Bright colors are an antidote to the end-of-the-winter blahs. Today, my friend Shoira and I had two-part, colorful Washington, DC adventure, all for the price of our Metro tickets.

First stop, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. If you don’t know SAAM, it is actually one-half of the grandiose, Greek Revival Patent Building, built back in the mid-1800s, and saved from destruction in the 1950s. The other half is the National Portrait Gallery. In between two parts of the building is a fun place to hang out, the Kogod Courtyard, with its splendid glass ceiling.

Currently, on the third floor of SAAM, you can walk among wooly mammoths. Well, kind of. You can actually walk around and through an imaginative world created by artist Nick Cave, which not only features various fanciful itinerations of elephantine ancestors, but installations literally dripping with bright color. This includes a wide table of artfully arranged found materials – glassware, plastic flowers, marbles, walking sticks, wigs, objects made from beer cans – and a whole wall draped with what looks like thousands of strings of Mardi Gras beads (see featured image above).

The exhibition makes you wonder, and also to appreciate how many hours it took to gather and put together all this stuff. The array of colors drew me in and cheered me up — the world has definitely lacked color and joy these past few weeks.

Second stop, Dupont Circle, to an outdoor celebration of the Indian holiday of Holi. The day was still gray, but the colors were flying! Holi is a Hindu spring festival, during which people throw colored powder at one another. The colors are symbolic, apparently, but mostly everyone has a blast getting festooned in red, blue, purple, pink, orange, yellow and green, walking rainbows with big smiles. The kids were especially joyous, and their moods infectious. (I mean, how often do your parents sanction covering yourself with what looks like crushed up sidewalk chalk?)

At the end of our day of color and playfulness, we were welcomed back to Northern Virginia by blue sky and sun. We had brought some color back to our world. Perhaps spring is not far behind.