Artifacts at the Museum
Recently, I've found myself longing to take advantage of the Smithsonian Museums that are so conveniently located ten miles northeast of my home- maybe it's because such destinations were closed for a long period of time due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I figured that I might as well take advantage of these attractions re-opening and welcoming guests. Only a select few Smithsonian venues have opened their doors and so I decided to visit one that I've always enjoyed in the past, the Freer Gallery of Art. The Freer Gallery of Art boasts an impressive collection of art from East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, and the Middle East. The collections range from the late Neolithic period to the modern era- there is certainly plenty to see. One of the main attractions located in the Freer Gallery is the <em>Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room</em>. This is a beautifully decorated room that serves as a lasting example of aestheticism. Despite the beauty and enveloping nature of the Peacock Room, I found my humanities moment in other places within the museum. <br /><br />My humanities moment came to me while viewing pottery, porcelain, ceramics, paintings, and sculptures from East Asia and South Asia. The connections to be made between cultures in India, China, and Korea, simply by identifying the similarities and trends in the artifacts seemed endless. Whether it was a ceramic-making technique or the spread and artistic display of Buddhism that could be traced across civilizations- regional interaction was present. Part of being a Social Studies teacher is facilitating the process of students making connections through the examination of regional interactions across time. Making those connections helps students be more globally-minded citizens.
Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
July 17, 2021
G. Lee, 33, Social Studies Teacher
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World History Puzzles
I have vague recollections of eating my packed lunch on the stone steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art after completing a scavenger hunt for facts about particular paintings deemed important by my elementary school teacher. <br /><br />I more distinctly remember returning to that art museum with my mom a few years later to view the <em>Monet’s Water Lilies: An Artist’s Obsession</em> exhibition. I had already developed a partiality for impressionism, and Monet specifically, probably from that early field trip, and we discussed the similarities and subtle differences in each iteration of the painting. Alongside the paintings were photographs of the gardens from Monet’s time as well as modern images that immediately put this French commune on our travel bucket list. <br /><br />My mom and I haven’t made it to Giverny yet, but this summer we traveled to see the <em>Monet and Boston: Legacy Illuminated</em> exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. This collection featured Monet’s paintings alongside works from his predecessor Millet and contemporary Rodin, but it was the comparison to the Japanese artist Hokusai that I found most surprising - until I learned that the forced reopening of Japan to foreign trade in the nineteenth century exposed Western Europeans to Japanese style and culture which inspired many artists of the time, including Monet. <br /><br />This art exhibition displayed the interconnectedness of political and economic power plays, expanding global trade networks, and cultural diffusion. And it has been by teaching my students how to analyze the content and context of paintings, maps, and other images that they have been able to put together the pieces that make up the puzzle that is world history. But I was doing to my students what my elementary school teacher did to me twenty years earlier. <br /><br />I selected all of the visual sources used in my classroom and explained how students should analyze them in order to understand the past - I was making them all complete my version of the world history puzzle. But then I came across the <em>Black Histories, Black Futures</em> exhibition curated by local high school students who developed a theme to explore, selected the works of art to display, and wrote the labels to provide context for three galleries throughout the MFA. These students actively researched and interpreted historical information to reach their own understandings about a past that was important to them. Next year, I look forward to seeing how my students put the pieces of world history together to create their own unique puzzles … and maybe even to curate their own museum galleries!
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
<em>Black Histories, Black Futures</em>
June 18, 2021
Sarah Bartosiak, High School Social Studies Teacher
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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! <br /><br />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 <em>Venus and the Three Graces</em>. I stood there mesmerized and soon realized I was crying. <br /><br />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
<em>Venus and the Three Graces Presenting Gifts to a Young Woman</em>
2009
Lindsey Waldenberg, 31, Public History Ph.D. Student
human-grace
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. <br /><br />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 <em>Les Demoiselles d’Avignon</em> left the biggest imprint. I had learned about this painting’s role in the history of modern art in Simon Schama’s <em>Power of Art</em>, but understanding something intellectually, and then being overpowered by it aesthetically represented entirely different experiences.<br /><br />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
<em>Les Demoiselles d'Avignon</em>
Summer 2009
Ivana Ancic, Ph.D. Candidate
afternoon-MoMA
Buddhism and Art
As I was walking through the MFA I saw some statues of Buddha and buddhavistas. Finally I saw an ahbatabi Buddha shrine. I connected what I was learning with the museum and saw a noticeable difference between the pure land and other Buddhism sect shrines.
