I knew I had to make my mask filled with different colors and textures. After slapping on a coat of paint I started with the beaded star eye. I had this idea which sort of pays homage to 70s rock like KISS or even David Bowie, the music I grew up on. It’s made of miscellaneous beads that have been with me since i was little. I’m really into jewelry making and bead work so that represents that aspect of me. I made a guitar over the other eye and a piano for the eyebrow to represent my love of music. Playing piano and guitar is big part of my identity so I knew I had to include it. I used yarn for the strings because I’m a big crocheter so that’s like a little easter egg.
Last Saturday we went to see the classic Italian opera La Boheme. I, like most of us, had never been to an opera before so I was intrigued to see what it was all about. I was also pleasantly surprised by the little screen with subtitles in front of my chair. I thought I’d have to decipher the Italian to understand.
In terms of the opera experience itself, it was amazing. Watching the live pit alone took my breath away, let alone the sets and the vocals. Hands down the most realistic sets I’ve seen in live theatre. I really felt like I was looking at a miniature scene plucked from reality in 19th century Paris.
When it came to the actual plot, I felt like there wasn’t enough substance. The story was very simply two lovers meeting, falling in love, breaking apart, the girl falling ill and ultimately dying in his arms. There wasn’t enough around for me.
Rent, the musical/movie based on the opera which was based on the book Scenes from a Latin Quarter, has the same premise as La Boheme but there was a lot more going on which I liked. First of all it was set in 1989 NYC but still had the same basic theme of struggling artists living in poverty. In Rent, aids was a huge focal point in the musical and many of the main characters had it. This differs from the opera because in the opera only Mimi got sick not most of the friend group, and also obviously it was tuberculosis not aids. Also in the opera Mimi dies but in the movie she almost dies but comes back to life after Angel told her to live.
I really loved the musical. It was really emotional and had a lot of layers that I thought came together nicely to talk about prevalent issues of the time period. I didn’t feel the emotion during the opera because I felt like we barely knew the characters but in Rent it had time to meet everyone, learn who they are and feel their pain and sadness, or at least a piece of it.
I also prefer the happy ending with Mimi living over the tragedy in La Boheme, but I guess I’m just a softie.
I love tattoos, and though I don’t have any, I will sometime in the near future. I loved learning about the origins of the art-form from Rich, as well as how it shaped his life.
I loved that Rich’s first tattoo was a Where The Wild Things Are tattoo because that book/movie was a core memory of my childhood. The woman who gave him the tattoo, who eventually became his boss, referenced the style in the book by using a single needle tattoo gun. It took much more time and allowed for much more detail than guns with 5+ needles. Before the zoom call with Rich I never even considered the factor of number of needles. I didn’t know that was a way to vary the line heaviness.
His stories were great and getting to learn more about tattoos, an interest of mine, from a tattooer and tattooee was super cool for me. I’m definitely getting a tattoo.
I enjoyed my time at the Brooklyn Museum. I and a lot of my friends agreed that it was way more enjoyable than the Whitney. The walls were filled with much more life and color which I personally prefer to the blankness of the Whitney’s walls. I loved the cabinets filled with artifacts and miscellaneous objects over the years. The experience felt much more interactive as well. I don’t know if it was because there were so many of us or if they are more lenient but I was able to get up close and personal with art, closely looking at details that I wouldn’t feel welcome to explore at the Whitney.
This was one of the most beautiful sculptures I saw at the Brooklyn Museum. The way their hair is intertwined is very beautiful and poetic. The clarity of their features also amazes me as someone taking a sculpture class.
One day I will learn to oil paint. Clouds and water are two features of nature that always amaze me when painted. They are so beautifully captured in this piece I had to include it here.
Before I get into the dancing, I have to share my journey there. The train that Nick, Mehdina and I were aboard on route to St. George decided to stop working one stop away from our destination. I don’t know exactly what the problem was, I think it was something with the doors? Anyway, we went out searching for a bus stop and much to our gratitude a bus came right when we got to the stop. It’s now 12:25 PM and we have to board the 12:30 ferry. Once we got off the bus we ran like children frolicking through an open field to get to this big orange boat. Somehow we managed to make it on with a minute spare and found our darling Lisa and friends waiting for us down below.
Ok now to the dancing. I had never been to a ballet before so I didn’t exactly know what to expect. The first performance was very pretty and met my expectation of what a ballet performance would look like. The second one on the other hand . . . Oh boy. The second one which I believe was called Valentine shattered my expectations. There was a cello (which was very cool) dancers in boxing outfits and weird noises coming out of all three of them. Also, lucky us got the splash zone seats and we had the privilege of witnessing the worlds tallest ballet dancer sweat like a water park. Anyway, back to the dance. It was weird and funny, and yet I felt like I was the only one laughing outwardly. It was cooky. I liked it. But I was only comparing it to the first performance.
After intermission the final two performances had me engulfed. The mermaid one was so beautiful, the two dancers felt like water themselves. And the last one was a visual experience. I really liked the whole Queen and King thing it had going, and the main ballerina was phenomenal.
We all sort of agreed that the performances got better progressively but overall I really liked the experience. Some parts of the dance really had me amazed and I would love to go again in the future.
PS after the show when we went out to eat I accidentally ate Jayson’s extra spicy chicken . . .
This eye catching piece by the Guerrilla Girls from 1989 is straightforward and informative, which is why it caught my eye—plus the giant gorilla head. The Guerrilla girls are feminist artists who stay anonymous by wearing gorilla masks in public.
