The National Ornamental Metal Museum

The Jamie Bennett crates arrived today, enamels and metalwork for a show next month. Before coming to us the exhibition was at a little museum in Memphis, the National Ornamental Metal Museum. We went up this last summer to preview the show. The museum is housed in an old brick building on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi river.



It is a beautiful spot, but a little ghostly in just the sort of way that Memphis is inclined toward, living in the shadow of a former prosperity. The larger complex used to be a naval hospital. Now the main building is abandoned and the museum takes up a few adjacent buildings. The main building is impressive but crumbling, with windows out and the roof beginning to cave in places. Across the street are a couple of ancient Indian mounds (called the Desoto mounds for Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto), one of which was dug out and put to use as a munitions dump during the Civil War. By now the roof has collapsed on that too, creating a large bowl.





Leila the registrar pointed everything out and told me the names of birds and how the museum hopes not to lose the old trees. One bird had a name like the title of a poem, but I can't remember it now. I think I might email for an answer because I really would like to know but who wants to slog through a google search of Mississippi waterfowl? Not me. The bird whose name I can't remember reminds me of a poem by Jacques Prévert with a line that goes "the example of the feathers the wings the flight of birds" where a man marvels at birds that he has come late to love. I associate this line with the idea of continually coming upon fresh things to love, even into old age, although I am young. This is one of the nice things about being in the arts as well. There is the continual possibility of finding something new that you "appris très tard à aimer" (learned late to love) as the poem says. The Metal Museum might just be an example of this. I know little of metalwork, and forging interests me not at all, despite the lovely forge across the lawn, but ever since the summer visit I've been wanting to go back.