Butler Institute of American Art Today I visited only one site, but it is an important one: The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. This museum is the premier institutional collector of new media artwork in the country. In addition to the new media work, the museum also has a through collection of American Art from 1900 and later. This museum is what I like small art museums to be, deep and specialized. The traditional painting is organized by theme. Many of them rotate. When I was there, they had a show on marine painting over time. It starts with traditional seascapes, ending up with work so abstract it’s hard to recognize as a picture of waves. Another show was on geometric abstraction. It combined color field painting from the ea... read more

Cedar Point Today I begin my exploration of Ohio in earnest. For many travelers, the state is dominated by the three Cs: Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. Today, I added a fourth: Cedar Point. For fans of thrill rides, this amusement park is holy ground. It competes with Magic Mountain near Los Angeles for the largest number of roller coasters, and both parks constantly add ever more intense rides. Cedar Point has the distinction of having four separate rides that were ranked number one in the roller coaster fan poll at the time they were built. It is also the only park with more than one roller coaster in the t... read more

Today, I woke up in pain. My lower back was twisted in severe knots. I finally figured out what had happened. Remember that Hart Plaza is mostly concrete (see ). Dancing on concrete is different to dancing on most floors because the hard surface sends shocks straight up the legs. Those shocks had ultimately injured my lower back. I wasn’t going anywhere for a while. The one nice thing is that it gave me time to catch up on paper work, between back soaks. By evening, I was finally feeling better. I had time to catch the last few festival acts. It was not a lot, but it was something. It turned out they included two of the better acts of the weekend. The first of the acts was Green Velvet. They play a variant of ... read more

Today is the first official day of Movement. The sky is threatening rain, which has me worried. According to the website, the festival goes in any weather short of a major thunderstorm. Detroit Institute of the Arts Before heading downtown, I squeezed in one of Detroit’s most important cultural institutions. As noted yesterday, Detroit used to be one of the most important industrial cities in the US. Like the bankers of Charlotte, (see ) Detroit’s industrial tycoons wanted cultural cache to go with their financial success. One of the biggest beneficiaries of their largess was the Detroit Institute of the Arts, which is now one of the ten largest art museums in the country. They are one of the few big museums that allow patrons to post pictures of the collection online, hence their appearance in ... read more

I woke up today in Dayton, Ohio. Dayton is famous for one thing, aviation. The Wright brothers were based here when they created the first airplane. They flew it at Kitty Hawk (see April 8th) but they designed and built it here. Their house and workshop no longer exist in town (more on that later) but several remaining sites have been turned into a National Park. Since I saw their history earlier at Kitty Hawk, I decided to focus on other things. The military really didn’t believe in airplanes until the Wright brothers did a demonstration for a group of army generals in 1910. Soon after, the army started buying airplanes and testing them for combat. An Army lieutenant, url=http://www.fir... read more