There are so many reasons why you should visit Mills Art Gallery in Orlando, FL. The arts are rising in Orlando. This is a city full of highly talented artists; not limited to painters, sculptors, glass blowers, folk artists, musicians, singers, dancers, deejays, actors and writers. It is a great community of like-minded individuals and companies who came together with a common goal of helping these artists and giving them a place to call home. The Mills Art Gallery is a recognition of the need for a place where visual and performing arts can be brought together in the heart of Orlando. There are many reasons why you should visit Mills Art Gallery in Orlando, FL.

The mission of the Mills Gallery is to enhance environments with inspiring art by featuring artwork from local, national and international artists specializing in contemporary painting, ceramics, jewelry and sculpture. Here are a few reasons why you should put Mills Gallery on your Orlando itinerary:

Art Inspires Your Visual Imagination

When you’re using memory techniques, you draw upon visual imagination. Even if you’re only using words in your mind when developing mnemonics, you’re using visual words. Mnemonics is the study and development of systems for improving and assisting memory.

​

The more visual iconography you’ve seen in your life, the more potency the visual words you use will hold. Exposure equals experience. Experience leads to substance. When you use the words “run,” “hit” or any other verb, the more art you’ve seen, the great depth of meaning these words will have.

Art Depicts Words Used In Visual Ways

If you’ve been to an art gallery lately, you’ve undoubtedly seen how modern artists use words. Pop artists use comic strips. Futurists made a big deal out of typefaces. You don’t even have to enter an art gallery to see words used in graffiti on nearly every street in your city.

Looking at art and paying attention to how artists use words is especially great for inspiring how you can use your visual imagination to memorize foreign language vocabulary and phrases. Next time you’re in an art gallery, pay particular attention to how words appear in the exhibits.

Art Helps You Make Mental Connections Between Space And Material Objects

Looking at art is more than “looking.” As your eyes meet the graphic displays, ideas emerge. In fact, “art” happens the moment that you start thinking about what you’re looking at or noticing your emotional responses.

You can become conscious of what you’re thinking and feeling and use your awareness to become more visual. Reflect on how the visual experience has triggered your thoughts and responses.

Also, journal what you’ve thought while at the gallery. By writing down your responses, you access your memory. Accessing your memory exercises your mind, which helps keep it fit.

Visiting Art Galleries Makes You Aware Of World Geography

It’s not just that art often depicts different parts of the world. Art galleries also exhibit art by international artists.

Pay attention to the international names and locations of where the art originates. This will exercise your geographical imagination and give you more facts to remember. It’s also a great memory exercise to remember the names of the artists you see and include their home countries.

For bonus points, you can also use the Major Method to add the dates of their lives and when they created the pieces you’re admiring. The more experienced you become with memory techniques, the more information you can memorize at a single go.

Plus, the location of the art itself within the gallery amounts to a Memory Palace station. Using the location gives you great practice at using your spatial memory in addition to all the other tools mnemonics draw upon, such as association, semantic memory, episodic memory and the like.

Art Galleries Are Depositories Of History

Yes, you can memorize the raw data of dates when going to an art gallery. But you also expose your memory to information about historical periods.

Artists love to reference other eras and historical events. Some artists have even made careers out of referencing history. Fluency in art equals fluency in history, which is always good for your memory.

​
Art Galleries Exercise Your Ability To Create Meaning

Let’s face it: A lot of art doesn’t make much sense.

At least, that’s until you give it some thought and learn about how to interpret art. Believe me. Interpretation matters.

After all, a huge part of art interpretation is creating meaning. To have created meaning, you have to remember the meaning you created. Ergo, going to art galleries and interpreting what you see is good for your memory.

And if you’re practicing memory techniques, handling abstract ideas is perfect for practicing the art of remembering challenging and abstract ideas. Art history is loaded with them.

Art Galleries Give You The Experience Of Puzzlement

Being puzzled by something is different than having to create meaning. To be puzzled, after all, you must have already understood something. Two (or more) things are separated and you know they go together.

You just have to figure out how. Visiting art galleries gives you that experience and to fit the pieces together, you need to hold them in memory.

The benefits of being puzzled are massive because it always exercises your memory as you work things out. Even if you give up before you’re satisfied, your memory abilities will have grown.

Art Galleries Create Enigmas That Carry On Throughout Life

Looking at art forces you to create meaning. It also creates unsolvable mysteries that you will carry throughout your life.

Take “The Persistence of Meaning” by Salvador Dali. What exactly does it mean? No matter how many times you see this painting, it still mystifies. The enigma of surrealism persists precisely because it resists meaning.

And yet, we can continuously connect to the enigma and try puzzling out new meanings even if we know we’ll never come to a conclusion. In Critical Theory, this is called “indeterminacy” and it is a powerful tool in art, cinema, theatre, and literature.

Looking At Art In Galleries Creates Conflicting Opinions

Even if you go to art galleries alone, you’ll often find yourself in disagreement. Many artists go out of the way to polarize audiences, and using tools like “indeterminacy,” they often pull your heartstrings in opposing directions.

Conflicts like these are perfect for memory because you’ll remember how you felt looking at the painting at a deeper level. You’ll have more interesting inner dialogs which also encodes longer-term memories.

If you want to help yourself remember more, keep a journal of the conflicting opinions you experience while looking at art just before you sleep after visiting a gallery. The reason to do this before you go to sleep is that memories consolidate during the night. Some studies have shown that the closer to sleep that you review information, the more likely your brain is to consolidate it into long-term memory.

​

Art Galleries Make You Look At The Outside World Differently

Often artists use everyday objects within the art gallery to change our perspective of the outside world. But when you deliberately remember more of what you’ve seen inside the gallery, you will find that you also see the outside world differently.

You often read about the effect of viewing art. However, it’s not until you’ve seen it with your own eyes that the stories take on the intended effect.