The first exhibit we saw was some show of athletic footwear — brightly colored, variously nubbled and ornamented tennis shoes lined up on shelves or dangling in mobiles from the ceiling. Another was strange furniture, carefully arranged behind exhibit ropes. “How can we experience the chair unless we sit on it?” Dad asked, his eyes on some lozenge shaped velvet saddle.

I suppose the Magritte show was still there but we never got to it, instead going to the Walker Evans exhibit. The spare, seemingly banal photographs fascinated me. An Appalachian sharecropper’s young wife with a scoured face and a mouth like a paper cut, her handsome husband, and in another picture a family, the heavy-faced mother’s bare feet resting on their sides onf the floor beneath the bed where she sat. New York City subway riders, their eyes unfocused, their faces relaxed, long dead people in an instnt of their lives that was like a million other instants.