Had a very artsy Saturday at the National Gallery to see a bunch of exhibitions and works that had recently piqued our interest:

Power and Pathos: a traveling collection of extremely rare Hellenistic bronzes from the 4th Century BC to the 1st Century AD.

The Serial Impulse at Gemini G.E.L.: collection of multi-part print series by 20th Century artists at the Los Angeles print studio Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited).

Louise Bourgeois: No Exit: the late Louise Bourgeois died in 2010 at the age of 99, leaving an amazing corpus of existentialist art. I also learned her marble sculpture Germinal was once redone in chocolate.

Celebrating Photography: recent acquisitions for the museum’s photography collection, including Richard Avedon’s The Family.

17th Century Dutch painter Jacob Ochtervelt’s A Nurse and a Child in the Foyer of an Elegant Townhouse. Yes, that’s a 5 year old boy in a dress, as was the style at the time.

Over in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum we checked out the Windland Smith Nature’s Best Photography exhibit. (I’d entered a few of my scuba photos into this juried show but ey obviously did not make the cut.)

On Sunday we also dropped by the National Geographic Explorers Hall to see Pristine Seas, photos from marine conservation expeditions led by NGS Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala around the world.