This week I took a vacation to the east coast (Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts mainly). Luckily–or unluckily–it was also the week when my increasingly-unreliable Macbook finally gave up the ghost. No writing got done, but I had a great time. Below are some of the stops I made along the way.

The Corning Museum of Glass has an exhibit going on right now featuring marine life done by the Blaschkas, a pair of German glass artists who produced replicas of biological specimens to fragile to be preserved in the mid-19th century. The specimens are utterly beautiful, and a little bit creepy in how accurate they are to the real thing.

(Images and more stops below the cut)

 

The museum also has a modern art wing. My favorite there was “Carroña (Carrion)” by Javier Pérez, a looping, enchanting sculpture with taxidermy crows in a sea of blood-red glass.

I also spent time in Salem, MA and Mystic, CT. Salem was a bit of a disappointment–I’m glad to say I went, but the stuff I ended up seeing was pretty hokey. The play “Cry Innocence” was booked that day, and I didn’t end up making it to the Peabody-Essex Museum. Those probably would have been better options than what I ended up seeing. I did pass by the outdoor sculpture “Stickwork” by Patrick Dougherty, which is a self-contained horror story:

 

Mystic, CT is a quaint seaside town with an extensive museum on maritime history (Mystic Seaport). I’m really not much of a ship person, but the exhibits on figureheads were fascinating. They had one exhibit of salvaged figureheads and one of miniature replicas.

Finally, we spent a couple of days in Providence, RI and New Haven, CT. The Yale Museum of Art and Museum of British Art were real highlights of the trip. The building housing the Museum of Art is a sight in of itself.

The last day it rained, so I would up at the little Museum of Natural History in Roger Williams Park. They had a replica of a Victorian naturalist’s office there, including this glass cabinet full of taxidermy birds (which is definitely going in a story someday):