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"Van Gogh and Me",,"Last November my grandmother was visiting and wanted to do something fun. Instead of fun, my mother dragged us to the traveling “Beyond Van Gogh” exhibit that was in Salt Lake City at the time. As we entered this big warehouse where the exhibit was located, my fears seemed to be confirmed. I walked along a winding path with backlit, large-canvas reproductions of Van Gogh’s paintings with excerpts of letters written between Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo written over top of the paintings. For me, because I have a visual field cut and other sensory processing issues, it was painful and overwhelming to look at. The backlighting of the artwork made every detail pop and screamed for my attention. So everything smeared together and my brain could not process anything. I did everything I could to avert my eyes as I felt myself slowly becoming overwhelmed and on the verge of melting down.
I did notice that not everything in this room was yelling at me. In between these paintings, there were various empty picture frames invisibly suspended from the ceiling. As people, including myself, walked by, we all became the subjects. I became part of the artwork for a fleeting moment as I was framed within the borders. Then, once I turned the last corner, I entered a dark room with projections of moving color on the wall and floor. I went from being the one who moved around stationary pieces of art into a stationary person watching as the brushstrokes of color and light moved around me and swallowed me whole. As my mind and senses adjusted to this new reality, I entered a huge warehouse-sized room, projections of Van Gogh's work enveloped me on all sides. I was completely immersed in all the colors and details. Music written about Van Gogh or his works was gently playing in the background. For me, it was like a reverse fishbowl effect. Instead of feeling alone and exposed while something stared at me, I was a natural being that was happily swimming amidst the wonder around me. As I watched colors and paint strokes slowly morphing one painting turned into another, for the first time, art moved me in ways I never experienced before. By magnifying details that I would never normally see, I finally understood why art is so powerful. I watched his artistic process from start to finish as sketches were recreated and deconstructed before my eyes. I did not know about his work as a portrait painter, but seeing his side-by-side gallery of his many subjects, including himself, showed such an incredible imagination. This was the first time that I felt art really move me. Van Gogh’s artwork is so powerful and now I understand why his work lives on today. Visiting the “Beyond Van Gogh” exhibit has made me rethink what is possible. Please do not tell my mom that she was right and that I had so much more than fun.
Works Cited: “The Immersive Experience .” Beyond Van Gogh Salt Lake City, 2 Dec. 2021, vangoghsaltlake.com/.",,"""Beyond Van Gogh"" traveling art exhibit",,"November 2021","Julia Reardon, Mountain Heights Academy, Utah",,,,,,van-gogh-and-me,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Aesthetics,Art,Art Exhibitions,Cultural Awareness,Emotional Experience,Family,Museum,Painters,Paintings,van Gogh, Vincent",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/543/Van_Gogh_HM.jpg,,,1,1
"An Afternoon at the MoMA",,"In the summer of 2009, in the final year of my undergraduate studies, I spent a month in New York with my sister. The MoMA was always going to be a site of pilgrimage. Throughout my sister’s studies at the art academy, she would come back home for the holidays and tell me about new artists she had discovered, from Brancusi and Giacometti, to Beuys and Bourgeois. I had only seen their works in books, but my sister’s passion had infected me.
The day we went to the MoMA, and I saw these artists with my own eyes, I felt something shift inside me. The ground gave way, and all I could do was to stand and stare, feeling terrified and excited at the same time. The room with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon left the biggest imprint. I had learned about this painting’s role in the history of modern art in Simon Schama’s Power of Art, but understanding something intellectually, and then being overpowered by it aesthetically represented entirely different experiences.
Having studied literature for four years already, I don’t think I had ever understood the meaning of aesthetics up to that point. Surrounding the room of Picasso’s young ladies, other rooms stretched in every direction, filled with Chagalls, Van Goghs, Modiglianis, and Matisses. I remember running through them, elated, almost out of my mind. I am afraid to go back now. Nothing can quite measure up to that first experience of truly being affected to the core by art.","Pablo Picasso","Les Demoiselles d'Avignon",,"Summer 2009","Ivana Ancic, Ph.D. Candidate ",,,,,,afternoon-MoMA,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Summer Graduate Student Residency","Aesthetics,Art Museums,Cubism,Modern Art--20th Century,Modern Painting,Picasso, Pablo,Sublime",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/471/869px-Les_Demoiselles_d_Avignon.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Have One on Joanna Newsom",,"As I considered a range of options for my Humanities Moment, I instinctively knew it would come down to music, which is the element that moves me most often and intensely in my daily life. However, my tendency to live within particular soundscapes for hours or days on end also means that my moment is entangled with longer histories and hard to pin down in time and space. If anything, the album Have One on Me that yielded my “moment” has taught me a different, more unbounded relationship with time. But first, a little bit of background on the artist and how I discovered her.
