There are certain people who become so famous that it becomes difficult to imagine them doing anything ordinary. Frida Kahlo is forever staring back at us from a self-portrait. Louis Armstrong is holding a trumpet. Muhammad Ali is standing over Sonny Liston. Jackson Pollock is flinging paint across a canvas. They become images before they remain people.
Which is why, whenever you get the chance, I recommend going to their house.
I don’t necessarily mean a Graceland-style pilgrimage, although those can be fun too. I’m talking about the smaller places where artists, musicians, writers, architects, and other remarkable people actually lived and worked. Where they grew. Where they dreamed. Places where you can stand in someone’s kitchen, look out their bedroom window, walk across their studio floor, or see the yard they saw every morning.
A museum can show you what someone made. A house can show you something about how they lived.
Outside Philadelphia, the Wharton Esherick Museum is essentially a three-dimensional self-portrait. Beginning in 1926, Esherick spent four decades constructing and altering his studio on Valley Forge Mountain. Architecture, furniture and sculpture bleed into one another. Staircases twist. Wood bends. Nothing feels entirely separate from anything else. You aren’t simply looking at Esherick’s work. You’re standing inside it.
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