Author: Rachel Wahba

On Wednesday night, December 5th, I made a trek from my home in Gravesend, Brooklyn to DUMBO, Brooklyn to watch the play The Jungle. After arriving not even 5 minutes late with my fellow Brooklyn friends, Renee, Frieda, Esther, and Danielle, we were told we cannot enter the theater until intermission. The staff was very unfriendly and would not tell us when intermission was, so we were forced to wait in the cold for almost one full hour. We tried to compare our experience in the cold to a jungle. The trees and bushes helped us set the scene, while we anxiously waited to be allowed inside.

When we did enter the theater, I was shocked. I did not expect the set to be a maze with different rooms and look like the actual jungle of Calais, with shops and restaurants. When intermission ended, our group was escorted to our seats and I was fascinated to learn that we were sitting not in sections, but in “countries”. Our class sat in Ethiopia, but other countries included Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine. I was a bit shocked that they called it Palestine, and not Israel, but maybe it was something I missed because I missed the first half of the show.

It was difficult to understand what exactly was going on when the second act first started. I wasn’t sure who the characters were and what the setting of the act was. We were introduced to two characters, Beth and Safi, who I believe were people who acted as leaders in the refugee camp. Safi was a refugee himself from Syria. He cared about helping others, and was trying to help everyone else out before helping himself. This was very admirable and stuck with me through the second act of the play. When Safi was offered the onion, that represented his freedom, he initially declined it. While watching this I was rooting for Safi and saying to myself, “No Safi! Take it! You are the good guy here! You have spent too much time helping others, it is time to help yourself!” I think that Safi realized the same thing, and when he decided to take the onion for himself, I was happy that he was standing up for himself. At some point, you can only help yourself. I think I felt such a deep connection to Safi’s character because he reminded me a lot of myself. I always try to help others, and am very selfless when doing that. I too will usually sacrifice myself in order to assist those in need. Safi showed me that sometimes you need to just let your guard down, and take care of yourself sometimes.

I loved the play overall. I wish that I was able to see the first half, and really get the full experience, but I think it is really amazing that I loved it even though I was lost. I can only imagine what it would have been like had I got to see the entire plot progression.

In 2004, Martha Rosler presented a collection of montages called House Beautiful in which she juxtaposed political art with leisurely art. This particular piece, Photo Op, shows a fiery war scene through the windows of an apartment room. On the chairs in the room we see two dead girls, with their eyes closed, lying, or sitting covered in blood. In front of the depressing background there is an image of a blonde haired girl, pasted twice, overlapping each other. It could also seem like they are two identical twins. They are wearing pink revealing dresses while holding up pink flip phones. They are completely engulfed in what is happening on their phones, and are not paying any attention to the background violence.

This work of art falls into the category of avant-garde art. Avant-garde artwork is supposed to intrigue. The artwork should be radical and unorthodox, something that hasn’t been seen or done before. Martha Rosler is one of the first to criticize the Vietnam War with art, so this is certainly political and avant-garde.The things that she chose to make montages of were things that she believes represent the country’s geopolitics. Martha Rosler used a method in which she took photos from the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Wars and combined them with pictures from magazines. By juxtaposing these pictures together, Martha Rosler directly takes the conflict of war, something we might turn a blind eye to, and puts it straight into our home, domestic life, something that we live in, that is impossible to ignore. This style of morphing the two mediums together is in essence abstract avant-garde and abstract. It is something intriguing and weird, that has not been seen before. The juxtaposition of this montage is meant to phase the viewer, and make a statement. Literally speaking, the art is political, as it is from wars, a political event. I believe that the message that Rosler is trying to send is that you can’t simply ignore the politics going on. Politics and war come back to you and are something you cannot avoid. Like shown in the image, there is war and hate going on in the background, while there are girls taking pictures on their cell phones in their home. They are materialistic and ignoring the facts, but Rosler is showing us that we can’t do this. We should not be bystanders to the atrocities of war that are affecting so many people around the world. Rather, Rosler is trying to teach a message, to be proactive about war efforts.

