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

Deep in the bowels of the Macaulay Honors College Building on November 11, 2008 we were privy to a small and intimate reading of Frances Richey poems by none other than Mrs. Richey herself.

She smiled somewhat nervously at the audience and adjusted her purple cardigan set. She beamed at them with her eyes smiling through her square lenses. There was not much to set her apart from an average benevolent looking middle age woman as I observed her from the second row. That was until she started to talk about her son directly and through her poems. [Read more →]

Not everything looks worse in black and white.  In the case of David Fenton’s small gem of a photography collection “The Eye of the Revolution”, worse could be more loosely translated to more serious.

These serious images of the seventies revolution are pocketed away in the nondescript Steven Kasher Gallery. This small exhibit is in a high ceiling room with the black and white photo prints interrupting the otherwise stark white walls. Their somber gray tones draw the unsuspecting viewer in with a note of concern. After a closer inspection they either draw back with indulgent smiles. John Lennon and Yoko Ono onstage together, Mick Jagger doing a power jump, bare feet dancing girls with long flowing hair. [Read more →]

“Let me introduce you to my man Clay!”  The hip one man musical with hip hop, yes hip-hop.

Now any skeptic or Broadway buff that might scoff at the idea of hip-hop or any non traditional form of music on a stage.  They might even deign to hide a condescending laugh at the idea of a white guy going to a bookstore of all places and rapping his way to self-actualization. Just watching the first five minutes of “Clay” can change those judgmental notions and there lies the power of Mr. Sax. Matt Sax’s refreshing rhymes and contagiously energetic performance joins the ranks of such musicals as “In the Heights” a Broadway musical with the enterprising Lin Manuel Miranda. [Read more →]

In that small box, amidst a few torn dresses, some letters from her daughter and sister, and a picture of her husband’s funeral lay fifty-five rupees that Firdosi Begum was saving in order to someday perform the Muslim pilgrimage.  To this day, these few mementos are a perfect description of how she lived her life:  surviving extreme poverty, loving unconditionally, and fulfilling the dreams of others while strangling her own. [Read more →]

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A supposedly wise man had once said, “What makes any endeavor worthy of pursuit is not that it will uphold our original prejudices but that it will enlighten us.” I often limited that ideology to science, which I considered to be the only field where such drastically different results could be yielded.  After having done this project, however, I believe that one’s worldly prejudices can be just as easily changed with genuinely insightful thinking. [Read more →]

Urban Bush Women and Compagnie Jant-Bi, as a part of the 2008 Next Wave Festival, collaborated on the production of Les écailles de la mémoire, or The Scales of Memory.  Sadly, despite the involvement of award winning choreographers and world-renown dance companies, Les écailles de la mémoire proves be a disjunctive work that is far less than the sum of its parts. [Read more →]

New York Times columnist and author of Jew vs. Jew, there are some circles where Samuel G. Freedman needs no introduction.  Currently a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freedman has seen tremendous success in life.  Arguably his greatest work, Who She Was, however, is one that seemingly came from one of his failures in life, his failure as a son. [Read more →]

Historians argue as to what were the reasons for the world’s separation into seven continents.  Some historians, however, spend more time arguing why it became necessary for the worlds to meet once again.  Regardless of why it happened, different cultures around the world developed on their own, only to collide with others.  The result was that the people saw confusion, rulers saw gold, and artists saw a new medium of expression. [Read more →]

In a place like New York City, cultural diversity flourishes. With the theme of cultural encounters in mind, I decided to make my collage revolve around my personal cultural encounter between American and Chinese culture. I am known as an ABC, an American-born-Chinese. For a time in my life, I actually thought of myself as two parts participating in a competition. Both ethnicities, it seemed, were trying to win me over to their side. I felt like I was often stuck in between, much like the hyphen in the word “Chinese-American”. In this collage, I explored the different cultures and values that I grew up with. [Read more →]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now featuring “Beyond Babylon”, a special exhibit that explores the artistic and cultural traditions of the Near East during the second millennium B.C. With approximately 350 objects on display, “Beyond Babylon” explored the art created in the circle of network among affluent kings and merchants. What attracted my attention the most besides the shiny gold artifacts were small objects that belonged to royalty and alluded to divine presences/gods. Evidently, there was a story behind each object. [Read more →]