I found Joanna Newsom in a Facebook post by a scholar I had met at a James Joyce summer school in Trieste, Italy. I had loved this person's academic work on literary hoaxes but as our social media afterlives showed us, our most vital point of connection was our love for women musicians with strange voices. I made it a point to check out any song he posted, and in late 2015, one of those songs turned out to be ""Sapokanikan"" from Newsom's latest release, Divers. ""Sapokanikan"" is notorious (within admittedly niche circles) for rhyming its titular word--an indigenous place name--with ""Ozymandian""--an adjective crafted from Shelley's famous poem (""Ozymandias"") about transience, infinity, and human hubris. This parallel is a neat glimpse into how the rest of the song traces the ebb and flow and layering of human histories in a single place. The audacity of it could be obnoxious, just as the music video of Newsom skipping down the streets singing straight into the camera could be precious. But none of it felt overindulgent to me.
The density of the lyrics allowed Newsom's voice to soar, at moments to hair-raising pitches that could have come straight from her harp or accompanying strings. Her earnest playfulness presented the mythic scope of her song with a disarming wink. And so my love for Joanna Newsom sprouted, easily and effortlessly. At times, I was troubled by how her love of myth led her to paint mystical pictures of ""ethnic"" cultures, or to string together different cultural references a bit too lightly and whimsically for the material histories of inequity that they grazed against. Nonetheless, I found the grand scale of her work personally liberating, and she always seemed to be aware of the fragility inherent in any overinflated image--whether in the way men saw women, or civilizations saw themselves.
But while I grew obsessed with Newsom's discography, I could never seem to get into her album Have One on Me. An over two hour-long triple album, it already posed a challenge to attention spans, almost testing the quality of her fans’ devotion. But a bigger problem for me was that the album seemed to lack her trademark energy and graspable forms that usually provided an entry point into her complex compositions. Unlike the sparkling and robust folk tunes of her debut, or the almost classical shifts in pace and melody in her later work, Have One on Me had a meandering, repetitive quality to my ears. The lyrics were devastating as usual, the singing was heartfelt, the overall sound was polished, but I failed to find that hook, that leap, that burst of vibrancy or ethereal lull that would transport me to Joanna’s universe.
At some point in the Spring semester of 2021, I was relying desperately on music to help me complete a dissertation chapter draft while my country was being ravaged by the second wave of COVID-19 and the disregard of a cold-blooded central government. My nerves were frayed--I craved a protective cocoon of music but not one so stimulating that I would be led away from my work. Have One on Me suddenly seemed like a good option. It may have been my least favourite Joanna Newsom album, but it was still Joanna Newsom. The album was expansive, elegant, and my distance from it could only help my focus. It turned out to be a great choice--the intricacy of the sound became a calming swirl around me as I plunged into the depths of my writing.
But after days of writing successfully to Have One on Me, something changed. The album was no longer a soothing but distant friend, no longer an amorphous mass of pretty and mysterious textures. I felt as though I had suddenly obtained the ability to see and hear at close range. Songs had intimately familiar outlines and phrases. The album wasn’t untethered, it was a deeply emotionally grounded narrative that left no stone unturned for the sake of the story that might lurk beneath. In a sense, Have One on Me occupies the most relatable of genres--the breakup album. But like Bjork’s Vulnicura, it is a breakup album that stretches and grasps and generates more than it fixes, fixates, or breaks down. The title track laughingly announces the singer’s separation from a hurtful ex-lover. “Baby Birch” mourns the loss of a baby, never held or seen. “California” makes an emphatic choice to protect the “border of… [the singer’s] heart” but still admits that the powerful habits of love wind her up like a cuckoo clock. It is easy to confuse something capacious for something overindulgent if we have been taught to trust bite-size pieces of wisdom and catharsis. Have on One Me was a vital corrective to those habits that I’ve acquired.
And I could not have been more wrong about the album’s pacing--I realized that everything about it was dynamic. Some songs, like the title track, are a richly embroidered tapestry, with subtle incremental shifts in the musical pattern. “Baby Birch” starts as a slow, pained crooning and swells into a tumultuous but triumphant section with strong percussion. “Go Long,” a bewilderingly compassionate indictment of toxic masculinity, switches between a regular and a high register with an unearthly ease while the shimmering harp in the background takes over in a wordless concluding meditation. The final song, “Does Not Suffice,” imagines the ex-lover’s home slowly returning to a masculine starkness as the singer removes all her items of clothing before her departure. It is once contemptuous and empathetic, self-aggrandizing and vulnerable. The gentle, ambling melody is almost identical to an earlier song, “In California,” with a whiff of added melancholy and fewer variations this time round. The ending however, is a dark and thunderous banging on a cluster of musical instruments all at once.
