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"Human Grace",,"In 2009, when I was a freshman in college, I went to France and Germany at the end of a year-long seminar exploring the emergence of European nationalism after 1848. As I majored in History and Art History & Archaeology, this class was right up my alley, so to speak. And not to mention, we traveled to Paris and Berlin!
Naturally, we spent one day exploring the Louvre museum. I was ecstatic to see some of the world's most revered works of the art. I now had the opportunity to see with my own eyes the very pieces that I had spent hours studying and analyzing. One of the first pieces I sought out was a work by Sandro Botticelli--I believe it was Venus and the Three Graces. I stood there mesmerized and soon realized I was crying.
Something clicked for me that day. Perhaps it was the fact that this fresco had survived centuries and, despite its cracks, continued to inspire awe and contemplation. These figures still conveyed such beauty and grace. For me, it was the realization that these works, whose reproductions in textbooks seemed so two-dimensional, were tangible items created by human hands and genius. I carry that understanding and respect with me today, especially as I handle artifacts in museums and archives or read original primary source documents.","Sandro Botticelli","Venus and the Three Graces Presenting Gifts to a Young Woman",,2009,"Lindsey Waldenberg, 31, Public History Ph.D. Student",,,,,,human-grace,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Art,Art History,Art Museums,Botticelli, Sandro,Emotional Experience,Europe,Louvre Museum,Material Culture,Travel",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/472/HM_Louvre_Image.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"The Original Starry Night",,"""Starlight Over the Rhone"" is a precursor to the much more famous ""Starry, Starry Night"" by Vincent van Gogh. It features a boundless black sky that merges into the murky waters of the Rhone below. Stars shine brightly above and are reflected in the river.
The sky, of course, is the most impressive piece of the work, but what I love most about this piece, is the couple walking along the river. The two appear in the bottom right of the painting, and are dwarfed by the landscape. Their faces are indecipherable, and they drift through the space. I think about them often, mostly I think about the idea of relationships and humanity. There are two people, together, compact, wandering, amidst this vast emptiness. They are together.
We don't know who they are, but their comfort is palpable. It almost doesn't matter who they were, it is simply the idea they present: an idea of comfort, of belonging, of compassion, of love that exists amongst all the black. I look at this painting whenever I feel sad, and think about all the love in the world. I think about how in a universe full of emptiness, of vastness, we still have each other here.","Vincent Van Gogh","Van Gogh's painting ""Starlight Over the Rhone""",,"2011 ","Katie Ligmond, 27, Ph.D. Candidate in Visual Studies",,,,,,original-starry-night,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,NHC,"Art,Art History,Humanity,van Gogh, Vincent",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/460/HM_Musee_Image.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Madonna’s Mandorla",,"While acting as a teaching assistant for a large art appreciation course, Caroline Jones witnessed a student’s curiosity about a painting of the Madonna. Such symbols, so pervasive and recognizable in Western culture, she realized, are not as simple and self-contained as they may seem to some of us. The experience helped her to see that even familiar objects are best considered through multiple frames, and that all parts of the humanities—including art history, religion, and history—are made more robust when put into a dialogue with one another.",,,,,"Caroline A. Jones, professor of art history at MIT",,,,,,madonnas-mandorla,,,,,,"
My name is Caroline Jones and I’m a professor of art history at a technical university known as MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve really enjoyed my time at the National Humanities Center because it’s given me an opportunity to think about the humanities, which I don’t always get every day at MIT.
I think for me, a really powerful moment in my thinking about the humanities came when I began my teaching career. I was just a lowly TA and we had a course on the books that was essentially a kind of art appreciation class, and people from the West, from America, might have seen this as a bit of a finishing school or something like that. But one of my students, who was not from this background, said, “Okay, I get all this stuff about the Madonna, but what’s that plate behind her head?”
I realized, in a kind of shimmering cascade, that my cultural upbringing had closed off for me some very deep questions in the humanities that could only be answered by history, by a study of religion, by a question of, where does that plate come from behind the Madonna’s head? What is the mandorla? What is the halo? How much of this is coming from the East? What does it bring with it as a kind of iconography? So the humanities, for me, are a dialogue with all that we have taken for granted, and a way of opening that up to renewed inquiry and a kind of wonder.
",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Art History,Cultural Exchange,History,Madonna,Professors,Religion,Symbolism,Teachers & Teaching",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/8/180/Madonna.jpg,Sound,"National Humanities Center Fellows",1,0 "Algorithms in Funk Music ",,"Late scholar James A. Snead wrote that repetition in Black American creative expression is most prevalent in performance such as rhythm in music, dance and language. He used James Brown's ""Cold Sweat"" to demonstrate this, revealing the algorithmic design of the song.