Asian art exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
John Batchelor 19, college student
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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
Finding Meaning in Art
My moment came at one of the least expected times for me over the past few weeks. To begin, I am not a lover of art. I generally am not a fan of art museums at all. About four years ago I married my wife who was a fine arts major at Penn State University and is currently an art teacher in Wake County, North Carolina. She has tried to convince me of the value of works of art and she has taken me to numerous art museums. I have never been one to get it, though, as I see a painting or sculpture and then move on to the next one.
On Wednesday July 25th, 2018 our NEH Summer Institute (Contested Territory) made a trip to the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina and my group went to the second floor to spend thirty minutes looking at one piece of art from Southeast Asia. This work was by Dinh Q. Le called Untitled #9 from Cambodia: Splendor and Darkness and I could not believe there was nothing else in the room beyond one piece of art. We were asked to bring our chairs up close to the piece. When we were asked to explain what we saw in the work, I was amazed that so many people could see so much and such a variety of things in the work. We switched angles and people then explained the new things they saw from a different perspective. I couldn’t believe it. One work of art could bring so much out of so many different people. The artist in this particular piece was attempting to display some of the horror and emotion associated with the violence in Cambodia in the late 1970’s.
When I spoke with my wife about it that evening she got excited. Without even seeing the piece she tried to explain what the artist may have been attempting to do with colors and what he may have sought by placing the pictures how he did. While I am in no way going to become an art expert, the emotion one work could bring from so many people was a valuable lesson for me and gives me new appreciation for the role art can play in keeping history alive.
<em>Untitled #9 from Cambodia: Splendor and Darkness</em> by Dinh Q. Lê
July 25, 2018
Michael Miragliuolo, 43, Social Studies Teacher at Green Hope HS in Cary, NC
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Nighthawks at the Museum
Answering the question whether a humanities moment looks different across generations, David Denby shares an example of such a moment he and his son experienced together at the Art Institute of Chicago.
David Denby, author, journalist, film critic for the New Yorker
david-denby-nighthawks-at-the-diner
“You don’t just run, you run to some place wonderful.”
<em>From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler</em> turned Deborah Ross’s world upside down. Kongisberg’s book, which just celebrated its 50th anniversary, chronicles the adventures of Claudia and her brother, who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book kindled Ross’s imagination so much that when she visited the museum with her parents, she retraced the protagonist’s steps in search of the Egyptian cat, the fountain, and Michelangelo’s sculpture.
<em>From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler</em> by E.L. Konigsburg
Deborah Ross, U.S. Representative for North Carolina's 2nd District
deborah-ross-someplace-wonderful
Haute Couture: Fashion Fair and the Empowerment of the Black Community
<p>I recall flipping through <em>Ebony</em> magazine as a child in the 80s and often seeing pictures of Fashion Fair models. It didn’t dawn on me then how the power of fashion was being used to inspire an entire community. After seeing “Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair” at the North Carolina Museum of Art, it became clear to me. I developed a deeper sense of the importance of John and Eunice Johnson’s creation.</p>
<p>The Johnsons started Fashion Fair in 1958. This quote by Mr. Johnson, which was a part of the exhibit, placed Fashion Fair into greater context for me:</p>
<p>“<em>Ebony</em> was founded to testify to the possibilities of a new and different world. In a world of despair, we wanted to give hope. In a world of negative Black images, we wanted to provide positive Black images. In a world that said Blacks could do few things, we wanted to say they could do everything.” –John H. Johnson, from his autobiography, <em>Succeeding Against the Odds</em>, 1989</p>
<img width="600" height="464" src="http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/john-johnson-ebony-quote.jpg" />
<p>Fashion Fair was more than models strutting the runway in expensive designer clothing. It was an empowering and uplifting cultural force and antithetical to the negative portrayal of Blacks at the time. Fashion Fair debunked commonly held beliefs about Blacks. It showed them as beautiful, successful, glamorous, classy, and dignified. Ebony Fashion Fair ended in 2009. Yet, it cemented its place in history.</p>
John and Eunice Johnson
<em>Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair</em>, an exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art
2017
Olympia Friday, Digital Engagement & Marketing Coordinator, National Humanities Center
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Visiting the Art Museum
On a school trip from suburban New Jersey when I was in second grade, I could take on the role of Claudia, admiring the works of art on display but also wondering: who made this? Why? How did it come to be here? These questions helped me realize from a young age the enormous potential of the experience of a work of art—to fascinate personally but also to open up a window onto the past. All of this activated by the curiosity to know more about what is staring you in the face.
