September 22, 2016 - Today's adventure was in Long Beach to see the Long Beach Museum of Art. The Museum was founded in 1950 as a municipal art center for the city of Long Beach and its permanent collection is diverse with more than 3,200 works encompassing 300 years of American and European art in all media. However, we didn't see any of them today because all of its permanent collection has been put into storage for their latest "Vitality and Verve in the Third Dimension" exhibit. This exhibit fills the entire Museum with site specific works done by 31 local and international artists. It is very interesting.
That man in the center of the picture peering into the second story isn't a man at all, it's a sculpture.
And this is a real man stringing lights next to that sculpture.
There's a beautiful origami installation of cranes greeting the museum's visitors.
This work is called "Balconies."
This one is called "Jack in the Box."
This artist took photographs of people in his neighborhood and then created a painting of the same scene.
The Museum operates a restaurant called Claire's at the Museum in this 1912 building. The patio out back overlooking the Pacific is a wonderful setting.
Long Beach has a great assortment of restaurants, so today we tried a new one, Domenico's in the Belmont Shore neighborhood. We came here to try their pizza after hearing about it on television. We started out with the best tomato bisque that we've ever had and then we split an order of fried calamari. It was also first class. The entrée was their Domenico's Special pizza. It had a super thin crust covered by a tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. But the main topping is what makes them unique: ground sausage, ground pepperoni, ground salami with fresh mushrooms, olives, onions and green peppers. It wasn't like anything we had ever tasted before, not our favorite pizza, but certainly memorable. The lady in the picture was in a party of three. All three came here for their high school graduation dinner in 1954, and have been coming ever since (62 years)!
