Sugar Cane and Caribbean Farmlands

My trip to the Museo Del Barrio in and of itself was an adventure. What started off as an arranged 2pm meeting last Saturday between Paul, Patrick, Michelle, and I, otherwise known as the “Staten Island crew,” was clearly not going to go as planned when I woke up to a hectic morning in my house that didn’t end up clearing up until around 1:30 – a mere half hour before we were supposed to meet.
I was relieved however, when I found that at least one other member in my group was also running late.
I finally met up with Michelle on Lexington and 104th street at around 3:30 pm. Patrick had already made it to the museum about an hour earlier. Michelle and I set off down 104th street until we reached Central Park and eagerly entered the museum. The wrong museum. Thinking that perhaps the exhibit itself was what was named “El Barrio,” Michelle and I completely overlooked the actual museum, across the street, and instead entered the Museum of the City of New York. Reassured by the fact that this museum was listed on the back of our cultural passports, we showed our Macaulay IDs to the receptionist. She informed us, however, that the Museum of the City of New York was no longer affiliated with Macaulay, however we could still enter at the discounted student price of $6 each. We paid and picked up floor plans. We were eager to see an exhibit on Staten Island, being from the “forgotten borough” ourselves, however peruse the map as we might, we could not find an exhibit remotely related to the Caribbean at all. Walking back to the reception table, we asked the same receptionist who had admitted us previously where we could find the Caribbean exhibit. She thought for a moment and then realized that we were in the wrong museum. She told us that the Museo del Barrio was across the street and was kind enough to refund the money we had paid.
Laughing at our mistake, Michelle and I proceeded to the Museo del Barrio, imagining how angry Patrick must be by now for waiting this long. We found him close to finishing his notes on a painting. We proceeded to split up to find our own pieces to write about, agreeing to meet later.
I originally thought I would be immediately attracted to paintings of serene landscapes, and although these were wonderful, I was surprised to find myself extremely drawn to a video piece. Walking past it, I didn’t initially look back until I heard a familiar crunching sound that brought me back to my summer in Egypt. The piece was entitled “Trata” meaning “Try” and was created by David Perez Karmadavis in 2005. The piece consisted of two videos. The first depicted a Haitian man peeling/shucking sugar cane and the second showed a Dominican man eating sugar cane. Each video was only a few seconds long and was placed on repeat. There was no dialogue, just the sound of the slice of the knife shucking the sugar cane and the crunch of the man eating it. Getting past my original nostalgia associated with my experience in Egypt last summer, I began to realize another connection I had to the piece. Thinking back to the limited knowledge I have about the region depicted in the videos, I realized that the two races shown had a lot of tension between them that is often fraught with racism. The Haitians in the Dominican Republic are often illegal immigrants, and hold low-paying jobs and often live in poor living conditions. It amazed me to see something like sugar cane bring the two groups together despite these racial tensions. It reminded me a lot of the period of time here in NYC when there were Islamophobic ads put up in subway stations. One of the counter-ads I saw had to do with halal food carts and said something along the lines of “how could you call the creators of such deliciousness savages?” Continuing to stare back and forth between the two videos in the set, I realized more and more that peace was attainable simply because as humans, we have too much in common: love, enjoying good food, etc. to continue hating each other.
My strong connection my home country, Egypt, is what also drew me to the second piece of art I chose. This piece was entitled “Pasaje Con Burro (Las Indians Occidentales Danesas)” and was a painting utilizing oil-based paints on hardboard created by Dutch artist Hugo Larsen in 1906. The painting was relatively small and depicted a man on a donkey and a woman balancing a tray of fruits on her head. Both subjects were dressed in all white: the man is wearing light-wash jeans and a white t-shirt and the woman is wearing a long white skirt, a white fitted t-shirt, and a white scarf wrapped around her hair. They both have a caramel-like skin tone. The scenery looks very dry and hot, and viewers can easily tell that the sun must be glaring down. There is a small line of what I take to be water shown on the horizon and a few very thin palm trees. The scenery reminded me very much of a scene I would see in the farmlands of Alexandria, Egypt. Over the summer, I visited this area and had the opportunity to ride a donkey and spend a day with a family there, learning that true happiness could be achieved with simplicity in the process. Staring at the painting, my memory took me back to those sunny days spent working the fields and learning the trade of life from the people of the land. The only difference, however, was that the scenery in Egypt was much more lush and green, and although it was hot and sunny, it wasn’t as dry as the scene depicted in the picture. Staring more at the painting, I began to grow thirsty, and thought about how the painter’s technique was clearly excellent because I not only saw the scene but could feel the warmth and dryness of the scene depicted by it emanating from it. The painter’s purpose could be an infinite number of things but the one that made the most sense to me was that he was just painting a scene he remembered on a visit to a Caribbean country. I didn’t see any specific symbolism in the painting, but merely a conveying of something he had seen and felt while on a journey. Taking into consideration that the painter is from Denmark, I realized the importance of conveying the temperature and sense of dryness through the paint, since his audience would be from a totally different climate. He did this quite successfully: the day I saw the painting, 106 years after it was created, was far from hot and dry, yet I could feel the climate, and I was awed by the skill of the painter in recreating perfectly every aspect of the scene.
Our day at the museum ended just as eventfully as it started when Michelle and I met up later. She explained that Patrick had left to get lunch so I suggested we do the same. Set on getting a gyro platter, we walked down Madison Ave in search of a cart. Thirty blocks later, finding none so far, we decided we might as well continue walking to Carnegie Hall for the performance we were seeing that night. And so we did. We walked about 50 blocks in total, and still managed to arrive at the theater early. So, we went to a Subway store nearby, settled for subs instead of gyros, and proceeded to watch a wonderful performance at Carnegie Hall with the rest of our seminar class.