🔥FIRE SALE🔥 No. 23
🚨 A FIRE SALE love letter to museum tees! 🖼️
I spent a particularly weird time in my early 20s in Washington, D.C., working for a [redacted] television network. It was partisan, to say the least—and not in my preferred direction. Those were pretty soul-draining times. I’d be in the office reading the network anchors’ “fan mail,” which were the ramblings of the insane, answering viewer phone calls—also the ramblings of the insane—or helping an editor cut video that would serve as cues for the ramblings of the insane on their news programs.
D.C. is a city—no denying that—but it doesn’t really have pockets or havens where artistic expression is fostered and grown. What it has in spades, and what was my solace during that time, are world-class museums. Not just the ones you visit on your eighth-grade trip, like the Air and Space Museum or the Smithsonian (although they are bomb), but true gems of our country like the Hirshhorn and the National Gallery of Art. Its modern wing, designed by I.M. Pei, features the most sublime display of Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross—spiritually nurturing during a spiritless time.
I don’t have many mementos from my time in Washington, but I do have a T-shirt from the National Gallery. It’s a minimalist design of Calder hanging mobiles, and I cherish it mainly because it reminds me of those lonely walks through the permanent collection, where I found out how nourishing a genuinely great museum can be.
Lately, my menu for that kind of nourishment has been my friend Lisa’s Art Pulse newsletter, which publishes highlights from galleries across the city and, most importantly, alerts me to last-chance weekends to see exhibitions. I would’ve missed Tyler Mitchell’s Ghost Images if not for Art Pulse.
With all this in mind, here are some great museum tees I’ve found recently that flash intelligence—which is cool.
From left to right:
The Tennessee State Museum hosted a “Masterworks” exhibition in 1990 with 60 Impressionist paintings on loan from the Bridgestone Museum of Art in Tokyo. I can only hope that country music memorabilia was part of the exchange. This tee commemorates the exhibition, and I found it strikingly modern—like an Off-White design or a Boot Boyz Biz tee.
I love this tee from the Picasso Museum. Red period? Blue period? I like the “phoning-it-in simply drawing period,” and this shirt is perfect for a fan like me.
Van Gogh’s correspondence—especially with his brother—is so important to his biography that I think this shirt, which pays homage to Van Gogh’s writing, is way more personal than slapping Starry Night on a shirt and calling it a day.
From left to right:
This piece from the Smithsonian reminds me of the Eyewitness educational VHS intros from when you had a substitute teacher. That African flute still gets me amped.
I don’t play Animal Crossing (more of a Stardew Valley guy myself), but my understanding is that there’s a museum in the game. Even the Met collaborated with it to make over 5,000 works of art downloadable in-game. This tee displays a collage of virtual insects from the game in a way that nods to the Smithsonian shirt above.
Columbia, Missouri, has a world-class collection of art and artifacts at Mizzou. You don’t have to be in New York or Rome to get a sense of the world of the caseras. I love the contrast of the maroon and baby blue on this vintage tee, featuring a very simple mythological figure.
From left to right:
One of the main perks of growing up in Indianapolis is access to the best children’s museum in the country—if not the world. The shirt on the left is from an exhibition celebrating the Indianapolis 500 and the city’s illustrious car history. Perfect for Hot Wheels kids who turned into Top Gear teens, and then BMW-owning adults.
Upon entering the Children’s Museum, you’re awed by the water clock designed by French physicist and artist Bernard Gitton. It stands 30 feet tall and is the largest of its kind in North America. As a child standing just under four feet, watching the water move across the oscillator, minute counter, and hour balls—which fill at the top of the hour—was positively psychedelic and sparked curiosity in any child or adult. This faded tee featuring a fisheye photo of the ticking, swishing clock is equally trippy.