Speed Art Museum

It's funny how a handful of extra degrees can improve your mood. It warmed me up to the Speed Art Museum, this local place that I've read about, and that we've even walked and driven by a few times and still managed to ignore.

It's Louisville's biggest and oldest art museum, nestled in the heart of the University of Louisville campus. Unlike its name and my false impression, the Speed Art Museum has nothing to do with quickness, it's just the last name of the founding couple. Its 60 million dollar renovation and expansion in recent years has made it into an impressive and impeccable palette to showcase and share art.

A local wine and spirits company called Brown-Forman made a huge donation (in honor of its former CEO and art-lover Owsley Brown II) which allows anyone to visit the museum for free every Sunday for the next five years. And so, on a cool but sunny Sunday, we finally checked it out.

Its variety, its size, its style - we were thoroughly impressed.

Their collection is like a painter's palette with tasty samples spanning the ages and world - memorial artifacts from ancient cultures of Egypt, China and Rome tucked just around the corner from European art made in the last few centuries. Tribal creations and modern mixed media and folk art. Improv musicians and interactive art for kids and a theater. Private trinkets of the museum's founders and a floor dedicated to bluegrass grown pieces. Can I stop rambling and get on with the highlights? Gosh, I'll try. There were a bunch. I'll mention them as we saw on our meandering walk through the floors.

The eye-catching color combo in this Picasso above and this remarkably detailed unfinished work below. Can you see her tear? It seemed to be glistening and hanging off the canvas.

This room filled with giant King Louis tapestries and other stuff of Francophilic dreams. I gave up trying to take a picture of the stained glass windows that did them justice.

This elaborately carved wooden room from a house in England that was disassembled, moved and reassembled a handful of times before ending up here.

This impractical but oddly satisfying dresser.

The many tributes to Kentucky's favorite son, Abraham Lincoln.

A tiny handcut silhouette.

An incredibly patient and cute husband hanging in after 120 minutes of museum wandering.

Lovely, calm strokes and colors.

Adam naming the animals in this huge piece that took up a large wall, letting you lean in and see the hare stretched out next to the fox, and the dogs already at man's side.

It is a wonderful place, and we both reached our art appreciation limit before we reached the museum's end. Lucky for us, there are plenty more Sundays open for us to take our time exploring the Speed Art Museum.