September 1st, 2017
For the first trip of Drew’s 2017 Art Semester (50th year, eeek, no pressure on these students), we visited the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey. The museum is small, so it has the ability to showcase smaller artists and lesser known works by larger artists. The museum is also less crowded than larger New York City museums, so it was a good first step into getting us used to the museum culture, rather than throwing us straight into the Met. The class first divided up to do presentations on separate sections of a floor of the museum. Christian and I explored the Latin American section, but decided on doing our presentation on the section between the Latin American section and the Civil Rights section which we felt connected the two sections of the floor. The first image shows this section, which appears more as though it has come out of a collector’s house than a museum. The two sections on either side contained very political pieces that could have been very overpowering if not connected by a neutral section. The section was not related to the other two except in color, through the use of a dramatically hued painting, as the pieces in the two other sections were both brightly colored, although more geometric and realistic on either side. The addition of a wooden sculpture that resembles a mantelpiece cuts a line across the hallway brings the eye across the division between the two sections and brings them together visually. We then moved on to one of my favorite sections in the museum, the nature works. Growing up in Vermont, I’ve always felt deeply connected to nature spiritually, particularly with trees, but I’d never thought of putting it directly into my work before. The Alan Sonfist pieces shown in the second image in particular inspired me to explore wood in my own work, which quickly became a part of my practice through wrapping sticks with embroidery thread. I’ve found this has added to the level of calm in my work due to the peace I feel in nature being included and conveyed in my pieces. The last section we saw before breaking up and exploring the museum further was a section with many fluorescent pieces. Fluorescent is becoming much more popular in mainstream culture due to the nostalgia for the 70’s and 80’s that has been coming back through many different trends, both for the better and for the worse. Fluorescents are one of those trends that have been very popular on Instagram (in fact, I posted the third picture shown on my Instagram), but that many people don’t necessarily see as art, despite the difficult process that goes into making it. The sheer amount of selfies that I saw many of the people in the museum, both in my class and otherwise, showed me that they were treating the piece more as an interesting light source than an artistic work, which made me wonder how people interacted with it in the past, although I’m sure they weren’t taking photos on cell phones.
