Month: October 2017

Whitney Museum of America Art

Posted on by j.wu38

With a wide range of museums in New York City, intriguing exhibitions are offered in various fields. Among other museums, I chose the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Whitey Museum consists of American artworks mainly from the twentieth century and temporary exhibitions.

The Whitney building draws attention with its unique building structure. Upon entering, there are glass windows that allow people to grasp an insight of the large and spacious first floor with a gift shop filled with artistic souvenirs and a line to purchase tickets. The exhibitions are divided into three floors each with a different concept and theme. The sixth floor is the Calder exhibition portraying the theme of Hypermobility. Calder’s sculptures depict kineticism in which it was fascinating to see because unlike other exhibition with framed artworks, Calder uses sculpture to express his idea of movement into sculpture. Through this exhibition, I learned about Alexander Calder and his concept of hypermobility. Calder asserts in combining motion and his sculptures. He believes that if artworks can be composed of colors, then motions should also be included. It was impressive to witness Calder’s sculptures slowly spin and rotate on its own.

Unlike Calder’s exhibition, “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017” provides historical context of political and social disputes in America. The exhibition greatly demonstrates Americans’ resistance towards wars in the 1950s. Out of all the artworks, Edward Kienholz’s “The Non-War Memorial” stood out to me the most. Instead of using a painting, Kiehholz expresses his idea by putting military uniforms on the floor symbolizing the dead soldiers to provoke a sensation of war terror.

Overall, I would recommend others to visit the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is fairly close to Baruch and the exhibitions are highly intriguing and inspiring.

 

A visit to the Met.

Posted on by m.yuan

For this week’s blog post, me, Kevin, Aliou, and Sergio decided to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art located around 85th Street. It was going to be a 20 minute ride so we decided to go out of our comfort zone and go to a museum. If I didn’t have a particular reason to go to a museum (aka this assignment) then I typically wouldn’t go. On the train ride, there was a lady with a Chihuahua puppy. The first thing that comes to me when I hear Chihuahua was an annoying dog that constantly barks. However, this puppy was rather obedient and well behaved. Once we got out of the train, I realized that we were around Central Park. I haven’t been in Central Park since the Summer and the weather was beautiful that I wish I could take a stroll the park.

We decided to go to the Met because we thought that admission was free to college students. We were wrong. When explaining to the lady at the kiosk, she explained that only Columbia Students get free admission. With a group talk, I decided to donate a dollar and Aliou donated a dime. Desperate times call for ridiculous donations when the sign clearly states “suggested donation”.

The exhibit we viewed was a statue from Ancient Greece. It was cool how the statue was one of the first known marble statues in a life-scale. I found it unique how the statue was missing a part of it’s face, showing that there may be multiple interpretations of who it could be. After walking around for a while, we decided to leave because frankly, we don’t like museums.

 

 

 

 

Museum of Modern Art

Posted on by m.rabinovich

After English class on Thursday I went alone to the Museum of Modern Art. Luckily for me there was a 6 train that went there straight from Baruch.  This is a museum I am familiar with and visit a lot. They always add new artworks and exhibits throughout the year. I got to the museum about an hour before closing so I had a good amount of time to explore. Not much has changed since the last time I visited.

The museum has 6 floors filled with interesting pieces of art. The interior design of the building is really cool too. Most people think of art work as a painting or photograph but there is way more too it. For example I saw carvings and handmade work. There are different types of artwork too. The main ones I checked out where: Impressionism.Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism and Surrealism. My favorite out of the bunch has to be surrealism. Surrealism paints dreams. Surrealism is my favorite because the artist can express anything imaginable on the design. It looks futuristic as well.  I found it really cool to look at art in person compared to seeing it in a book. Last year I read a book analyzing different types of artwork throughout the world. They had many drawings/paintings from the book at the MOMA museum. I thought these pieces of art would look huge but it turned out most of them looked tiny. The Persistence of Memory is a painting by Salvador Dali that really stands out to me. It expressed imagination and the colors Dali used were extraordinary.

The painting I took a selfie with was actually painted by a man that works at the Museum of Modern Art. Unfortunately  I didn’t get an opportunity to meet with him. The experience I got from going to this musuem was really informational and showed me that I could learn a lot outside of school. I will be taking advantage of more free museums in the future.

 

 

 

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Going to the Whitney

Posted on by b.li5

On Wednesday, we went to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Before we arrive, we had to walk many long blocks from the L train to the museum. As we approached the museum, we went up to the front desk to acquire our free tickets since we are CUNY students. As this continued, the woman at the front desk kindly gave us white and beautiful tickets that displayed generic fonts of admission to the museum. The lady then told us that we had to go through baggage check in; however, my group and I decided to take the elevator that we first saw and it was the elevator that skipped the basement floor, which was baggage check in. Instead, we immediately arrived at the third floor where I had to urgently use the bathroom. Afterwards, we had gone to the 8th floor to see what was up there. When we arrived, we did not feel satisfied of the certain pictures and displays that they had. So we decided to go down to the 7th floor where we saw more paintings to our liking. I found an oil on a canvas painting which was primarily colors of black, beige, and maroon while it had little streaks of grey, dark blue, light blue, yellow, and orange. When I looked at the picture, it reminded me of a pizza slice because of the yellow and maroon colors. However, this pizza slice picture elicited emotions such as confusion, mellowness, joy, and a hope for a new beginning. After looking at this painting, we decided to head down to another floor where we saw more abstract art of propaganda during the cold war era. We saw uniforms of soldiers laying on the floor as if they had been positioned the way that dead people would be. This entire experience I would say was a very unique experience because we were 2 minutes late to sociology but overall it was good since we saw beautiful art.

