Arts in New York City: Baruch College, Fall 2008, Professor Roslyn Bernstein

How can we relive the past? I do not mean fifty years ago, or even a hundred. I mean four thousand years! Most people wonder in awe about what life was like such a long time ago. Did humans look the same as they do now? What kind of activities did people engage in? What did they wear? With new and innovative technologies emerging at what seems like lightning speed, uncovering the past seems like a more and more feasible feat. Thanks in large part to Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman and The Hagop Kevorkian Fund, as well as other sponsors, a new exhibition titled “Beyond Babylon” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was made possible. This intriguing exhibit takes us on an adventure through the Mesopotamian region in the Second Millennium B.C, showcasing ancient jewelry, weapons, and texts.
Walking through the doorway of the exhibit, it feels like you enter into a whole new world. In stark contrast to the off-white walls of the rest of the museum, the walls at “Beyond Babylon” are colored a bold blue. It is a good recreation of the old world. The ceilings are high and the doorways are massive, being a good representation of the word Babylon itself, which when disassembled into its parts means “gateway of deities”. It was clear indeed that deities had a powerful influence on the people of the Mesopotamian region in those days. On exhibit were various religious figures. Also, uncovered from Egypt during the Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 12-13, was a wand. It was decorated with fantastic creatures and deities. Supposedly, it had a protective function. Circular motions were made with it over children to protect them during the night. It was made from beautiful hippopotamus ivory, as were many of the artifacts from this time.
Besides wands and such, weapons are also a big part of the exhibit. One particularly beautiful weapon was an Axe inscribed with Ahmos. It is made of gold, electrum, copper alloy, semi-precious stones, and wood. This battle-axe exemplifies the ingenuity of the people in those days, as well as their artistic and creative ability. This battle-axe can be considered as much a weapon as an artistic piece. Probably one of the most revealing artifacts of the time is The Uluburun Shipwreck. This ship was carrying 17 tons of cargo and 15,000 artifacts from 12 different cultures, including the Canaanite, Mycenaean, Cypriot, Egyptian, Nubian, Baltic, northern Balkan, Kassite, and Assyrian. At the exhibit, inside a fake vessel, are housed horse training manuals, cups and vessels, helmets and armory, as well as glass and ceramics.
“Beyond Babylon” is an exciting and interactive exhibit. There is a ton of information available, including a short film. In a rather small space, the creators manage to display artifacts from over ten different cultures, and from over 4 thousand years ago. This exhibit is an educational experience where you can come pretty close to reliving the past.

Street photography is the art of observing glimpses of every day life, freezing them, and putting them on display. Why is this an art? Photography is an art because in a sense it is subjective, and there is a huge element of creativity that is part of it. A photographer must see past what the naked eye sees. He or she must differentiate between something that is striking versus something that is plain. He or she must see colors not just as a characteristic of an object, but as a part of the whole image. Nowadays, taking a picture with a camera can be as easy as a click of a button, but it takes someone with creativity and insight to capture a genuinely good image. When I took on my own street photography project, I realized just how difficult taking a picture really is. [Read more →]

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The photos presented were taken at three separate locations at three different times.  The ones that were taken first are the prominently orange photos, those littered with utility poles and water towers, were taken on the way back from LBI during an early summer sunset.  I gasped at the colors flooding the car and related to my mother how much I love telephone wires.  In response she fished my camera out of the back and handed it over.  I clicked the last of the sun’s fading rays into the memory card and dubbed the collection of blurred telephone wires “pretty jersey” in tribute to New Jersey’s often discounted and ignored beauty.  The set is full of traffic lights and pick-up trucks, the highlight being a perfectly placed water tower, which was well within my camera’s grasp.  [Read more →]

A play about something as gargantuan as the worth of thirteen lives, about their daily narrow escape from death should leave a viewer with some resounding sense of something.  One should be left with a feeling just as huge as the implications of the play.  Yet I left the theatre with nothing more then an appreciative shrug for what Irena did. [Read more →]