In the height of my newfound obsession with this album, I listened to it all the time--with headphones on, through my portable speakers, on my laptop speakers, and even directly through my phone. When “Does Not Suffice” drew to a close, my phone surprised me by the sheer contained violence that exploded from its inadequate sound system. As the instruments pounded away, it felt as though there was a ghost trapped in my device. I remember that visceral quality straining past technological barriers as a reminder of much energy there is in Joanna Newsom’s music, and particularly in the album that I had underestimated.","Joanna Newsom","Have One on Me (2010) by Joanna Newsom",,"Spring 2021","Anushka Sen, 30, Ph.D. Candidate, teacher, emerging translator",,,,,,have-one-on-joanna-newsom,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Summer Residency","Aesthetics,Art,Graduate Students,Music Appreciation,Newsom, Joanna,Poetry,Self-Realization",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/453/HM_Harp_Image.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Aesthetic Sensibilities and Property Management",,"
Author, educational advocate, and entrepreneur David Bruce Smith reflects on the manner in which his parents encouraged and valued his engagement with visual art while growing up. Years later, while working as a property manager and developer, he realized that his ability to analyze his surroundings and to create efficient, balanced, aesthetically appealing environments was directly connected to his lifelong familiarity with artistic compositions.
Curator's note: The Grateful American™ Foundation is dedicated to restoring enthusiasm in American history for kids and adults. Smith holds a bachelor’s degree in American Literature from George Washington University, and a master’s in Journalism from New York University. During the past 20 years he has been a real estate executive and the editor-in-chief/publisher of Crystal City Magazine. He is the author of 11 books, including his most recent title, American Hero: John Marshall, Chief Justice of the United States. The Grateful American Book Series for children, featuring historic couples that were partnerships, debuts in the fall with Abigail and John—a joint biography of the Adams's.
",,,,,"David Bruce Smith, Founding Father of the Grateful American™ Foundation ",,,,,,david-bruce-smith-looking-seeing,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Aesthetics,Real Estate,Vocation",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/299/Dutch_painting.jpg,"Moving Image",,1,0 "From Aesthetic Shock to Ethical Awakening: How an Environmental Artist and Activist Found Purpose",,"Environmental activist, photographer, and teacher Subhankar Banerjee recounts a time, shortly after moving to New Mexico, when he walked out of his house to encounter a small dead bird lying motionless on the porch. This humble, private moment of grief, confusion, and aesthetic complexity echoed the sensations he had previously felt while viewing Albert Pinkham Ryder’s 19th-century painting “The Dead Bird.” As Banerjee’s career has evolved to address the large-scale crisis of global biological annihilation, he still emphasizes that this small interaction between the human and non-human affected him profoundly and set him on a lifelong ethical journey.",,,,,"Subhankar Banerjee, environmental activist, photographer, and professor at the University of New Mexico",,,,,,subhankar-banerjee-aesthetics-ethics,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,"Beyond Despair environmental humanities conference","Aesthetics,Art Museums,Dead Bird,Death,Environmental Justice,Ethics,Paintings,Photography,Ryder, Albert Pinkham,Santa Fe, New Mexico,The Phillips Collection,Washington, D.C.",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/288/Unknown.jpeg,"Moving Image",,1,0 "Executive Order 9066",,"Actor, author, director, and activist George Takei recalls his family’s resilience and ability to find joy, beauty, and love in simple treasures while imprisoned in Japanese internment camps in the 1940s. He notes that the humanities remind us that we are better than war and destruction and together are capable of bettering society.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
",,,,,"George Takei, actor, author, director, activist",,,,,,george-takei-executive-order-9066,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Activism,Actors,Aesthetics,Executive Order 9066,Families,Imprisonment,Internment Camps,Japanese Americans,Nature,Resilience,Rohwer War Relocation Center,Rohwer, Arkansas,Roosevelt, Franklin Delano,Social Justice,World War II (1939-1945)",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/5/145/Japanese_internment_detainees.jpg,"Moving Image","California Humanities: “We Are the Humanities”",1,0 "Wabi-Sabi: The Perfectly Imperfect","This new outlook on the meaning of beauty has been part of me since that illuminating course, in conscious and unconscious ways. It helped me come to terms with my own imperfections, value simplicity, and accept the fact that things I have loved ended. It helped me embrace my reality as it is, appreciate it, and see the beauty in it. Since then I always try to smile when I notice some damage or rust in things I own and am attached to. I do not want to quickly throw them away, rather, I pause to appreciate the changes time has imprinted on them. It shaped how I think of beauty and assisted me in undoing some of the unrealistic ideals my western culture had instilled in me. Of course, I’m not quite there yet, but I will always be grateful to that class for showing me the beauty of the real, simple, and natural.","As part of my undergraduate degree in Asian studies, I took a class on Haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry. At the time, I knew nothing about Japan beyond its youth’s obsession with Hello Kitty and similar colorful