Just us in front of a sculpture

The MET

Posted on by r.wadolowski

Today, I went with Daniel Mastebowski to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I found out that the blog was due of friday of this week, I began to panic because I didn’t think I had anytime in my schedule, but somehow some higher power heard of my struggle and my thursday math class was cancelled. With this beautiful chunk of time now in my schedule I made my way to the MET. When I got there I was surprised to find out that admission wasn’t free so after a fierce back and forth with the cashier, not really, I coughed up a dollar.

Once in there, I was admiring all the statues and artwork. For the blog I need a picture of me in the museum so while I was standing next to a photograph of a couple on a date, and employee at the MET started yelling at me about the how everything is delicate and how he would personally sue me if I broke anything. After a second of confusion I realized that the man didn’t even work there so I started to touch as many things as possible in front of him. When Daniel and I saw him starting to talk to an actual employee we left rapidly.

I am actually really glad we were assigned to explore New York City because it reminded me of all the good memories of me visiting a variety of places on school trips back in the day. Now I am really considering going to the Museum of Moving Images with my friends after school one day. Another thing I learned today was that Alexander the great was a total badass, there was one war in which his army of 40,000 was able to outsmart and entire Persian army of 250,000. Most leader would not be able to win this kind of battle but Alexander the Great used techniques such as the hammer and anvil technique where the opposing army would be attacked from two fronts. In addition to this, even when his own army outnumbered the opposing army, he would never surprise attack them when they weren’t ready because they viewed that as a cowardly way to fight.

Some guy screamed at me not to touch stuff, so I touched everything I saw

Metropolitan Museum of Art by Kevin Z.

Posted on by k.zheng3

On Wednesday, 10/11, a group of us went to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The group included Sergio, Aliou, Michael Y, and I. The train ride was interesting as there was a woman that brought her dog aboard. I was trying to get the dog to lick my hand but it never so that was a bummer. As we got off at 77th street off the 6 train we had to walk a couple blocks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Upon arrival, there was security check which we passed with ease. At first, we didn’t know what exhibit to attend so we stood there for a while. Then we realized we had to get a ticket to enter so we waited on line. For some odd reason, the wait on line was long. Why do people visit a museum on a Wednesday afternoon????? Anyways, on the Freshman Seminar book, it said that we could attend any NYC museum and if we displayed our student ID’s that it would be free admission. However, the lady that rung us up, didn’t permit free admission unless we were Columbia University’s students, so the freshman Seminar book was a lie. We ended up paying a dollar for all of us to enter. We saw this exhibit that displayed half a head. I thought it was interesting so we just ended up spending time examining it. The head is believed to represent a young god and possibly Alexander the Great. After exiting the museum, we each went our separate ways. Aliou and I ended up taking the 6 train towards downtown. Along the way to the train station, a homeless guy said to Aliou, “Where did you get Chinaman from?” We both thought it was pretty funny especially the way he said it. Aliou ended up taking the train back to Baruch to study cause he’s a studious kid and I ended up going home cause I was tired. This image requires alt text, but the alt text is currently blank. Either add alt text or mark the image as decorative.

Academic- Trip to the MoMa Museum

Posted on by a.wong11

After I finished my freshman seminar class on Friday, I went to the MoMA Museum in Manhattan with my friends. It is an art museum which displayed many famous artworks and art pieces. The museum is large and I had to walk a little further into the museum to check in and get my tickets. There was a mandatory bag check to see if your bag meets the size requirement. Fortunately, our bags were allowed in. I picked up a brochure which shows the floors and the outline of the museum. In the museum, there are 6 floors and 2 floors in the basement.

In the lobby, the view inside the museum was amazing The walls were made out of glass and we could look outside. We could see a small garden outside known as the Sculpture Garden.  My friends and I did go out and admire the garden at some point. there was a huge pretty rose displayed. There were chairs that we can sit in and there was some greenery. There was also a circular glass displayed right in the middle of the garden.

There were many beautiful artworks that I had seen and enjoy. The artworks were hanged on a plain white wall. I saw a variety of artworks by Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol- to list a few. One of my favorite artwork is called The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh on the 5th floor. After viewing the artworks on the top floors, we went to the basement. There were some photos displayed on the walls and a theater. All of the pictures and film we saw in the theater were black and white. I went through a short escalator to go to one of the theaters. It was smaller than I expected; there were a few pictures and a big screen displayed. We watched a silent black and white film of the daily lives of Americans in New York in 1911. This is one of my favorite part of the museum. I liked how the film told a lot of stories without the use of audio. Just by watching the film, I can see people walking int he streets in New York, how New York City looked back then, how people dressed, people riding in carriages pulled by horses, and much more.

How attending this museum will assist me in my first semester in Baruch by allowing me to travel through the city and find different places to explore. I think going to different places other than just attending college is beneficial and allows me to have a broader view of things.This image requires alt text, but the alt text is currently blank. Either add alt text or mark the image as decorative.