We’ve all heard the fable, but who actually remembers “The Ant and the Grasshopper”? The story goes something like this: winter’s coming, and the ants are ready. They’ve stockpiled their food, and now their pantry overflows. While they were out collecting food and putting it in storage like the dreadful bores that they are, the grasshopper was out making sweet music.
In case you haven’t noticed, CL loves music. We’re the type of people that put money in the tip jar when we hear a band we like. Because that’s what you do when you value music and you’re not a douche.
IF YOU GO
‘The Grasshoper and the Ant’ and Other Stories
Open now through January 5, 2020.
Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Dr. NE., St. Petersburg.
mfastpete.org.
You know who didn’t value music? The ants. When their town musician — the grasshopper — begged for a little food, they shut him down. “What did you do all summer?” they asked our starving artist. “I was so busy making music that before I knew it, the summer was gone,” said the grasshopper.
Did the ants help him out? No, of course not. Instead, the ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust and told him to dance. Dance fucker dance. At the bottom of the fable, there’s a message: “There’s a time for work and a time for play.”
OK that’s true, but did the ants have to be so judgmental and unkind? Did they really not have any food to lend their town troubadour? This is one of the questions Canadian artist Jennifer Angus poses in her latest exhibition, “‘The Grasshopper and the Ant’ and Other Stories,” at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.
Angus is one of the most prominent installation artists working in the U.S. according to MFA Director Kristen A. Shepherd. Angus now creates unique patterns and arrangements of insects on museum walls, but this wasn’t always the case.
Angus was originally a textile artist with a passion for patterns. While visiting Thailand’s Golden Triangle region, she noticed green metallic beetle wings on the fringe of a woman’s dress.
“I had that ‘aha moment’ that I think every artist hopes to have,” said Angus, who gave CL a guided tour of the show. “I’m going to take insects and place them in patterns.”
No two Jennifer Angus installations are alike — she draws inspiration from the host museum and items in its collection. Angus found an illustration of Aesop’s “The Ant and the Grasshopper” in the MFA’s collection, inspiring her to create a story-based installation here.
Upon revisiting the classic fable, Angus told us she questioned the ants’ harsh treatment of the grasshopper.
As we enter the gallery space through “the ant’s pantry,” Angus asks us to reconsider the value of creative pursuits like music. A Victorian receiving card in the gallery reads, “I was not idle: I sung out the whole season. I did my best to amuse you and your fellow brethren while you were getting in your harvest.”
An overabundance of glass jars sit on shelves representing the ants’ harvest. The amber-colored jars of preserves — made with pectin and sugar and containing insects — are reminiscent of the way children collect live bugs and place them in jars.
In the next gallery, flowers made of insects tower over everyone in the room; doll houses covered in beeswax stand above us on stilts. Through her art, Angus did everything she could to make the viewer feel small and insignificant, much like an insect. Here the card reads, “No one is too weak to do good.” The message is in reference to Aesop’s “The Lion and the Mouse,” where a mouse frees a lion from its trap.
A deer eats dinner with a raccoon, a squirrel, and other native Florida species in the adjacent gallery. They’ve set the table with honey, bread, fruit and a plate of flies. Angus tells us that the old nursery rhyme I know an old lady who swallowed a fly inspired this setup.
Finally, the artist led us into a gallery filled with Victorian style cabinets of curiosities. During the Victorian era, people used these cabinets to store and display notable collections of objects like scientific specimens, religious relics or works of art. Inspired by this Victorian era fad, Angus filled over a hundred cabinet drawers, bell jars, and museum display cases with insects. There are insects looking at Victorian-era microscope slides, insects reading books and insects doing God only knows what.
In one drawer, an insect holds a silver spoon next to a half dozen tiny clay pots full of pebbles. Is it cooking?
In another drawer, a black stag beetle stands before an insect dressed in white holding a bouquet of flowers. Are these two getting married?
While the other galleries tell one story, this gallery tells many. There are almost as many stories as there are drawers. And there are so many drawers you can’t even see them all in one visit. The largest of the cabinets has 170 drawers; Angus filled 130 of them. Museum staff tells us they’re scheduling hours when a curator will be available to open drawers for museum visitors.
This is just one of many interesting things the MFA is doing for Angus’ exhibition. The museum scheduled about a dozen insect-inspired events between October 27-December 31, including author talks, a lecture with the artist, an insect-themed family day and an insect-inclusive dining event in November called Bugsgiving.
This fall, don’t be like the ants, spending all your time and money grocery shopping (the modern human equivalent of harvesting food like an ant). See some art, make some art, eat some bugs. Wait, what? OK you don’t have to eat any insects if you don’t want to, but you should definitely go see these insects at the MFA.
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This article appears in Oct 24-31, 2019.