49) American Visionary Art Museum

This morning we took a field trip to one of my favorite places for good art inspiration. The American Visionary Art Museum is located on Key Highway at the foot of Federal Hill. The museum houses over 4000 pieces of visionary art, a kind of art made by someone who is not necesarrily an artist with art training and often uses unconventional materials. To give you an idea, one of the pieces the girls were most fascinated by today was the Lusitania by Wayne Kusy a 16 foot boat made  from 194,000 toothpicks. Some of our other favorite pieces have been a bench made of whoppee cushions, the large collection of mechanical toys and the junk robot family. I have taken the girls several times to visit  and every time they love it. There is so much to look at, the art is very colorful and often very childlike. I also love that so much of the artwork is made from every day materials. The Bee was so inspired by these sculptures by an artist named John Landry made from wire and beads she made her own sculptures when she got back home.