Collage

The title of my collage is “Eurotrip”. The reason I named it this was because the subject of the college is the trip I made with my family to Europe this past summer. We visited Paris, three cities in Belgium, and Amsterdam. I included little pieces of memories and things/ places I enjoyed most, mainly from Paris and Belgium. Instead of putting the combination of photos and objects on plain paper, I decided to make the background a map of central Paris. It is colorful and catches the eye, and gives the background much more meaning than a simple, colored paper. [Read more →]

The dawn of a new millennium, the advent of sophisticated technology, and my family’s coincidental relocation to Seattle, WA were all possible factors that contributed to my mother’s pivotal change in careers. I remember as a child I would awaken to the sound of her tinkering with a computer, and I would fume over my expulsion from her study. She had to go back to school for computer science, and by the time I was ten she was working for large corporations. In my mind she had always occupied a place on the rising tides of technology, and I rarely asked about her enigmatic history as a book editor for Knopf and Pantheon. I have come to realize, however, that her time spent at Knopf shaped the woman I know as my mother. She was just a Midwesterner straight out of New York University, naïve to the inexorable madness of the city, yet she was always loyal to her own moral probity. This is my effort to articulate her story. [Read more →]

At first I thought it would be a simple task. How hard could photography be? Little did I know that photography was actually harder than I thought. My biggest problem was that I had difficulty choosing a theme. I have always taken pictures of auspicious occasions, family and friends, landscapes and pretty objects. Therefore, doing this project was actually new to me because I would have to go looking for pictures to match up to my theme. After compiling about 200 pictures that I took and leafing through each one, I realized that most of my pictures related to one theme: people struggling to cope with everyday life for everyday living. With the amount of pictures I took in the subway and in the streets, I came up with the title I have because of the correlation between people trying to make a living on the streets and those doing the same underground but in a different way. [Read more →]

Who was my mother before I was born? This is a question that I have not really confronted before, probably because I am always so busy with the present, and especially busy with thinking about what the future holds for me. While our country is in a deep recession, it is important to think about certain changes that I might possibly have to make to prepare myself for a grim future. However, this does not mean that the past holds no importance. Why do we study the past? Many historians might argue that learning the past can help us prepare for the future, because history repeats itself. Although this might hold true, this trend usually occurs every half- century or century at least. My mother is only 38 years old, so her past is not so far away. Nonetheless, memories can easily be forgotten, and in order to salvage these precious memories, I decided to learn more about what life was like during my mother’s childhood in the Soviet Union. All I can remember is the struggles of my parents during immigration to the United States, but was this future already in my mother’s mind in the 1970’s and 1980’s? Probably not. As I grow older, I begin to understand what kind of a person my mother is. She is caring and loving as a mother should be, but at the same time she is a fierce competitor, leader, and perfectionist. These qualities must have been instilled in her before I was born, so I wanted to delve into her past and see her growth, as she became the person that she is today. [Read more →]

     Today, my grandmother, Jeannie lives in a condo in Florida. Most of her neighbors are originally from the New York area. Among her friends, there are many who also grew up on the Lower East Side and the Bronx.

       Jeannie was born on Feb. 21, 1933 on the Lower East Side. Her parents were both immigrants. Her mother, Tillie , came from Lizhensk, a village in Eastern Europe, and her father Joseph came from Russian controlled Poland. Jeannie spoke Yiddish at home, and only learned English once she went to public school. She also grew up with her maternal grandparents living in their apartment.  They were very religious people; Baba Raizl wore a wig, and Zeida Shmeil had a long beard. However, her grandmother did not think religion was as important for the younger generation; she felt there should not be that burden upon Jeannie and her two younger sisters, Sally and Sharon.

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In America today everyone expects things to be instant. People want to get fast money without saving, they want to lose weight immediately without diets, and they want technology to work faster and faster. Society has no patience to wait for things to happen, and they want instant gratification. The collage is designed to have a congested feeling. We expect so many things to happen instantly, that our lives have become much more complicated. Even though everything is supposed to be easier and simpler, the instant culture causes people to try to do too much at once.         

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