And so, I left. I walked out of the doors of Baruch College’s Vertical Campus building and I walked uptown, a direction I don’t usually go towards. I walked up Lexington Avenue up until 28th street, and then turned left and went west. I passed right over Madison Square Park, but I could still smell the wetness on the grass from the rain this past few days. I usually take the 6-train home, but today I wanted to simply wander. I wandered up until 6th avenue and 28th street, where I hoped I could catch the downtown F train, but instead I saw a sign that read “No F trains at this station”. Just my luck. So, I walked uptown a little bit more until I finally got to a train I could take. I’m not sure why I did this, when I could’ve walked downtown, towards my home.  I hopped on the 34th Street-Herald Square downtown local train and headed home. I looked up at the subway map and saw that my ride home would be 26 stops.  Well, that was certainly a long trip. I usually just listened to music on my commute home, but that day felt different. There was a sense of silence all around. I’ve noticed that rainy days are usually silent, morbid days. I decided not to take out my headphones, and I listened to the natural sounds of the subway. I heard the sound of the train moving across the tracks, and the dinging that would occur whenever we stopped at a station. I also noticed that I was essentially imitating the intercom on the train. “This is a Stillwell Avenue bound F local train. The next stop is Bergen Street.” I overheard a couple talking about what they were going to have for dinner. She was dressed in a nice jacket, and he was wearing a suit jacket and carrying a briefcase. I wondered where they lived, and I wondered what they would end up having for dinner. They seemed well off, so maybe they were going to have something expensive, like steaks. That’s what I am always in the mood for. They got off of the train before they made a decision about dinner. That left me feeling on my toes.  When I finally looked up after letting my mind drift for a little, I was at Avenue N, just 3 stops from my house. I tried to bring my body back to my natural senses, and brought myself off of the train one stop early, at Kings Highway. From there I walked home. I passed Public School 215, the local public school. There were kids playing outside. Oh, what I would give to be that age again, the age of innocence. Did they understand how lucky they were? I couldn’t help but stop and stare a little bit. After what felt like 5 minutes, but was probably more like 30 seconds, I decided it might look a little creepy to just look at kids playing in the playground. So, I turned right, onto East 3rd Street. and was delighted when I saw my house right off the corner. I was finally home, so I went inside, where I stayed, until the next day.

For our STEAM project, the five of us plan to integrate a couple of the art mediums we discussed this semester along with the idea of New York City being the subject matter of Art as well as a space of displaying and consuming art. NYC is not just a fast paced environment where 8 million people live. It is a place that is full of art and culture, and that is something we are going to try to represent in our project

When we think of New York City and things we see in our everyday lives, we immediately thought of the subway. All of us take the train to and from school everyday, and it’s something we are fairly comfortable with and want to represent at the STEAM Festival. Basically, we are going to recreate a subway car and on the walls will be three different forms of art: photography, painting/drawing, and poetry. Following a model of our photography project, Renee is going to compile a couple of pictures that show the beauty of NYC. She will make sure each photo is “agitating” and that it has a clear studium and punctum. She will show the beauty of New York City and print pictures in high resolution, which will be placed aesthetically and placed on one of the walls of our train. Danielle will create a piece of art, maybe a drawing or painting, or maybe something with fun supplies such as tissue paper and pom-poms, that will either reflect the beauty of NYC or incorporate some of the paintings and artists that we spoke about this semester, perhaps a lion, like our first “find a lion” project. Lastly, Frieda will create her own train literature. On many subway cars there are big posters with poems about everything and anything, all to keep NYC reading and cultured. Frieda is going to write her own poem about NYC which be displayed on a poster and placed on a wall of our subway car, mimicking what is done on real trains. We were also thinking of maybe putting some funny school or NYC related advertisements on the inside of the train, like we are used to seeing on real trains.

Lastly, Rachel and Esther will work on actually creating the train. The train will be made of some kind of cardboard, possible a couple of tri-boards. From there they will outline and paint the inside of a subway car. The train will be an “M” train, for Macaulay. It will have a red circle around it, just like Macaulay red. The M will be colored white, again to incorporate the Macaulay colors. Additionally, the stops on the train will be places that we visited as a class this semester: the different places we’ve found  our lions, Chelsea galleries, the Highline, ICP, the MET Opera, Miller Theater, as well as anything else we visit later on in the semester. If possible, we are also going to try to blow up a copy of the map of manhattan, and try to make something like a subway map, connecting the city together. This will help us all gain an appreciation for going to school in Manhattan, and having so many resources available to us at our fingertips, by simply riding the subway uptown or downtown.

This photograph was taken by a photographer named Shirley Baker. Shirley Baker was born in 1932 in a town in England called Salford. She lived in England from birth until 2014, when she died. Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, Baker took pictures of things she saw in the inner-city slums of Manchester. Her images were never posed; she just waited until the perfect moment to take a photograph. Baker’s photographs are usually taken on the streets of Manchester, where the streets are rugged and destroyed.

The image I chose to focus on strangely is unnamed and almost untraceable. It appears on a British gallery website that sells Shirley Bakers photographs. In the photo the clear studium is a boy standing upright by a street corner with his friend bent over the side of the building corner. When I first looked at the photo I noticed that the first boy I mentioned has a bandage wrapped around his left knee. To me, this is the punctum. Seeing that he is still immaculately dressed made me question if this is a new injury or had it happened a few days prior? He did not seem to have any other injuries. However, after seeing the possibility of a quarrel having occurred, I looked around the photograph more for some clues to help me figure out the image. The blond child that is hiding behind the wall is wearing glasses, however it appears that they are crooked and one of the lenses is popped out. Were these boys in a fight with each other? Are they friends? Are they brothers? By the smirk on the first child’s face it seems like they are just having playful fun. Additionally, I noticed a third, and final punctum, the object in the boys hands. To me, it looks like a wireless remote controller. Although this unnamed photo also doesn’t have a date attached to it, referring to context clues from other pictures that Shirley Baker took, it is unlikely that that is a game controller, because they were not circulated until the 1990s, and Baker’s oeuvre was taken up until the 1980s. It is something to note that perhaps the fact that the child is very well dressed, especially for a toddler, tells us that he is from a rich family and could afford these new games to play with.

