the Louvre's Egyptian Antiquities galleries, I needed help looking at the objects. One of the first artifacts [ ... ]
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This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.
IMAGINIBUS is a blog about playing in museums, with a focus on imagination and creativity.
This blog is a place to be inspired to use your imagination around artworks—and to see the art of your daily life.
When we engage creatively with art, museums can become playgrounds and laboratories to experiment with attention, mindfulness, and imagination. Interesting things happen when we use that museum gaze to look at our daily lives like a work of art.
Find more inspiration for playing with new ways of paying attention to your daily life here.
Hello! I'm Marina Gross-Hoy, a writer, Museum Studies PhD candidate, and mother currently living in Quebec. I take playing in museums very seriously.
Read more about the blog here.
Check out my newsletter on Substack to be inspired to see the art in your daily life.
