Since its April opening, Washington’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been drawing visitors in excess of expectations. And, according to a recently released museum report, the majority of the visitors have not been Jewish.
“We knew that this museum had a very solemn, and very special, message for all Americans,” said the museum chairman, Miles Lerman. “The fact that the majority of our first visitors are not Jewish, and frequently come from far away to visit us, indicates that we are fulfilling the educational mandate with which we have been charged by Congress.”
Containing more than 5,000 artifacts documenting and illustrating Nazi Germany’s systematic persecution and extermination of the Jews and other minorities, the museum is a grim, solemn, disturbing place where visits by children 11 or younger are discouraged.
Initial estimates of the number of visitors expected in the museum’s first year ran to 750,000. According to the report, attendance already has reached 523,000 in just five months.
A survey of 3,200 summer visitors to the museum, conducted by the Peter Hart research firm, found that 38 percent were Jewish, 26 percent were Protestant and 22 percent were Catholic.
Half the visitors lived outside the Washington-Mid-Atlantic region, and 26 percent said they came to the capital specifically to see the Holocaust Museum.
Fully 74 percent of museum visitors are college graduates, compared with 64 percent of all Washington visitors, and 55 percent come from executive or professional ranks. About half have family incomes exceeding $50,000. Eight percent have been African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian or other minorities.
The museum expects continued high attendance through the fall and winter as it begins various educational programs for students, Lerman said.
Because of the high attendance, those who wish to tour the museum’s permanent exhibition must obtain free, first-come-first-serve, same-day tickets at the museum, which during the week are available until about noon every day. They also can be obtained (for a charge) through Ticketmaster.
For more information, write: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, Washington, D.C. 20024.
– The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s unique and solemn Medieval Galleries will reopen in special ceremonies Oct. 16 and 17, as part of a $60 million renovation and reinstallation project embracing the museum’s entire collection of European art.
The medieval section, comprising 25 galleries and covering A.D. 1100 to 1530, is the first phase of the project to be completed. Among the architectural artifacts to be restored to public view are the museum’s medieval cloister from Saint-Genis and its famous portal from Saint-Laurent.
More than 400 works of art from the period, including other architectural pieces and tapestries as well as paintings and sculpture, will be on display-in Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance styles. Among them are noted masterpieces by Pietro Lorenzetti, Fra Angelico and Jan van Eyck.
The next two phases of the project, involving 58 exhibit galleries and art dated to the year 1900, are to be completed by 1995.
From Oct. 9 through Jan. 2, the Philadelphia Museum also will be exhibiting 200 drawings by the contemporary German artist Joseph Beuys, considered one of the most important figures in German art since World War II.
– Washington’s Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA Gallery was founded late last year as a museum for the exhibition of modern art-by Japanese and non-Japanese artists-that is inspired or influenced by traditional Japanese culture.
Through Nov. 16, the gallery is showing lacquer sculpture by Natsuki Kurimoto that epitomizes the perfect union of these two seemingly inimical concepts-contemporary art and traditional Japanese culture. His 1991 “Dance of the Flame,” for example, is a grooved, self-standing, highly polished form that in some ways seems part of 17th Century samuri equippage, yet asserts itself in bold red as a pure, modernist expression of the essence and nature of flame-especially flame as something elemental and permanent.
Kurimoto’s 1991 lipstick pink “Clown” could be part of the headpiece of a kabuki costume, yet suggests the broad lips and downturned expression of the modern-day circus clown.
The gallery is a rare find among capital attractions, and not that far off the tourist track, located just a few blocks from the White House at 1819 L St. NW.
