New England Wax at the DeCordova Museum

Unfortunately, no, this heading does not mean that NEW is showing at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. We had one of our meetings there last Saturday for a change of scene and so that we could take a look at their Biennial Exhibition*. We had a lovely catered lunch, a tiny bit of group business and then a wonderful time playing a getting-to-know-you game devised by our Chair, Kim Bernard.

Happy diners at the DeCordova lunch - Table 1

More happy diners - Table 2

Another happy group - Table 3

And still more - Table 4

A view of the whole room. You can see that we were actually seated in a gallery (the Dewey Family Gallery) and were surrounded with art.


After lunch and the brief business session, we moved our chairs to the back of the room and arranged them in a circle. We were about to play a game based on the concept of speed dating.

In this version of speed dating, we paired off in sets of two within the big circle of chairs. 

Kim explaining the game to us.

Each pair had three minutes to discuss a question that Kim asked the entire group. Some of the questions were (to the best of my recollection):

What is something you do or are that can't be seen from looking at you?
What is your greatest strength?
What is your greatest weakness?
What is the one thing you hope to accomplish in life?
What do you do for fun?
Where is the one place you would like to travel to?
If you could come back in another life, what would you be?

(If you were at the meeting and can remember any more of the questions, I wish you would post them in a comment because there were some really great ones.)

We weren't supposed to talk between partners. We abided by the rules initially, but as we grew more comfortable we kept chatting. Eventually, Kim had to resort to saying, "if you can hear me, clap once," in between sessions to get our attention. Hey, if it works for first graders...

You could either move around the room to find a partner or just stay seated and let a partner find you. Most of us did a combination. The goal was to meet and talk to everyone in the room. There were 34 of us there, I think, and we nearly succeeded in completing the whole mission before the meeting's end.

What a great time we had talking with each other and getting to break the ice with new people a little bit without the pressure of having to invent something to talk about. Even with people we thought we knew fairly well, we learned new information. Some of the questions resulted in surprisingly self-revelatory answers that were fuel for future contemplation.

I really enjoyed this meeting and didn't come away from it feeling like I had suffered through a grueling session  of minutia and group business. This really allowed us to focus on each other without stress and complications. Well done, Kim!


Coming up in my next post: sculpture from the DeCordova sculpture park.


*I was disappointed in the work included in the Biennial which I found too trendy, scattered and working very hard to seem like it had something to say without making art that looked like art. (Can I just say that nothing in art is unintentional no matter how hard you try to make it look that way.) I gave it a thumbs down - for what my opinion's worth.