I had not noticed this when I first entered Baruch, but the Newman Vertical Campus can be both a college building and a museum.
When we go to museums such as the Metropolitan or the Guggenheim, we enter through the doors with a mindset of expecting to see great pieces of art. When we go to Baruch, we go through the turnstiles focusing on our next class or thinking about a paper due in a week; looking at art is probably not our main focus. However, on the walls of the Newman Vertical Campus, much like on the walls of the Metropolitan or the Guggenheim, there are some great paintings that I always notice and take a few seconds to look at before entering the classroom.
Doing some last minute practice for my speeches for Speech Communication, I always sit in front of this painting.
Going up the escalators to my large Introductory to Business Lecture, I notice these paintings
.
Exiting the 8th floor escalators to my English class, I pass by these colorful paintings.
There are probably so many more great paintings throughout the building that I have never seen before and that just shows how the Newman Vertical Campus can be, in a way, a museum.
Feel free to share or describe any paintings or works of art that you always notice on your way to classes!
Walking towards the Guggenheim for the first time, the first piece of art I noticed was not Jianwei’s Time Temple but the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The building from the outside has a cylindrical shape with the rings increasing in width from bottom to top, and the building itself look likes a sculpture. Going inside, the levels of the building combined is one continuous spiral. What I liked about this design was that the works of art were displayed in
the open (I could see a piece of work looking at it from a floor above) and you see each piece of art as you transition from the bottom to the top of the spiral.
After staring at the architecture of the Guggenheim, our group was taken into a room and we began looking at Time Temple.
The installation was composed of sculptures and paintings. For the sculptures, the aspect that caught my interest was the hundreds of cuts made into each wooden block. Not o
nly were there many cuts, but each cut was different in angle and size creating this complex and highly precise sculpture. I learned later from our tour guide that Jianwei did not plan out every cut from the beginning rather the process for Jianwei was gradual. He did not have an idea what the sculptures were going to look like in the end. Rather, Jianwei made cuts into the wood everyday until he was satisfied with how the sculpture looked. For a person like me who plans and outlines, learning of Jianwei’s approach to creating these sculptures was surprising and at the same time fascinating.
For the paintings, the one that caught my eye was this one with a bright orange background surrounding something that resembled a microscopic cell or organism. What was interesting about this painting was how Jianwei used different types of paints to present a message on time. In contrast to the bright orange and yellow, the black is oil paint and the oil paint represents ancient China when most paintings were black and white oil paintings while the orange and yellow represents modern China. Through the juxtaposition of these colors, Jianwei presents a message about convention in modern China and a message about the movement of time.
Overall, Wang Jianwei’s Time Temple was an unique and interesting installation. The abstraction of the sculptors and the paintings matched perfectly with the main topic, time, which is also a concept that is full of abstract point of views.
Three weeks ago I had first opera experience and now I just had my first modern dance experience seeing Complexions Contemporary Ballet at the Joyce Theater.
The first thing I noticed about the performances were the dancers. All of them were very flexible, and even though I knew beforehand that modern dance requires dancers to be highly flexible, seeing the flexibility in person was astonishing. One of the moments that surprised me was when one of the dancers stood and maintained her balance on her left leg while lifting her right leg into the air until her legs formed a straight, vertical line; it was something I could never imagine myself doing.
The second aspect I noticed was the constant shifting of music in pace and tone. The shifts were sudden and they happened not only between each performance but also in the middle of the performances. For example, during the first performance, Head Space, the music shifted from a slow, gentle tone in the beginning to a more upbeat and faster tone and then to music that sounded alarming and instilled a sense of danger. At first, the constant shifting of the music was confusing and the shifts made it difficult to try and understand what was happening, what was the underlying message or theme in the performance. However, I realized that the constant shifts in music were not used for a theme. Rather they reflected emotions and how in humans, emotions can constantly and suddenly change.
The final aspect I noticed was the lack of a concrete story line and a defining idea for each of the performances which emphasized the idea of freedom associated with modern dance in contrast to traditional ballet. There were no descriptions of each performance in the information booklets given out; each member of the audience was left to decide and interpret the meaning of each performance based solely on what they saw. Although some performances such as the biblical allusion of The Testament had a general tone to the performance, most were open to many different interpretations.
Overall, my first modern dance experience was definitely something that was very unique; I had never seen people move their legs and arms in that kind of way before so watching modern dance was seeing something that was completely unfamiliar to me.
I remember when I was in middle school, so many of my classmates were using and combining these small beads to create colorful works of art. Today when I was walking home from East River Park, I saw a small store near my apartment that was displaying a bunch of cool bead art in its windows and wanted to share this unique style of art.
Bead art is essentially using several individual small beads (about 2 cm tall) and connecting them with small amounts of glue (or string) to form a cohesive, larger image. You can kind of 
think of bead art as a new form of mosaics. Often bead art recreate popular images or icons seen in other places especially from video games and television shows.
The aspect I enjoy most of bead art is how it can create images that look almost digital. Many works of bead art have this sense that they are pixelated. They make me feel like as if I was looking at something from an old video game created in the 1990s or something created using a digital image program.
