Our final scores:

Lightning Bug Foundation – 69
Van Gogh’s Ear – 34
Gen X Museum – 33
Xena Foundation – 31
Lehman BIPOC Art Org – 10

Excited to jump into our simulated art auction next class. Come prepared to compete against other “institutions” in the room for your chosen artworks. If you want a little preview of what an art auction look like, watch below:

Loved hearing what you saw in Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills and in Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series today! If you’re curious about some of Cindy Sherman’s other self-portraits (she’s made many!) you might also like looking at her inserting herself into and imitating old paintings. And in recent years she’s been making some even more bizarre self-portraits that grapple with aging (she is in her 70s now). Check them out!

Thanks for thinking at War & Memory today, including some of the earliest photo documentation of conflict. If you are interested in seeing more examples of stereographs (like the Civil War ones we discussed in class) the New York Public Library actually has a pretty extensive collection and a fun project where you can see them in 3D!

I know we were all intrigued by all the bizarre actions going on in Inci Eviner’s video piece that we looked at in our artistic responses to Orientalism, so here’s that video if you want to watch for yourself and catch more unexpected things!

Loved seeing the bizarre and amazing collaborative drawings you made today while playing “Exquisite Corpse” — the Surrealists would be proud of your strange, fun creations!

In light of our conversations about Symbolism, Spiritualism, and the ways in which artists used their work to give viewers a transcendent, emotional, or mystical experience, I encourage you to go to see a Mark Rothko in person and see what you get from it! Bring a notebook and sit for a while with the painting if you feel really inspired. There are Rothko color field paintings on display at the Met and a couple of them at the MoMA too. If you go, tell us what you felt or discovered (or if you didn’t at all think it made you feel anything!)

We covered a lot during our session around Urban Space! If you want to see the all 60 panels of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series online, there’s a nice presentation of it on the Phillips Collection website. James Van Der Zee’s whole collection is now going to be co-managed by the Met Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem — about 20,000 prints and 30,000 negatives! Here’s hoping we get to see a lot more of his photos soon. You can watch a little video about that below:

It was great to see your takes and diagrams in respond to Rosalind Krauss’s dilemma: defining landscape, architecture, sculpture and Land Art (which also overlap!) I’ve attached photos below to document what you all came up with. Safe to say it can be hard to differentiate these four once we really start to think about them philosophically! If you are interested in seeing a contemporary Land Artist in action, I highly recommend watching either of the documentaries about Andy Goldsworthy mentioned in class: Rivers and Tides (2001) and Leaning Into the Wind (2018).

Great first session! Your drawings and instructive descriptions for your drawings were great (and creative!) We’ll come back to your definitions of “art history” and what makes something “modern” by the end of class to see if our ideas around these big concepts have changed over the course of the semester.