Almost everything in Riga is closed on the weekends while the pandemic continues. We were pleasantly surprised to see the art museums are one of the very few places allowed to open with masks and social distancing. The annual pass for the art museums is one of the many things we love about living in Riga.
We've been staying home a lot lately other than walks outside for fresh air. That's less appealing as it gets colder. I decided Sunday would be a good day to try a museum with the hope that it wouldn't be too crowded.
The basement exhibit hall has a limit of 16 people to spread everyone out. There was a short socially distanced waiting line to enter. The whole experience felt a little safer than visiting the grocery store, which is probably about as safe as it can get here with masks and social distancing.
The basement exhibit hall is after this awesome storage system. You can see how they keep some of their collection when it isn't on display so it ends up being another display to behold.
We visited the temporary Symbolism exhibit featuring artists from Latvia and this part of Europe. There's a few more temporary exhibits, but we'll save them for future weekends. There's only so much new stuff to explore with this part of the world on pause for the pandemic. It's important to savor what life has to offer, especially when our lives are more restricted.
A normal year would have me blogging about trips abroad with cool discoveries or new experiences around where we live instead of sharing this same museum again. We explored a lot more of Latvia this summer when the situation was good. I could share that, but so much is closed now. There won't be any Christmas markets, Staro Riga was online, and any of the other cool things about this time of year are canceled. This isn't a normal year even if some foolish people are trying to treat it as one.
Here's some interesting local art from the symbolism period. Symbolism is "seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through metaphorical images and language mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism." I don't know much about that, but I like the colors and style of this period.
Wild Souls - Symbolism in the Art of the Baltic States
The Baltic States – Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia – became independent republics shortly after the end of the First World War. Marking the centenary of these countries, the Wild Souls exhibition presents Symbolism in Baltic art, from the 1890s to the 1930s. The project aim and main idea is to demonstrate the high professional level of the art that emerged in the Baltic States and to discover its distinctive characteristics within the general European context of art. Symbolism, born in France in the second half of the 19th century, affected all of European culture, including the Baltic art scene.
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