• Art Organization: Kimberly Singer, Kemper Art Museum @ Rachel Gagnon Craft, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

Epic Cross-Town Museum Bowling Championship

From the Kemper Art Museum:
June 17, 2009: Remember that date. It’s the day that the staff of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum beat-down their colleagues at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, in the first annual cross-town museum bowling championship. It was an epic experience for all involved.

This friendly cross-town rivalry was inspired by all of the Twitter trash talk about an early summer softball game between the Brooklyn Museum and the Met. Rachel, official Tweeter @thepulitzer, and I (@kemperartmuseum) thought this sounded like great fun, a good excuse to meet some of our arts colleagues in town and call each other names at the same time.

We did come to one early consensus: that softball maybe wasn’t the best fit for our outing. Believe it or not, art museum work doesn’t seem to attract hordes of über-athletes, and so we brainstormed about some alternative competitions. We tossed around the idea of a bake-off, LACMA-style - but that really seemed like a leap almost too far on the other end of the competition spectrum. We also considered kickball in Tower Grove park - inspired by this article from The Onion - but gosh it is awfully hot outside these days, and none of us had the apparently requisite stripey knee socks on hand. So eventually we landed on bowling: an appropriately Midwestern activity that can be played by all pretty much regardless of athletic ability. It even involves the big extra bonus of being bar-adjacent.

And, of course, the Kemper brought the heat and came away victorious. Complete and utter domination. Don’t believe the rumors, we trounced those Pulitzer folk on all counts-picture our Eliasson smashing right through Joe. It was like that. And we did not even have a certain Bowling Hall of Famer on our staff “show up late” and end up pinch-bowling for some of our strike-challenged players, unlike SOME museums I might be familiar with. (Cheaters never win, ya’ll!) No, we took home this title fair and square. Special kudos to Ron and Eileen, the Kemper staff members whose individual scores nearing 200 really made it happen for us. (And whatever the opposite of kudos is to me-last place among the Mildreds, as predicted… I believe my end result was in the neighborhood of a 72…)

Next year perhaps some of our friends at other Art Map locales would like to join us and make it a tourney- at the Kemper we’ll have to come up with some kind of catchy slogan (”Eat our Lanes” maybe? hmm, needs work). And maybe t-shirts. And a trophy!

From the Pulitzer:
Oh, June 17th was memorable alright. The aforementioned bowling showdown was a success - what we lacked in skill, we made up for in trash talking (Kimberly’s score is high compared to what mine was…). It all culminated in a friendly potluck at Francesca’s, our senior curator, home right around the corner from the bowling alley. It was at said potluck that the name of the showdown’s winner was heard: “The Pulitzer won, right?” was on everyone’s lips. I mean, who am I to argue with that? The adding up of the scores could’ve been wrong - we did ask someone from the Kemper to do it. And we did bring in QUITE the ringer, our security guard Silas who actually is in the Bowling Hall of Fame! I wish I had a video of him walking up for the first time, kissing the ball, and getting a strike. Amazing. Here he is, showing off his championship ring:

So he might’ve helped a few of our staff members out. I wouldn’t call that cheating! He got off work late, and really wanted to play. What were we supposed to do?

However next time, we’ll make sure he’s a full-time member of our team, we’ll be wearing t-shirts (or maybe blue shirts, black shorts?) and we’ll BRING IT. We’re working on some ideas for trophies too - what about a painting of a bowling ball?

Tags: bowling, epic
Author: Kimberly@Kemper Art Museum | Published: Jun 25th, 2009 | Category: Behind-the-Scenes | Comments: