I am going to preview this post by saying I have never been to a gallery before in my life. Our class field trip to the Luhring Augustine gallery and the Anders Wahlstedt Fine Art gallery was an extremely fun experience. I felt very posh and very bougee visiting these galleries and I also liked looking at the interesting art pieces.One of my favorites was the sculpture by Simone Leigh shown in the picture above. I truly loved the aesthetics of it with the different textures, colors, and the way it was displayed as well. As for the second gallery we visited, though I do not understand abstract art and it is not my favorite type of art, I really enjoyed learning about the process Frank Stella used to make his pieces. I was almost more interested in the journey rather than the final destination, i.e. the print.

Texture and color wise, the Simone Leigh sculpture shown above was one of the most complex pieces in Leigh’s collection. Featuring “clothes” of beige-yellow straw, a black ceramic bust, a light colored shell-like texture for the hair, and a black ceramic vase opening to top off the piece, this sculpture was very aesthetically pleasing and more “realistic” to the human form than some of the other sculptures in the Luhring Augustine gallery. From what I understand about Leigh’s work, she builds these sculptures fusing traditional African pottery style with some African traits. Sometimes, the vases can act as crowns. Since these features are often not displayed in museums and such, I appreciated Leigh’s intentions to represent something that is not represented in the mainstream. I could especially relate to this being a minority myself and not having representation for my culture in American society. I also admired the material she used for the hair since it added another interesting element to the piece as well as served her purpose of representing traditional African features.

In the Anders Wahlstedt gallery, I enjoyed learning about the process Frank Stella used to go through to produce his art. His process first involved making the actual pieces he would use to stamp on the paper, then adding color to those pieces, running it through a compression machine, and once all these steps were completed to his satisfaction, he would go back and manually add color to where he felt it was required. I liked the attention to detail he had and his dedication of sticking to his artistic vision and not being satisfied and making multiple prints until he thought he had replicated his vision in real life. Though I could not tell you how his prints were related to Moby Dick or what they were trying to say in the first place, I definitely have an appreciation for both artists and their visions.