Final Friday At The DAM

Yesterday was the last Friday in March, and so I drove down to the Denver Art Museum last night for their Final Friday event. The theme was Homeward Unbound and featured "deconstructed post-colonial narratives." In plain English, the evening had an Indian theme.  Since it was a cold and rainy night, I thought the crowd would be small, but it turned out that a lot of people had showed up, even if the free buffet table was no longer a part (a big part, for me) of these events.  There was a food truck from Little India out front, but you actually had to pay for that.  The nerve.

In any case, one of the first events was a dance from the Bollywood movie Devdas, performed by Sumitra Mattai, as seen in the photograph on the right. It was a fairly short dance, which was probably a good thing, since I was standing along the wall near the front and the crowd was so big I would not have been able to sneak out even if I wanted to.  The evening was hosted by Suchitra Mattai, and so I assume that the dancer was a relative, but that is only a guess.  In any case, Suchitra Mattai did not appear in the program as hosting a talk or a tour, and so I don't even know if she was there that evening.  Nobody tells me anything these days.  Is it because I'm retired, or what?

The next thing on the program was a "Decolonized Art Tour" of the museum's Berger Collection, which consists of British art from medieval times through the 19th century.  One of the two tour guides had a family emergency and could not attend, and so the other guide had to give the entire talk herself, mainly by reading off an i-pad. I had trouble hearing her, but since I arrived at 6:00 and had an hour to kill, I had looked at all the paintings already and knew what she was trying to say.  The portrait of the woman in the photograph on the left was part of a family that made it's money in the slave trade, and the painting was commissioned so it could be placed in the dining hall of their manor house just outside of Liverpool.  In other words, this work of art, and possibly many others in the room, were paid for by bringing slaves to the Americas.  Not a pretty picture, to say the least - figuratively speaking, of course.  After that, I decided to head home, bypassing the food truck parked outside.  Indian food is good, but pricey, and as everyone knows, I can't stomach pricey .