tutified

does anyone else remember this t-shirt from the 70s? i remember going over to see my aunt stella, omnipresent cigarette dangling from hand, mouth, wherever, wearing this shirt and telling me her tuts were getting too hard to find. she fixed that soon thereafter.

king tut, tutankhamun, was so all over dallas. it rocked. the exhibition kicked so much ass it was unreal. i should probably be putting my doctorate in art history to better use in this description...but seriously it was an exhibition of a lifetime. i highly recommend it. i also have some extra tickets if anyone is genuinely motivated to go see it before may 17 in dallas. i actually started a blog post about this in october 2007 when i realized tut would be so close by:

tutankhamun's treasures are on the move again (click here for info). i am so excited about this exhibition--about 30 years ago my grandmother took me to see an egyptian art exhibition at the museum of fine arts, houston, and that (along with a cezanne exhibit) was what made me want to become a curator. and now king tut's stuff (not king tut himself--he is at rest, sort of, in luxor) is coming to texas in october 2008. gus and i will definitely be there!

and so we were! my friend, julia, and her son, max, went with us and got tutified, too. we flew into dallas on friday, rented a ginormous chrysler aspen, had a fabulous feast of fish tacos at chuy's (and a few margarita/sangria swirls), then hit the dallas museum of art on saturday. i think we spent four hours there in all--it still wasn't enough for me. as ridiculously cliché as it sounds, i felt like i was going home to see old friends at the DMA (i worked there from 1992-93); i knew those artworks very, very well. it was bittersweet. anyway, the boys had their own hotel room, meaning that julia and i were thrilled to be boy-free, and we spent much time all weekend watching them swim on the rooftop pool (30 stories up--that was a huge deal for a born and bred albuquerqueño like max, as albuquerque has no buildings taller than maybe 20 stories at best). we flew home on sunday and got back to reality. we bought all kinds of tut-related memoribilia; alas, no "hands off my tuts" shirt to be found at the DMA.

this is actually the face of tutankhamun, newly-unwrapped a little over a year ago (click here for info).

this was one of my favorite objects in the exhibition--it is a canopic coffinette for king tut that held his liver. the really cool thing about this, aside from the obvious (that it IS cool), is that the way it was displayed you could see the inside of the coffinette and the back--it was visible like a proper piece of sculpture, 360 degrees around. i had no idea what the back of tut's head was supposed to look like, and i was so pissed that i couldn't take a picture of it (no photos allowed in the exhibition). you can kind of see the back of his head in the really bad photo below, but hey beggars can't be choosers and it was the best i could find. imagine the inside of the coffinette as beige slip with two tons of hieroglyphics all over it, spelling out specific spells from the egyptian book of the dead. tremendous little object--it is about 18 inches tall.



***timely update from yahoo news: new mummies found intact in saqqara***