“Excuse me,” demanded a tourist armed with an open Louvre map and a huge camera, “where is the art?” I had been standing with my nose in an intricately sculpted wooden frame that was, in fact, empty. Indeed, all the frames surrounding us in the gallery were missing their paintings, their raisons d’être. The resulting room was quite eerie at first [...]
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 MoreI recently had the pleasure of visiting the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts with its musical audioguide. The first stop on the audio tour was a French statue of the Virgin and Child from the 14th century. The cult of the Virgin Mary was very common in both the visual and musical cultures of that time. This [...]
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 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 part of Make a Mask, a series where I make copies of masks in Parisian museums. This Halloween, I made my first papier-mâché mask. It was such an enjoyable process; a mix of sculpture, paper work and painting. Since then, every time I visit a museum, I am drawn magnetically to any and all masks on display. Naturally, the next step was [ ... ]
Read MoreI am really excited about the Poussin et Dieu exhibition at the Musée du Louvre. It is a solid exhibition, with clean, simple scenography and accessible interpretation. But—oh my goodness—are the artworks exceptional. It was an absolute pleasure to get lost in the masterful paintings, and to finally get why Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) is [ ... ]
Read MoreI am in the midst of finishing a 150 page thesis (in French) about mobile apps in temporary exhibitions in Parisian museums. It is eating me alive. Needless to say, stress is a constant presence in my life right now. I've been fighting back with an arsenal of calming techniques, including candlelight, [ ... ]
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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.
