Macaulay Seminar One at Brooklyn College

Like I mentioned today in class, for some reason i seemed to have this strange bias against going to the Brooklyn museum. I think it was because i felt that there would be no art that would grab my attention or that since there was an assignment that I had to do, it would not be possible for me to take a moment and enjoy the paintings.
I was very impressed by the Egyptian section (I’m a sucker for anything ancient) and I had enjoy many of the paintings and had really warmed up to the place. My group and I had already completed a discussion about one of the Egyptian sarcophagi and were on our way to pick out another thing to talk about when we were all struck by one painting. It depicted three french peasant women walking away from a field after a hard day of work with the sun setting behind them. The painting was right after the revolution that occurred in the 1850’s, which had finally put an end to monarchy in France. We decided that we should record another discussion. I do not want to say that when we discussed the Egyptian sarcophagus that we were simply making up stuff in order to complete the assignment. We genuinely felt that it was a noteworthy piece of art and many of the points that we brought up were real, but when we discussed this painting we never felt like we needed to find something else to keep talking about. I think that we could have gone on and on talking about this painting but after we finished recording, we looked at it for another second in silent admiration, and continued on our way.
Overall I really enjoyed the experience and I know that I will definitely return to the Brooklyn Museum.

I have plenty of past experiences in museums. I went to the MET, the Natural History Museum and many science museums (because who doesn’t love playing around with the interactive games there). I love museums. Its a place for fun and education. So when I first heard that the Macaulay class of ’17 will go and visit the Brooklyn Museum, I thought that it would be a great experience to have the whole museum to ourselves and to hang out with friends. But I never really experienced a museum the way I did on that Tuesday, September 3rd.

The instructions were to record ourselves discussing the details and the mysteries that are behind the art pieces that we were looking at. At first I was a little skeptical about recording myself talking about what is and isn’t of the art piece- it would be boring and difficult. I was just holding on to the recorder waiting for my group to decide which painting/sculpture to choose. As we roamed around, we stopped at an Egyptian carving and one of my group members already started discussing the details of the huge piece of stone. And then, another group member had a comment about what the other guy said and he wanted to add in some of his input. And I thought, this is exactly what we need to do, and its coming out naturally! So I clicked the button on the recorder without the group realizing and after two minutes- just like that- we had gold!

Once we became “pros” at this, the second and third one was a piece of cake. Once my group was done recording, we continued to roam around the museum a little longer. As I was aimlessly scanning all the paintings on the walls, I realized that I was paying more attention to the details in the paintings. How the characters in the painting were facing a certain direction, or how the wrinkles on a character makes him look weak. This experience helped me both achieve a keener eye and meet new people.

Adiell Melamed

I am not very interested in art museums, so when I found out that we were going to the Brooklyn Museum I wasn’t really that excited. I knew what I was expected to do- look at a painting or sculptor and talk about it for five minutes. All I could think was  ” Five minutes?! I’ll be lucky if I could talk about it for two minutes!” It seemed like an impossible thought to me.

However, when we split into our groups I chose to work with two of my friends from high school- one that goes to Brooklyn and one to City college. I’ve always shared hilarious moments with these two girls so I thought that this museum idea might actually be fun. We went in search of our first piece to talk about and found a carpet. We talked for about 3 minutes until the guard kicked us out and made us delete the recording because we weren’t supposed to be in there. I was a little upset, not because now I had to go and look for more pieces to talk about, but because I really liked the ideas we came up with about the carpet’s design.

While describing the three pieces of art we chose to talk about, I realized that everyone looks at art differently. No one person has the same opinion on what the artist drew. I actually had fun looking at all the art work in the museum and trying to understand the meaning of the works. Even though I didn’t think I would enjoy the museum that much, it ended up being really interesting and I liked looking at art in a new way.