Overall, I really like the idea that, similar to a mosaic, you can use small fragments to create a cohesive image. Beads were objects that I viewed as insignificant especially with how small and disposable they are. However, bead art can really make a person appreciate how useful and creative these tiny things can be.
My favorite part of taking the F Train is being able to see the colorful mosaics located in the Delancey Street Station every time I pass by the stop.
My personal favorite is this vivid glass, mosaic by Ming Fay called Shad Crossing. The mosaic depicts two shad fish, side by side, as they swim across a body of water. What I love about this is how colorful the entire mosaic is; every color of the rainbow and a different shade of each of those colors are used to create such a harmonious and joyful blend. It always feels calming looking at this mosaic every time I am going home after classes.
In addition, I really appreciate the historical value of Shad Crossing and how it is reflective of the local immigrant community in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The shad fish was a staple to many of the immigrant’s diets when they first arrived and it symbolizes the immigrants themselves as they too had to travel across a large body of water in order to arrive in America.
As a person who grew up in the 21st Century surrounded by vast media entertainment such as cable television and the internet, I had never seen an opera before and I believed them to be boring. As a result, when I walked into the Metropolitan Opera, went up the spiral, red stairs, through the narrow halls, and sat down in my seat to watch Act 1 of Carmen, I was not expecting much. Three and a half hours later, I clapped for three minutes straight.
The best aspect of Carmen was the music. It told the story; it expressed anger; it signaled the entrance of a character; it expressed innocence. The music of Carmen established the tone for every scene and revealed every message to the point where all a person needed was good hearing to understand everything. I watched the majority of Act 1 without my translating monitor turned on (I did not realize what all those rectangular things were). However, I was still able to understand and feel the emotions of the characters because of the orchestra and the music they played.
The r
ole of the orchestra’s music in Carmen revealed to me that the nature of a opera’s success is a duality. Success depends as much on the actors on the stage performing with all the passion in their bodies as the conductor, the violinists, the flutists and the rest of the orchestra playing their instruments in harmony to define the tone of a scene through their music.
Overall, I do not regret the three and a half hours I used Tuesday night to watch Carmen. Rather, I was delightfully surprised with how enjoyable the experience was. Before the event, all I had on my mind was stress, thoughts about presentations and tests coming up soon and how I could be using my time then to prepare and study. However, once I sat down, all those feelings were gone and the only thing in my mind was how good Carmen was. I hope I can go see another opera one day.
“Beautiful,” “large,” “amazing” were all words my friends used to describe the Bloomberg building. But when I turned around the corner and saw the building with my own eyes, the only word I could use to describe it was “wow.”
Yesterday, I, along with about 50 other students from CUNY colleges, had the pleasure of going to Bloomberg L.P.’s headquarters on 731 Lexington Ave. for an informative session and a tour.
Aside from the important information I gained about potential opportunities at Bloomberg and the connections I made during my visit, I learned about how a professional business can use architecture to support its mission.
Similar to how the high stairs at the entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art symbolizes that 
the artwork and the information in the Museum is exclusive to those who have money, the internal architecture of Bloomberg emphasizes its mission to make dynamic networks of information available. The architecture is almost exclusively white, a color that symbolizes clarity. I
nformation ranging from current stock price changes to what floor a person is on is made easily noticeable.
Other pictures of the building:
Apparently one of only eight spiral escalators in the world.
Pond of 22 Japanese Koi fishes for good luck
Station Bloomberg News uses for live interviews.
Going into the Rox Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to see Tom Smith’s Heavenly Bodies, the first thing that caught my attention about the gallery was the bold contrast between the plain, white walls and the pulsating colors of every painting. Like the Rox Gallery, most art galleries have white walls to create a sense of cleanliness and to direct the focus of the viewer to the painting. However, this effect is even more so for Heavenly Bodies as each painting is glowing with an abundance of bright colors that immediately strike the viewer as he/she comes into the room.
Boom Boom Room
As a result, the vibrant colors are a central importance to Heavenly Bodies. Take for example the painting to the right Boom Boom Room. In this art piece (one of my favorite), we see an assortment of light and dark neon-shaded colors such as green, blue, purple. yellow, etc. that are exuberant and work together to form an abstract, three dimensional-looking image. Although ideas about what the painting actually portrays differs from perspective to perspective, the vibrant colors of the painting nevertheless instill in the viewer a sense of joyfulness and enthusiasm. This sense of joy and enthusiasm, according to a discussion with Tom Smith, are meant to reflect the ideas of heaven and utopia, places people often envision and associate with happiness.
Strobe
Another interesting aspect of Heavenly Bodies is how digital each painting looks. From afar, the paintings look like they were made by computer. However up close, one can tell that the paintings were hand-made with physical objects such as wood, glue, and paint. As a result, Smith creates a paradox in which a hand-made painting looks digital, which blurs the line between what is digital and what is physical. Heavenly Bodies illustrates and reflects how art in modern day society is slowly becoming more and more digitize, moving away from conventional means of producing art.
Overall, Tom Smith’s Heavenly Bodies offers a refreshing take on art; its highly vibrant colors in conjunction with its digital appearance presented an art style that I found unique and enjoyable to look at.
More information about Tom Smith, Heavenly Bodies, and his other works can be found at: http://www.tomsmithart.com/works/
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