I learned quite a lot about my first experience to an art gallery with my IDC class, learning to appreciate other cultures and perceiving art in a new way. The first exhibit that I went to with class looked odd, and out of the ordinary in Chelsea Galleries. The Simone Leigh exhibition sends this melting pot of New York City a powerful message. After the reading, I realized that each art work is priced at nearly $100,000. When I walked inside the spacious gallery, I walked around each sculpture appreciating and trying to gain insight about the context of the work. At first, there was a very large room with only a handful of sculptures and to me this meant that people should take a couple steps back and appreciate the sculpture from a distance. What grasped my attention however, was the towering hut and placed ontop was an African American woman respresing power and the so called “head of the house” I believe Simone Leigh was placing emphasis on female power as this African woman was standing tall and all the people walking in had to literally look up to her.

The gallerist Anders Walhstedt opened my eyes to a new perspective about the selected prints from Frank Stella’s Moby Dick series. At first what I saw on display were vibrant colorful splatters of paint with different shapes and sizes all colliding in one image. However, after the class gathered around the computer to watch the video with gallerist Walhstedt it opened a new lens allowing to gain a better understanding of the painting. Through the video, I learned that some of the paintings by Frank Stella required multiple hands and a lot of working space. Moving the painting from the painting room, to the printing room, and even into an enormous printing-press like machine. I concluded that there was a lot of energy and time taken into these paintings rather than just a splatter of paint and an elementary school student playing with triangles and squares. I noticed like most galleries and museums, the walls are white to specifically blind out the background and bring focus just to the art piece. The window’s shades were partially open allowing sunlight into the gallery presenting an ever brighter and vibrant painting. Zooming into the painting itself, I not only visualized the painting but I encountered the sense of sound. The wavy piano lines in the center of the painting surrounded by the bright pink, orange, red, and blue somehow allowed me to feel a serene tone. Sometimes gaining insight about the artist, the process, and the story behind it actually does help the understanding of the painting.