I mentioned before that I visited the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento this Christmas holiday. I was very intrigued by it: it was huge, and I only got to see the contemporary wing, but that's what I'm usually most interested in anyway. They also had a Native American section which I walked through, and there were some beautiful artworks there as well.

What I noticed with a lot of the art here-- I think most or maybe all of it was by American artists-- is that it was a little dystopian and almost negative about society, but it was all depicted in a creative and often strange way. I liked paintings like Eduardo Carrillo's Las Tropicanas, which looks like a spooky but good party; Julie Heffernan's Moving Out, showing people fleeing a place with the world's contents dragged along with them; and Irving Norman's My World and Yours which is very disturbing but captivating at the same time. For the rest there were a lot of surrealist pieces (I loved Dorr Bothwell's Mental Terrain, also because of the title) and some modern paintings that looked almost like photos (for instance, Jack Mendenhall's R/B Furniture). And there was some very fun art, like Maija Peeples-Bright's painting filled with walruses. 

The Crocker is a very large museum: I spent two hours there and only worked through half of the third floor. So if you want to go, you might like to open up a day for it! There's something for everyone there-- contemporary art, Asian and African art, European art and some temporary exhibitions. It's also one of only three big museums in Sacramento I believe, so if you're close, you have almost no excuse ;)

1. Julie Heffernan: Moving Out

2. Michael Stevens: Spike

3. Dorr Hodgson Bothwell: Mental Terrain

4. Maija Peeples-Bright: Walrus Willamette with Whale Walkers

5. David Klamen: Parenthesis #4