animated characters. In analyzing and understanding the magic of these three-lines poems, we talked a lot about the traditional Japanese aesthetics on which they are based. And it was nothing like Hello Kitty. Traditional Japanese aesthetics–which can be found in their well-known gardens, teahouses, and architecture at large–not only produces well-designed artifacts and surroundings, but also promotes an acceptance of reality. Japanese aesthetics is based on a few principles that highlight the beauty in the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete (of which wabi-sabi are the more known terms to a western audience). These concepts create a realistic understanding of beauty. Taken as a whole, these aesthetic elements unveil the splendor of temporality, constant change, simplicity, imperfections, and even aging. Or, in other words, they embrace and laud life and nature for what they really are. Growing up in a western culture, consuming beauty ideals straight from Hollywood movies, this class opened my eyes to a whole different understanding of beauty. Initially, it seemed foreign and odd, but as the course went on and I had the chance to internalize these ideas they started to make more sense than the ones I have known all my life. This new outlook on the meaning of beauty has been part of me since that illuminating course, in conscious and unconscious ways. It helped me come to terms with my own imperfections, value simplicity, and accept the fact that things I have loved ended. It helped me embrace my reality as it is, appreciate it, and see the beauty in it. Since then I always try to smile when I notice some damage or rust in things I own and am attached to. I do not want to quickly throw them away, rather, I pause to appreciate the changes time has imprinted on them. It shaped how I think of beauty and assisted me in undoing some of the unrealistic ideals my western culture had instilled in me. Of course, I’m not quite there yet, but I will always be grateful to that class for showing me the beauty of the real, simple, and natural.",,,,2006,"Yael Lazar, PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Duke University and a curator for the Humanities Moments Project",,,,,,perfectly-imperfect,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Aesthetics,Beauty,Haiku,Japanese Aesthetics,Poetry,Students,Teachers & Teaching,Tel Aviv, Israel,Wabi-Sabi",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/116/Wabi_Sabi.jpg,Text,,1,0 "The Golden Line",,"I started learning Latin in seventh grade because I decided it was the most difficult course I could take, and I had something to prove. I was an economically disadvantaged student in a wealthy private school, and all of my classmates knew it. I would never live in their mansions, or wear their expensive clothes, or go on their exotic vacations, so I set about making myself at least academically equal. Like most grade school students who read Latin, the poetry of Catullus was some of the first “real” literature I encountered. After the dry, contrived passages in my textbooks, the sensuous love poems and harsh invectives were a welcome change of pace. Catullus’ writing is the rare combination of accessible and beautiful — a perfect entry to Latin poetry.
I did not love Latin before Catullus. I was proud of my success with learning the language, and I dutifully memorized decks of vocabulary cards and recited declensions, but I worked through it without any real joy. Then, in tenth grade, Catullus’ mini-epic poem 64 seduced me and I never recovered. Catullus uses gorgeous, rich language, stunning imagery, and brilliant humor in all of his poetry, but these were not what initially hooked me. No, I fell in love with, of all things, his grammar, and at the same time Latin as a language. In poem 64, Catullus frequently employs what is called “the golden line,” a five word line usually arranged as adjective adjective verb noun noun. Writers in English cannot do this as our word order is too rigid. The precision of Latin grammar is what allowed him to use this rhetorical device and add another layer of nuance to his poetry. Latin writers were freed by the rules and structure of their language.
My life at the time was chaotic. I was still at the private school, shunned by my classmates. My home life was in turmoil. I had moved twelve times by then. With those golden lines, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the structure of Latin. The order both comforted and dazzled me. Latin stopped being a course in which I could prove myself and started being a passion. After Catullus, I devoured Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in high school, and went on to get my B.A. in Classics. Five words changed the course of my entire life.
First century Latin poetry may seem like an esoteric subject, especially one far removed from the concerns of a teenage girl in late 20th century America, but my exposure to Catullus and a learned appreciation for the elegance and beauty of Latin poetic grammar helped forge my life’s path — through college and into my career as a research librarian.
Experiencing the power and nuance of expression created through word transpositions in Latin grammar also opened my mind to the possibilities inherent in other languages and cultures, ideas and realms of feeling that were not only new and exciting — but that were nearly impossible to approximate in any other way.
",,"The poetry of Catullus",,,"Brooke Andrade, Director of the Library, National Humanities Center",,,,,,brooke-andrade-catullus-latin-poetry,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Aesthetics,Books & Reading,Catullus,Classical Literature,Comparative Grammar,Horace,Joy,Latin,Librarians,Literature,Ovid,Poetry,Raleigh, North Carolina,Research,Virgil,Vocation",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/26/catullus-960x590.jpg,Text,,1,0