Hi everyone!
This is the recap of Tour de Museos Palermo Chico, a geo walk that consisted of visiting three museums.
A total of 5 people signed up, and 2 of us attended: @DanielEspinoza and me.
José Hernandez Museum of Popular Art
This museum showcases varying pieces of Argentine art. It’s free for students, teachers, and retirees, as both of us are students we got in for free.
It’s mostly accessible, there’s a chair lift elevator to go to upstairs, but not one to go to the floor underground. The entrances to the other rooms are accessible.
We started our tour with “The mate and the falcón” exposition.
Mate is a traditional Argentine drink a bit similar to tea, you can read more about it on my post Mate: all about it. The falcón is a kind of knife used by gauchos in something like fencing with knives. Both of this elements are very important for Argentine culture, and related to gauchos, that are something like Argentine cowboys.
We were able to see many very different mates and kind of knives used by gauchos, from many years ago and made with materials and shapes were not used to seeing these days.
Next, we visited Rodolfo Ramos’s exposition of his 50 years as a painter of Argentine gauchos culture.
We entered the room showered with great paintings of gauchos and their usual environment: fields, horses, and the wind. We also saw some horses figurines.
As we left the room, we came across a small collection of tea cups intervened by artists.
A number of artists were given the same kind of cups and they made them art by painting, breaking, and transforming them.
We loved this collection!
There were also some tea bags made of paper, and a signed that invited visitors to write the flavor of their own infusion choosing one of the options that were: to think, to rest, to feel, to remember, to enjoy,…
After that, we went to the museum’s courtyard, where many sculptures of animals and murals can be seen. There is also a giant mandala.
Finally, we visited the collection of traditional crafts of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. These objects were made by indigenous, mixed, and gauchos as well as immigrants from those centuries.
On the same room there are objects from last year’s Contest of Traditional and Contemporary Crafts.
I made sure to include the accessibility information and exceptions to the entrance fee on my review of the museum.
Victoria ordered the construction of this house in 1926, which was the first rationalist house of the country.
The plans for the house offended municipal authorities and neighbors, who thought it would make the neighborhood ugly when they compared it to the french architecture surrounding it. Many successful people visited Victoria’s house, including Argentine Jorge Luis Borges.
In 2005, the house became a small cultural center with an exposition room in the ground floor, and a meeting room upstairs. It’s free to visit and visit the artistic expositions and events.
Most of the house can be roamed, the original furniture is gone but you can find in photos every room of how they looked like when Victoria used the house.
We first visited Augusto Raúl Cortazar’s exposition in the ground floor, it was similar to what we had seen in the previous museum as it was also about argentine crafts, but still different. There were some interesting masks.
Then, we went upstairs and roamed the rest of the house.
You can click here to read my review of the house.
National Museum of Decorative Art
It’s in the Errázuriz Alvear Palace, designed in 1911, and used to be the residence of a family that had bought a valuable collection of European and Oriental art when they lived in Europe for 10 years. More than 6000 objects are now showcased in this free-of-charge museum, as well as some temporary exhibitions.
We first visited an exhibition of Chinese snuff bottles, these are very small bottles used to carry powdered tobacco. They are pieces of collection as well as objects of everyday use and they can be made out of porcelain, stone, glass or metal and have many different shapes. They were usually custom made for each person and decorated with symbolisms that were hidden meanings of things the person cared about.
People would carry their snuffs everywhere with them.
I found all of them beautiful, and I kind of left wanting to have my own custom made snuff bottle, only to collect of course 
And don’t worry, there were warning signs in the exhibition about the many dangers tobacco does to a person’s health.
Then we roamed the many rooms of the museum, there were a lot and all full of luxurious items. There was even a room filled with very well done paintings of the family members. It’s easy to tell how rich the family was.
The palace also has a beautiful garden, that we sadly weren’t able to go as we went to it after seeing the rest of the museum, and it had already closed. I’d have no problem in going again just for the garden, it looks that nice. You can see it on the many photos in Maps.
I made sure to let people know that it closes before the rest of the museum on my review.
There’s much more to see. If you are interested, you can see more photos in our shared album clicking here.
Thank you for reading! I hope you liked the museums.
I invite you to write the flavor of their own infusion choosing one of the options (to think, to rest, to feel, to remember, to enjoy, or something similar to them) It can be made with real or fake ingredients.
An infusion to remember: a mix of a cake my grandma used to make, with the smell of my elementary school.
I’m glad you liked the recap