My family always visited art museums when I was a child. I’m not quite sure why, as we never talked about the art, and I wondered, in secret, what exactly we were supposed to be doing there. When I was about eight years old, I read a book that answered that question: <em>From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler</em> by E. L. Konigsburg. It is the story of two children—a brother and a sister—who run away from home to solve the mystery of a sculpture: was it a long-lost work by Michelangelo? They hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, borrowing coins from the fountain to buy food, sleeping in a magnificent bed in a period room, and blending in with school groups. More importantly, the sister Claudia is entranced by the Renaissance sculpture of an angel then on display at the museum, and she is determined to get to the bottom of the question of authorship: is it really a Michelangelo? And, if so, how did it end up in the museum?<br /><br />On a school trip from suburban New Jersey when I was in second grade, I could take on the role of Claudia, admiring the works of art on display but also wondering: who made this? Why? How did it come to be here? These questions helped me realize from a young age the enormous potential of the experience of a work of art—to fascinate personally but also to open up a window onto the past. All of this activated by the curiosity to know more about what is staring you in the face.
E. L. Konigsburg
<em>From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler</em> by E. L. Konigsburg
1984
<a href="https://mornaoneill.wordpress.com/">Morna O’Neill</a>, age 41, art history professor
visiting-the-art-museum
“I was dragged, kicking and screaming, to a van Gogh exhibition”
I get chills thinking about it even now, because to have this extraordinary storyteller explaining to you what was going on at that point in van Gogh’s life—what this meant to him, what it should mean to us—but still leaving the whole painting open to individual interpretation, it was really something that, to me, was quite profound.
In what I believe was the latter part of the 1980s, I was dragged, kicking and screaming, to a van Gogh exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. And for the first time in my life, I wore one of those machines around my neck, where you listen to headphones and you hear somebody describe what it is you’re going to see. It was a brand-new experience.
The narrator was the then-director of the Metropolitan Museum, Philippe de Montebello, and at the introductory part of the exhibit, I was really struck by the quality of what he was saying. It was so well written that it really bordered on being fine literature.... As we went from room to room, his storytelling, and the visual impact of my seeing these extraordinary paintings by this extraordinary, troubled person, made an impact on me that I still think about, probably, every month.
There was a new richness in what I saw, but also a level of insight into what van Gogh had done that magnified to a great degree the impact that it had on me. Looking back on it, coming at a part of my life where I had been underground for a long time, as a law student, and then as a young lawyer, it pulled me back into the knowledge that there was this greater, more interesting world out there; one to which I owed a lot more attention. From then on, I dedicated myself to making sure that I was going to live a life that was more rich.
I get chills thinking about it even now, because to have this extraordinary storyteller explaining to you what was going on at that point in van Gogh’s life—what this meant to him, what it should mean to us—but still leaving the whole painting open to individual interpretation, it was really something that, to me, was quite profound.
Vincent van Gogh
An exhibit of Vincent van Gogh's paintings
C. Allen Parker, General Counsel, Wells Fargo & Company
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