Essay about Two Exhibitions on View at The Museum of Contemporary Art

First artwork is the Vietnam War Memorial in 1982, designed by May Lin. What I see in this picture is that it looks like a park area is created having a lot of fresh green grass and long trees. It also have very elongated walls. The walls are made from mirror-like surfaces that reflects the images of the surrounding trees, monuments and people. As it is a Vietnam War memorial place, I observe that people staring at the walls depicts that the walls have something related about the Vietnam War. It can have written description about the specific people participating in the Vietnam War. It’s like a long granite wall inscribed with the names of all those men and women that sacrificed their lives during this war. I also see how these mirror like

This paper is a formal analysis of the Marble grave stele with a family group relief sculpture. It is a pentelic marble style relief standing at 171.1cm tall carved by a master. It is from the Late Classical period of Greek, Attic which was completed around ca.360 B.C. . I chose to analyze this piece as apposed to the others because I’m mainly attracted to art and sculptures from the Greek era. The overall color used in this relief is ivory with a few cracks and pieces broken off. There is some discoloration which causes the color to come off as slightly light brown for most of the relief. The sculpture appears larger compared to the other sculptures in the art room. It represents a family which includes a man, his wife, and their

Painful as it may be, such experiences brings home the finality of death. Something deep within us demands a confrontation with death. A last look assures us that the person we loved is, indeed, gone forever.” (108) Cable finishes his essay by asking, Tim if his job ever depressed him. Tim in reply says, “No it doesn’t, and I do what I can for people and take satisfaction in enabling relatives to see their loved ones as they were in real life.” (108) After reading this essay I feel as though sometimes we don’t understand death so therefore we do not talk much about it. By reading about what goes on after your loved one dies and is sent to these places to be prepared and ready for burial, it helps to understand why morticians and funeral directors do what they do. Knowing that someone enjoys taking the responsibility in providing that comfort in a sorrowful time makes me appreciate these people in these occupations a bit

“What the dead don’t know piles up, though we don’t notice it at first,” is an insight in Roger Angell’s descriptive memoir, “Over the Wall” (414). Emotional responses, stimulating thoughts and solid feelings are elicited through the use of personal reflection, regarding the death of his wife, Carol. This literary nonfiction, memoir uses the present tense, a constant tone, and an informal view to help add immediacy, by keeping the reader involved step by step as the author connects his personal present and past experiences regarding death. Readers are continually intrigued by Angell’s literary nonfiction essay, with provoking thoughts focusing on death, while using figurative language to keep Carol alive, with the use of vivid personal reflections and descriptive personal experiences.

Each individual has a unique way of coping with death, and this is evident throughout Christina Rossetti’s, “Remember” and W. H. Auden’s “Stop all of the Clocks”.

Lorraine O’Gradys’ unintentionally historic performances, seemingly elevate everyday life to the status of art. In her ‘exhibit’ at the Studio Museum, her work is represented through photographs, in ‘Art is…’. Thirty years ago, O’Grady presented ‘Art is’ in the form of a float in the African American Day Parade right here in Harlem. Performers pranced with empty frames, metaphorically capturing fleeting pictures of the people and places that surrounded the route of the parade. By doing so, the trappings of high art were brought out of the museum, into the street, which promotes a new way people might begin to recognize this new art form in the celebrations of every day life. The

Positioned alongside Central Park in 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 museum, especially one as influential as the Met, inherently predisposes its visitors to a certain set of understandings that subtly influence how they interpret and ultimately construct meanings about each individual object within the museum. Brent Plate in Religion, Art, and Visual Culture argues that “objects obtain different meanings in different locations and historical settings.”An object placed on display behind a glass case inside a museum would hold a vastly different meaning if it was put on sale by a street vendor, like the ones who set up their tables in close proximity to the Met. The different meanings that objects are able to obtain is attributed to the relationships that are established between the object itself and the environment that surrounds it. These relationships often involve the kind of audience that a museum attracts, where the work is exhibited, and how the exhibits within a museum is planned out. Museums subsequently have the ability to control how these relationships are established which influences the way a viewer is able to construct meaning. When a visitor observes an object on display at the Met, they instinctively construct a certain set of

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Thou famished grave” and “Mindful of you” both include the themes of death, however, “Thou famished grave” uses the personification of a grave as a starving beast, diction to add imagery of starvation, and an image of a strong will to live to show the resentfulness and bitterness that the speaker has towards death, while, “Mindful of you” uses the imagery and personification of the four seasons to remember someone close who has died, to express that although death may take people physically, but they live and are remembered through memories.

