Thelma Gordon Speech Summary

Back in my school years I used to visit many historical museums, where I learned a lot about the culture and society of the past. As I have always been interested in history and arts, all that was a breathtaking experience for me. I believe that these museums is the best way to get closer to lives of our ancestries and it can help us to see the world in a different way. However, to be more knowledgeable about the world we live in, it’s also extremely important to be familiar with modern art. So this time I decided to experience something new and started searching for a museum which would contain works of contemporary artists. Tampa Museum of Art was a great option. This Museum was founded in 1979 and since then it has curated three exhibitions covering the Classical World to Mid-Century Modernist works,

One pleasant afternoon, my classmates and I decided to visit the Houston Museum of Fine Arts to begin on our museum assignment in world literature class. According to Houston Museum of Fine Art’s staff, MFAH considers as one of the largest museums in the nation and it contains many variety forms of art with more than several thousand years of unique history. Also, I have never been in a museum in a very long time especially as big as MFAH, and my experience about the museum was unique and pleasant. Although I have observed many great types and forms of art in the museum, there were few that interested me the most.

1985 (Figure 2) first appeared in 1985 plastered on billboards around New York City. The piece is illustrated in monochrome colours so to not distract viewers from the meaning of the poster. The harsh contrast in colours between the black writing and white background make the piece stand out and draw the attention of bypassers. Written on the artwork is a list of well-known museums in New York City and beside them is a score of how many women artists have had one-person exhibits there in the past year. The results showed that the Guggenheim, Metropolitan and Whitney museums each had zero, whilst the Modern museum had one. These results are supposed to shock the audience and make gallery curators feel a sense of guilt, that it’s clear the art world don’t appreciate women artists like they do men. Whist they are confronting the public with that truth they are also providing another critical message with this piece. The Guerrilla Girls identified these museums by first name, not out of convenience, but to make a statement, that the only museums to allow women artist some form of respect like male artist do was the ‘modern’ museum. Emphasising the fact that gender discrimination and bias nature in the art world should be in the past, and the only museum that realises and recognises this is the modern one. The poster’s main message challenges the patriarchal world of art and confronts art galleries

It must have been 13 years or so since I have been to the art museum, back in elementary school, on a one of a kind field trip. 13 years is way too long to have been away from the art museum, as my experience this year reminded me that. It was a beautiful, sunny October day, although it felt like July, and it was an even better day to talk a walk through the vast, mesmerizing pieces of art that the museum has to offer. The North Carolina Museum of Art provides an abundance of artwork from various time periods, cultures, and one can find art anywhere from Egyptian, to classical, to modern and contemporary art. The artwork that the museum provides not only displays an abundance of artwork, but

In 1976 Barbara Jordan, Congresswoman from Texas, became the first African American woman to deliver a keynote address at a major party convention in the US. She was aware of the significance and symbolism of the moment. Referencing the first Democratic convention of 1832, she said, “A lot of years passed since 1832, and during that time it would have been most unusual for any national political party to ask a Barbara Jordan to deliver a keynote address.” For Jordan, her presence at the convention was “evidence that the American Dream need not be forever deferred.”

Over the weekend, I took the time to explore two museums. The first museum I visited was the D.I.A , also known as the Detroit Institute of Arts. The D.I.A was a very beautiful, multicultural, and unique place. I also took the time to visit and explore the Charles H. Wright Museum of Detroit. Luckily, these museums weren’t too far from each other they were roughly 5-7 minutes apart. The Charles H. Wright Museum was also very beautiful, it was more appealing to me because it is a museum that exhibits and highlights the history of the African American culture. The Charles H. Wright museum also happens to be the largest African American museum in the world.

This Summer, I had the opportunity to spend my entire break attending conferences and interning at a lab at UCSD so I thought to myself I would never have the time to visit any art museum or do my summer assignments for that matter. That was until I realized I was living at a campus who had an art piece practically on every corner of their six colleges. I then began my journey, on scooter, to discover the hidden and the not so hidden gems The Stuart Collection at UCSD had to offer. It was then that I fell in love with 2 specific art pieces throughout the campus, those being Do Ho Suh’s Fallen Star, which depicts an immigrant’s transition into American culture, and Kiki Smith’s Standing, which depicts a seemingly tortured woman.

Fred Wilson is an art activist for minority groups, especially the African American population, which in today`s generation, is looked upon as the unseen minority group (Grinberg 2012). Wilson creates innovative exhibitions to display art and artifacts found in museum collections with arrangements that represent minority contemporary artists. His ideas lead the audience to acknowledge that changes in the perceptive view transform the whole meaning of what is presented.

Since its founding, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has been exhibiting and collecting works by contemporary artists. They have an ever-expanding collection of 20th- and 21st-century art that I had the pleasure of viewing, following its remodel in 2012. In addition to the permanent collection, a new innovative experience called the Black Box gallery introduces a new way of viewing the works of contemporary artists. The Black Box allows the viewer not only to see the work in a new way, playing with light but also hear and experience images in motion. The exhibit I went to see was curated by Kristen Hileman, the senior curator of contemporary art, and it features two screen-based works as opposed to displaying one as it usually does. The two artists featured were Kara Walker and Hank Willis Thomas.Within their works, both artists discuss the feeling and experiences associated with being black in America, specifically the historical significance of the legacy of slavery.