The piece was created when the Public Art Fund commissioned them to design a billboard. The Girls visited the met and saw the alarming ratio of female artists to female nude art. The Public Art Fund rejected the piece as a billboard and it was instead displayed on NYC buses. The woman in the photo is from the female nude painting La grande odalisque (1814) by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.
This issue is definitely still relevant today because while society has come a long way sexism is never going to disappear, at least not for a long time. Part of the problem is that so many famous classical European artists loved to paint naked women and those pieces are wanted by museums. The more we take a chapter out of Kimberly Drew’s book This is What I Know About Art and push ourselves to keep evolving art the more protest art such as this will become less relevant and that is the ultimate goal.
Funnily enough I found this piece of protest art on the Met’s website so in that regard the Met has recognized its core issues following 1989.
In addition to attending this event, I was a volunteer for the Snug Harbor fence show. That means I was there from 7:45 AM to 5:30 PM. However, it actually was a lot of fun I didn’t feel like I was there for too long.
Upon arrival I helped setup the Biergarten where they sold alcohol and pretzels. Yum. It actually ended up looking really cute! All the table had blue and white plaid table clothes and we put mini pumpkins on them for decoration.
I was stationed at the kids activity table where there were coloring sheets and masks for kids—or me—to decorate. In the morning it was busy I created this moth by ripping up pieces of paper and streamers we had set out and glueing them to the wings.
After creating this I slipped out to the Art Lab to meet my fellow artists. We started with the ceramics class which taught us how to work clay and hand make different ceramic objects. I really enjoyed getting my hand dirty, I personally love things of this caliber and I haven’t really tried ceramics before so it was really cool. At first I thought we all had to make a bowl but then i got more comfortable and learned I could make whatever I want so that’s exactly what I did. I made a friend.
My friend Jordanda’s Bowl
After that me and Sofia headed to the painting class which was less of a class and more of an opportunity to paint a still life or something else and ask for tips. I’ve been meaning to try oil painting so I decided to give it a try here and it was nice to be able to experiment and learn something new. For my first experiment I think it went pretty well. The contrast isn’t as deep as it is in real life so that’s something I could work on in the future.
When I went back to my station at the activities table I joined the children in coloring and learned a lot about the mine of a 5 year old. Eventually I even go tot help with the face paint when there was an abundance of eager kids. That was my first time doing face paint and the kids seemed to like it so I’ll take it as a win. I did a ladybug, a lion, batman, and a snowy owl. While the event was winding down I did this sea turtle one one of my fellow volunteers:
The event was super fun and interactive. My favorite part of art lab was the ceramics because we were altogether having fun playing with shape and texture. I would definitely go again next year or whenever the next time they have it.
It was calm, drizzly Sunday day when our adventure to The Whitney began. Mehdina boarded the Sim1c. And as water dripped down from the emergency exit onto my ankle, I felt relaxed and ready to explore what the modern museum would have to offer.
Upon arrival we met the others who were venturing with us. A woman told me to come to her and I soon realized she wanted to check my bag. I asked if she wanted me to open it. She looked at me blankly and said, “uh, yeah.” Woopsies.
The first art we looked at was on the top floor. It was an exhibit by a deaf artist, Christine Sun Kim. Th exhibit was mostly black and white and looked to me as if it contained many doodles and words. The first thing we actually saw was a video that looked like one of those “not my arms” challenges, meaning a person standing behind another person put there arms through the other’s armpit crevices so that the person in front looked like their arms were the person in the backs. Not at all what I was expecting and I audibly laughed out loud, which was probably not well received by other people observing it. But I say oh well that was my authentic reaction.
I don’t go to the city a lot so seeing the cityscape was really cool. It’s a whole different way of life with playgrounds on roofs and apartments with peoples blinds wide open.
I wanted to play on that playground . . .
I really enjoyed when we got the opportunity to converse with James Michael B. ( I don’t remember his last name). We were inquiring about a sting of lights on the floor to one another and James jumped right in to clarify that the art came from an immigrant who was reminiscent about the lights and gave them to museum, allowing them to decide how to display them. very interesting to me. James seemed knowledgeable about the art here and it was nice to talk to a human we didn’t know about something we didn’t know.
James Michael B.
While there were some more abstract pieces at the Whitney, there was a lot of art that appealed more to my tastes. I really like this architectural/landscape/slice of life painting.
I also got to see one of Yuji Agematsu’s pieces which my sculpture teacher recently showed us. It was a cool coincidence because before i started taking that sculpting class I had no clue who that was.
This piece is like a colander. Agematsu makes one of these little sculptures every day.
On the way out we looked at souvenirs and got those little picture card things that come out of the machine when you insert four quarters. I even saw one of the artworks printed on to mugs which I know Lisa loves!
Overall I definitely enjoyed looking at the art within the Whitney. Some of it made me think, Why the hell is my art not in a museum? But a lot of it was really cool and made me think (about the art itself or about the artist). I don’t go to museums very often so it was a nice push to get out there, see the city, and see what people have made for us to see.
On the way back we stopped a K-Town where Khadijah led us to a lovely Korean cafeteria place in which I enjoyed 7 pork-fried dumplings. It even had little karaoke rooms which we partook in.
On the way back we started to wind down after a nice long day in the city, feeling a little closer and perhaps a little more artsy than before.