No matter what the circumstances were, this photo intrigued me and livened me up, just like Barthes says a photograph is supposed to do. Shirley Baker photography will forever hold a place in my heart.

Try to imagine a brick wall. The bricks are all cemented together up high. The walls are taller than a person, but nowhere near as tall as a building. But the bricks aren’t the normal crimson red color that my house is built from. The column of bricks is painted in different hues of blues, purples, and blacks. Instead of looking rough, coarse, and ragged like bricks usually do, the wall looks like a galaxy. Dusted with some white paint, you really do feel like you are walking through another cosmos. On the top quarter of the wall, there are yellow dots scattered around. There are about 8 significantly sized polka dots, and on the right side there is a bigger yellow circle, that seems to represent the sun, while the smaller dots are stars. Beneath the “stars” is my favorite part of the mural. 

We all know what the stereotypical heartbeat echo looks like on a doctor’s screen. The red lines going up and down with sharp turns?

So yeah, there are 3 maximums, that mathematically speaking would be described as being concave down, and 2 minimum points, concave up. However, in the first section that goes up and down, instead of having a blank area, the area is shaped like a New York City building, perhaps the Empire State Building. The inner space has 17 yellow squares painted in it. A line of two squares at the uppermost, thinnest part is followed by 5 rows of 3 yellow squares underneath it. Under the “heartbeat monitor” is another yellow illustration. This time, the yellow represents the lines on the street, marking two different lanes. At the very bottom, painted in red, the artist left her instagram account @mapillustrations and a hashtag #BRICKFIT.

This mural is just one of the many murals painted outside of Fashion Institute of Technology on 28th street. Each student was given the same assignment, to paint a mural on a brick wall between 7th and 8th Avenues. Seeing this mural amongst all the others made the project come to life for me. If I just saw one mural I would have still thought it was cool, but seeing the multitude of artwork made it that much more special for me. Every mural is completely different, yet is still insanely beautiful and filled with so much talent. 

Walking into the Studio Fine Art Gallery  in Brooklyn was a completely different experience. The white walls were cluttered and filled with paintings from the floor to the ceiling. There was no room for the paintings to breathe and there was no order to the paintings. The gallery was stressful to look at. While the streets outside of FIT were orderly and each mural was the same size brick panel, the art gallery had paintings of all shapes and sizes, with all different themes too.

The painting that stood out to me the most at the gallery was this image. For starters, the painting is bare. There is no frame around the painting. The next thing I notice was the image of a tree. Imagine a wicked tree with branches coming out of it. The branches envelop the entire painting and the negative space created by the branches is colored in with different shades of blues throughout the leftmost side and the upper right quadrant has hints of yellow and gold leaves in the crevices. The branches loop and create the image of a mosaic window. The image looks like it could be printed on the stained glass window of a church or synagogue. It could symbolize the tree of life. The top of the image is rounded, just like how a window looks. The yellow/gold coloring looks like a glimmer of hope shining through the blue, gloomy, tree. This painting is much colder than the mural painting.

I definitely did not like this image as much as I enjoyed looking at the wall murals. Looking at this made me feel flustered and frustrated, because the room was not in any order. In order for me to enjoy looking at something it must be aesthetically pleasing. A disheveled art gallery does not give me peace of mind and therefore was not enjoyable for me. Had the art been organized, the gallery could’ve been beautiful.

“The Sleeping Gypsy” was painted by the Frenchman Henri Rousseau in 1897. The large 51.0 in x 79.0 in painting is on display on the 5th floor of the Museum of Modern Art. The painting is oil painted on canvas.

In the image we see a dark skinned gypsy wearing a colored striped tunic fast asleep on the mountainous desert floor underneath a moonlit sky. The gypsy has a stick in her hand and is lying next to a string instrument and a jug. Behind the gypsy is a dark lion, bent over. What struck me at first was the yellow eye of the lion that is painted as wide open, almost like it is staring into my eyes. Although the lion is bent over, you can also see a big mane, that covers about 2/5 of its body. Aside from its mane, the lion doesn’t seem to be realistic, because there is no fur drawn on the rest of the body. The face of the lion is similar to that of a pig.

While it looks like the lion is staring at the audience, it also looks as if the lion is watching over the sleeping gypsy for some reason. She is asleep and not startled by the lion’s presence so maybe she was aware that it was there and he was acting as a guard over her while she slept. The lion doesn’t seem vicious like he is about to pounce and attack a victim. Rather, he looks serene and calm, just standing confident over the gypsy.

My initial reaction to seeing the lion watching over the gypsy in the painting was fear for the gypsy. I couldn’t tell if she was in danger or if she knew what was going on. The dark colors of the painting mixed with the burst of color from the striped jacket compliment each other well and relax the tension of the eyes while looking at the painting. It all looks like a dream.