Day 61: Tacoma Museums

Cars, Art, and Car Art

Bob & Lisa at America's Car Museum (with a little help from a green screen)

Today was our first of two downtown Tacoma museum days.  Bob softened me up by starting the day with a visit to a Tacoma glass blowing studio where I bought a cute little pumpkin.  I'm not usually much on the glass pumpkins, but I particularly liked the curlicues on the stem of this one. (Sorry no picture, we didn't want to unwrap it right now.)

From the glass studio we headed to the LeMay America's Car Museum. The LeMay name was attached to it because the family donated 600 cars to the collection. (Remember the LeMays from yesterday post.)  However, there were other donors too-- which made this collection far more interesting because it included a bunch of foreign cars, and a bunch of really fast ones too. 

As you can see from the main photo, the museum has an interesting design. The main floor holds the current special exhibit, and is a long hall that ends with a viewing deck where you get fantastic views of Tacoma.

Main Floor of the LeMay America's Car Museum, in two different lights

Bob shot this panoramic off the deck, which is located where the window is in the picture above.






We just happened to visit while the featured exhibit was "Seductive Super Cars."  Here are a few from that collection.

Ferraris

Bob Standing Next To a 1992 Acura NSX
Note: He tried to test drive one of these when they first came out, but he couldn't fit in the car.
 (too tall, not too wide)

The "Seductive Supercars" were all good looking, but some were quite old.  It is nice to know that M does 0-60 far faster (around 4.4 seconds) than some of these vintage Ferraris! In fact, she is faster than most of the cars in the museum (though most of them range from the 1920s to 1960s-- so that is not saying too much).

The museum had three levels and a winding path so that you walked down one corridor and back up another, with a bit of overlap so that you could revisit sections where you might have missed something (or only look at one row of cars at a time--which we did not do).

Trying to put rhyme or reason to our favorites would be virtually impossible. So, here in no particular order are Bob's highlights from the museum:

1926 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, in Hokie Colors (Bob's Dream Car)

Lotus Indy Car, like the slot car Bob had as a kid

Mustang GT 500
(Like the one Scott Wilson Claimed to Have, but his college buddies never saw)

From a guest collection at the museum.
Bob Finds a Kindred Soul
(He dreams of owning both a Rolls and another Cadillac, but for Bob it is still a dream)

1967 Cadillac Eldorado
(Bob had a white 1967 Calais, but this one is nicer and apparently doesn't leak on the floor.)

1957 T-bird, like the one Uncle Denny had
(The piece in the back is the hardtop, not a piece of the trunk)

The following are Lisa's favorites, and I'm pretty sure M's favorites too-- as they are all BMWs.

BMW-507, about a $2M car

Red BMW Z1
(This one has pocket doors too, but retract down rather than to the side)

BMW M1 (great purple-blue paint, that doesn't quite come through in the picture)

Red 1958 BMW Isetta 300
(Slower than the one at the other museum, but it is red)

1975 BMW "Batmobile" art car
(Named for the bat-wing on the back)

BMW M1 Frank Stella Art Car (my favorite car in the museum)

There was a whole exhibit of art cars, as well as other car art at the museum. This is a picture of a flag created out of painted hot-wheels cars.

Flag of Toy Cars

Also in the at department, the Tacoma Glass Museum (which we will visit tomorrow) collaborated with the car museum to create these glass hood ornaments, which I thought were just fantastic.  They kind of represent our marriage-- when cars and glass meet, wonderful things happen.

Blown Glass Hood Ornaments

Blown Glass Abstract Hood Ornament (my favorite of the set)

The real hood ornaments were great examples of Deco art too.  This Pierce Arrow example was one of my favorites:

Pierce Arrow Hood Ornament

Mixed with rows and rows of cool cars were some social messages as well.  And, the museum played it fairly even handed, as you can see from the two examples below:

Maise & Blue Solar Car created by University of Michigan Students
(Bob almost didn't let me include this one.)

Bob's second favorite quote of the day

If you read the caption above, you are now probably wondering about Bob's favorite quote of the day. Here it is (it was part of a British Invasion car exhibit).

Bob Hoping It is Not Too Late

And here we both are in the children's section of the museum, proving that it is indeed not too late for us yet.

The challenge was to build a race car using weighted blocks.  You had three slots where you could stack blocks to create the perfectly balanced car.  It took ingenuity and engineering expertise to get it right.  For the record, the English Major beat the Engineer 2 out of 2-- even after he went back to the drawing board after the first race.


Putting on our adult hats again after the car museum, we headed over to the Tacoma Art Museum (TAM).  We were able to keep our car at LeMay and take a free light-rail over to the more central part of downtown that contains TAM.

Tacoma (and Seattle too) is a glass town, and particularly a Chihuly glass town. Part of the museum's permanent collection is devoted to Chihuly, including this installation of glass balls on a concrete mountain surrounded by mirrors.

Chihuly Mountain with Mirrors at TAM

That's the only picture from the museum--as we spent more time looking at the exhibits than taking pictures.  The collections were interesting for a smallish museum and included a still-life collection that spanned realism to cubism, a jewelry collection, a gallery devoted to western art (not my favorite), and a really impressive collection by Chinese artist Zhi LIN. It was called, "In Search of the Lost History of Chinese Migrants and the Transcontinental Railroads" and consisted of huge (full gallery wall length) depictions of Chinese railroad workers and the hardships they faced, a video installation, and small ink-on-paper sketches. 

All arted out, we headed back to the car and to our house in Gig Harbor. Tomorrow we'll take the same drive into downtown Tacoma and visit the glass museum and the natural history museum.

Stay tuned...

--Lisa