The interpretation and appropriation of culture within museums came under attack starting in the 1960’s. Native American groups raised questions about the biases and agendas of curators and museums and demanded that their voices be heard in the political arena. Many Native American organizations argued that if Whites are the ones interpreting and appropriating other cultures, then it is actually their culture on exhibition.(King 1998: 96, Stocking Jr. 1985: 88, Patterson 2014: 52). Deidre Sklar, a researcher of Native American artifacts, stated that: “Time and space in a museum, are defined in terms of the confines of the collection, not of the context from which [the collection is] drawn. Visiting hours from ten to five and the glass exhibit case define EuroAmerican, not Native American time and space” (Weil 2004:3). In response to this outcry, the Museums of the American Indian Act was created and signed on November 28, 1989, enabling the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The NMAI is arguably the most famous native-run institution and acts as a living memorial to Native Americans and their traditions (King 1998: 106).

Recalling my inability to understand art, you can just imagine how much fun I had in the museum. When I walked into the little area I was immediately stopped by a collection of commemorative plates, each with names of famous civil rights activists on them. The plates looked very elegant, but I couldn’t figure out why the artist would want to create them. “Irony”, I thought, “it must be ironic somehow. Artists love irony – but how is this ironic?” Maybe because the names were in black on white plates? Maybe because they didn’t lead extravagant lifestyles but yet were commemorated on extravagant plates? Or maybe that their names, and all that they have stood for, have been reduced to a cheap souvenir-like object, that may or may not be available at the gift shop. I decided to shake off all the thoughts that were running through my head when I saw a giant sign that described the purpose of the exhibit, and what Brown v Board meant. Beneath it I found a pamphlet describing each work. “Spectacular”, I thought. “Now this is my kind of art museum – one with answers”.

He started his article, “How African-American Artists Fought to Diversify Museums”, with an overview of the history of the issue. The article stated the importance of the initial attempts to mollify black artists and how the attempts sparked more outrage by displaying the blatant disproportion of diversity. It concluded that all of these events built up and provoked a movement to include more art as seen to this day. It focuses on how museums are still guilty of conforming to social and political views, as seen by the types of art displayed and who created them. The article then turns into an interview with author, Susan Cahan, to discuss political influences in museums throughout history and what effect it has on the art world today concerning black artists. Unlike the New York Times article, this story went into excessive detail of how the movement to include more African American artists started and the progress that has been achieved throughout the years. It granted the reader a more thorough understanding about the movement and why it has been (and still is) a serious issue today. The comparisons it brings up from the very first attempt to include black artists in an exhibit—“Harlem on My Mind”—to the exhibits today document the remarkable progress made as well as the excessive amount of protesting that accompanied it. Both articles were great sources of information for people looking into the history of black artists exhibition, but the critical difference between the two was the tone: the first article viewing the situation to be long-overdue but hopeful, while the second article spoke of the situation from the perspective of an author who felt the museums should be ashamed of their lack of effort throughout the

I participated in a tour of the Black Cultural Center. It was quite interesting and I’m not just saying that because some stranger is reading my response. I really enjoy art and love painting, so when I saw all of the canvases with these moving paintings I was really drawn into the tour. Now because I waited so long to complete the badge I forgot the name of the paintings, but I can tell you exactly what I saw and how the ones that stuck out to me made me feel. I remember the front desk is the designed after the nose of a slave ship. I thought that was pretty interesting. Then as we began the tour there was this painting of a woman. The painting was very moving as she looked very weak and yet as you looked into her eyes they were as serene

Throughout the history of socially engaged art, Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses can be regarded as one of the most successful projects in exemplifying how art and community can be unified together to incite social change. Founded in 1993, Project Row Houses has managed to revitalize a marginalized population in Houston and subsequently provided a collective space to instigate dialogues between artists and residents of Third Ward. Although such community-art projects are not uncommon in today’s society, the intention of collaborating with disenfranchised communities have been a long-debated question among art critics and members of the public. Since the beginning of 20th Century, these works of art have been given different titles such as participatory art, community art and activist art which falls under the umbrella term “social practice”. Inspired by early avant-garde movements such as Conceptualism, Fluxus, Dada, these forms of interventions have seen an increase in the number of artists working outside the confines of the traditional museum and creating works that liberate art from its aesthetic framework. Therefore in this essay, an in-depth analysis of socially engaged

Positioned alongside Central Park within the heart of New York City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest and most influential art museums in the world. The Met houses an extensive collection of curated works that spans throughout various time periods and different cultures. The context of museums, especially one as influential as the Met, inherently predisposes its visitors to a set of understandings that subtly influence how they interpret and ultimately construct meanings about each individual object within a museum. By analyzing two separate works on exhibit at the Met, I will pose the argument that museums offer a unique expression of a world view that is dictated through every element of its construction.