As I walked out of Washington Square Park, I was immediately drawn to this piece of art done on a brick wall around the corner from the park. The street was a short, but wide one-way street, with a construction project going on in the middle of the street, which caused traffic to be moving a little slow. My first thoughts when I noticed the mural was that it was truly just a beautiful painting of a bear, but as I looked deeper into it, I noticed many other details. I think what originally drew me to this mural was the fact that it was a painting of an animal, and I have grown up in a household where we strongly admire all types of animals, so I thought it was cute in a way whereas many people might see a bear and associate it with fear. The painting is done on a brown brick wall, surrounded both left and right by red bricks. Because the wall where the painting is done is brown, that means the background of the painting is brown, however the artist offset the darkness with pops of blue and orange tones. On the neck of the bear appears to be a pattern that reminds me of an Aztec styled pattern including blue, red, orange, and yellow in it. The bear has thick, long, fur with 3 strips of color bleeding down and eventually dripping off his front paws. The 3 colors which stem from the Aztec pattern in the neck of the bear and bleed down to the paws are blue, orange, and yellow. The bear’s paw has claws that look more like long fingernails rather than claws, which I found strange because most portrayals of bears’ paws are short and nubby and don’t involve such long claws. Finally, surrounding the bear are triangles coming out from all around, which look more like triangular metal blades protruding out of the perimeter of him. What I loved most about this mural is that it ultimately allowed me to escape being in the confinements of NYC just for a few moments and envision myself in a more rural, natural setting. I really enjoyed this mural because of this, and after all, it’s not every day that you get to experience a bear in NYC!

After my lovely escape into nature, I visited the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. The current gallery being featured here is a photography gallery called NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932-1960. Upon entering the gallery, I wasn’t very familiar with this topic, due to the fact that I had never closely studied it. As I first began walking through the gallery, which was also the first art gallery I have been to, I experienced a spacious room filled with evenly spaced, framed photographs on white walls. Because of the fact that all the photographs in the gallery appealed to the same NeoRealismo theme, I was able to receive the impression through the pictures that the Italians were very hardworking people. Had this not been a gallery completely dedicated to this theme, I probably would not have been able to find as much meaning towards the photographs, especially from the photograph I chose, because the pictures would have made less sense to me. In addition, these photographs altered the space for me because I was surrounded by photographs of the everyday tasks of the working-class Italians in this time period so I was able to get a feel for what their lives consisted of. The reason I got this impression was because most of the photographs in the gallery were pictures of the Italian people working. The picture I chose, called the Il Dopopranzo Delle Mondine, shows two women, one sitting on a sheet with a basket looking tote bag in between her legs, and one standing up handing a glass of what I assume to be water to the woman sitting. Since both women have their hands on the glass, I received a warm feeling, almost like a sense of community from these women. The woman standing has a wrap around her hair and the woman sitting is wearing a sun hat. Behind the woman sitting there is a bike sitting upside down, and beyond the two women appears to be a field. I decided to look further into the name of the photo, and I learned that it translates to “the afternoon of the mondina”. Once again, I had to dig a little deeper because I had never heard of a “mondina” before, but it was also to my discovery that a mondina refers to a rice weeder, specifically in Italy’s Po Valley.  Once I found this out, it explained what these two women were doing in a field. It was of no surprise to find out that the moninda were very hard workers, who worked long hours in the hot sun for very low pay. Overall, I really enjoyed this gallery and being able to learn more about a topic which I was not well informed about before coming.