Among the many artworks I have seen, I decided to discuss about the “Sarcophagus Depicting a Battle between Soldiers and Amazons (Warrior Women)” from the Roman civilization. It was built sometime in between 140 A.D. to 170 A.D and is approximately forty and a half inches in length, ninety-one and a half inches in width, and fifty and a half inches tall in height (“Roman Sarcophagus”). This masterpiece appealed to me because of the unique approach that has been designed to honor the deceased. Many people are familiar with the formatting and inscriptions of a gravestone because it is usually engraved with an individual’s full name, birth date, and death date. During the Roman Empire, a sarcophagus, which is a coffin, was widely used to show decorative themes that includes: battle scenes, hunting scenes, weddings, or other memorable episodes from the life of the deceased individual. The most luxurious ones were made from marble surrounded by symbolic sculptures, figures and inscriptions on all four sides (“Sarcophagus”). Another feature that captured my attention was the large quantity of details used to bring out a lifelike aspect of the deceased individual’s favorable moments in their life. In this artwork, this sarcophagus was dedicated to a Roman commander. The exterior of the sarcophagus has been well-decorated and carved with exquisite details depicting a battle scene

The exhibit that I viewed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art was one about European Art between the years 1100-1500. This was a series of paintings, sculptures, architecture, and tapestry of the Medieval and Early Renaissance as well as objects from the Middle East. This exhibit was an important part of the history of the Philadelphia Museum of Art because for the first time, Italian, Spanish, and Northern European paintings from the John G. Johnson collection were shown. It gave me a good idea of what the paintings were like in these four centuries and reflected ideas of both the east and the west.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has often been referred to a citadel of American Art, partially due to the museums façade, a striking granite building (Figure 1), designed by Bauhaus trained architect Marcel Breuer. The museum perpetuates this reference through its biennial review of contemporary American Art, which the Whitney has become most famous for. The biennial has become since its inception a measure of the state of contemporary art in America today.

Death. The topic no one likes to discuss despite it being an inevitable part of life since humans came into existence. Simply thinking about the phrase, “I am going to die,” causes most people to become extremely uncomfortable, evoking unwanted emotions such as dread and fear. Humans will do anything to distract themselves from this depressing reality. Whether it’s using drugs or going out with friends, people frequently engage in activities that push darker thoughts to the back of their minds to be dealt with at a later time. Hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), the painting Leyster, The Last Drop (Fig. 1) captures the complexities of coming to terms with one’s own mortality. Judith Leyster’s use of lighting, color, and symbols in the piece come together to express the struggle people go through to give their lives meaning in the context of eternity, making observers confront the temporal limits of their humanity right on the spot.

Death has captured the mind very early on and since then it has driven us to create some of the most powerful images in the world. In this essay I am going to discuss why art often symbolizes death and some of the complex ways in which art represents death.

In her poem #465, Emily Dickinson’s speaker allows the reader to experience death vicariously from beyond the grave, as the speaker questions the reality of spirituality in an age of growing materialism.

Non-Place is a group exhibition of four artists based in different countries, bringing together the works of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand, Carla Klein and Xizi Liu. Those artists continued on traditional art forms: paintings and photographs, but their works that exist between distinct classifications. All of the artists search for a new type of space that resists the certainly of a conclusive ideology. The works in Non-place interrogates existent structures, and establishes new dialogues. The idea of non-places drives from the French historian Michel de Certeau 's Invention of everyday. Volume One (1974), but it is from the short but powerful text by the French anthropologist Marc Ange’s Non-Places: Introduce to an Anthropology of Supermodernit: