The National Gallery of Art

My family and I spent the week before July 4th in Washington, D.C. this summer. We spent two days visiting the National Gallery of Art, which is comprised of a West Building that hosts primarily paintings and sculptures of European artists and a few early American artists, and an East Building aimed at contemporary and modern art. While I enjoyed the East Building far more than I did the West Building, it was a sculpture featured in neither of the buildings that fascinated me the most. The moving walkway connecting the two buildings also happened to be a light sculpture created by Leo Villareal, Multiverse.

Multiverse is composed of over forty thousand LED lights that are programmed by Villareal to run through numerous different patterns in a random fashion. [source: http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/villarealinfo.shtm] Walking along, or better yet, just standing, on the conveyor belt transports one to an entirely different world where the continually blinking lights create a stark contrast to the otherwise dark stretch of two hundred feet.

When one thinks of gallery art, an image of a museum wall hung with paintings usually comes to mind, security guard optional. Villareal's elaborate high-tech sculpture of light is not just a visual experience, but a bodily one. Photos do not do it justice; the hypnotizing manner in which the lights move must be physically experienced.

Villareal's Multiverse demonstrates what it truly means to be art. The forty thousand LED lights that create the sculpture is not only marveled as a work of art in itself, but it serves the necessary purpose in transporting thousands of people daily between the East and West Buildings.