Museum sculpture

The National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum both have a lot of sculptures in their collections. The Portrait Gallery's things tend to be much more traditional—bronze, marble, etc.—and classical in style, while the things in the American Art Museum tend to be strikingly contemporary and at times even shocking. Here are a few things we found interesting.

Some of the things are what you'd see in most any museum.


Then, when we get to the modern sculptures, things become more stylized and symbolic, rather than literal. Here's a sculpture depicting the arrest of civil rights figure Rosa Parks.



We also see a lot of traditional concepts being re-realized in the modern idiom.



And, of course, there is a lot of "modern" sculpture which is abstract and which can't really be identified or described other than just amorphous figures.



We also found some almost lifelife sculptures made of wax—after all, Madame Toussaud has been doing it for decades, why can't modern artists? Many people walk by this sculpture and think it's a real person.