Making Objects Speak

“Make-it New”: Modernist Visions

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:24:54 +0000

This audio tour introduces undergraduate students to representative artistic achievements from some of the most inventive decades of Modern art in the 20th century. On this tour, students will encounter visual evidence of the Modernist project to “Make it New”— Ezra Pound’s plea to a generation of artists and writers to reject “realistic” and academic representation, as practiced in the 19th century, in favor of drastically new forms of expression in the 20th. After passing through a 1900 Paris subway entrance in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden, students consider themes of dislocation, fragmentation, alienation, gender, and the consequences of war as expressed by Modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Max Beckmann, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Marcel Duchamp. Orozco’s “Dive Bomber and Tank” as well as Beckmann’s “Family Portrait” work well with a discussion of World War I poetry, the consequences of war and the challenges of making peace in the 20th century. Two Cubist paintings by Picasso and a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo support discussions of identity, gender, and issues of fragmentation and alienation preoccupying 20th century poets and novelists, such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Duchamp’s sculpture or assembled “readymade,” “Bicycle Wheel” enhance students’ understanding of collage and assemblage in poetry, from Imagist poets, such as H.D. and Amy Lowell, to avant-garde and radical poets, such as Gertrude Stein. The objects on this tour can also serve as points of comparison between literature and art at the turn of the 19th century and the post-Modern experimentation of the latter half of the 20th century. Finally, the tour invites students to consider the relevance of Modernist work to artists and writers of today.

Harlem Crossroads

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:24:26 +0000

This walking tour examines the history of Harlem, a center of African-American life in the 20th-century. Stops in central Harlem include apartment buildings and houses, businesses, schools, churches, and cultural and political institutions associated with this area’s artistically and historically rich African-American past. This tour centers on themes in the cultural and political history of African-Americans, while providing background and context in the history of New York City.

Immigrant New York: A Walking Tour of the Lower East Side

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:24:07 +0000

The audio tour, “Discovering Immigrant New York City,” leads students through one of the nation’s most significant multi-ethnic historic neighborhoods, Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown and Little Italy. Examining the area’s streetscapes, the tour will draw students’ attention to the visible traces of previous immigrant communities while attending to the lives of recent arrivals. Students will learn how the neighborhood encapsulates several broad themes frequently taught in undergraduate American history and immigration courses – neighborhood succession, Progressive Era reform, the changing immigration law, and the consequences of those changes.

Civil War Stories

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:23:34 +0000

This tour of Civil War artworks and artifacts in the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture of the New-York Historical Society is designed to enrich the study of American writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott. Intended for students in American literature courses, the tour uses Whitman’ s observations of the Civil War as a springboard for the examination of relevant paintings, sculptures, and swords and other weapons used in the War. The tour illuminates the Civil War stories that artists have told in their works and that we can glimpse by looking at military artifacts—stories of men and women in the North and South, cavalry charges and maritime combat, African-American leaders, popular culture, heroism and devastation.

Note: Because the New-York Historical Society is undergoing renovations, the Luce Center permanent collections are open by appointment only through November, 2011. To make an appointment, please email Joshua Perea at jperea@nyhistory.org.

Encounter with the Past: The Renaissance and the Ancients

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:23:08 +0000

This tour introduces students to Renaissance objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stressing how artists and their patrons not only revived ancient traditions but also adapted what they revived to the ideals and values of their own time. In the Gubbio Studiolo, the feudal lord and mercenary captain Federico da Montefeltro fills his private space with images of himself as living a life of both action and contemplation like the noble Romans of old. In a religious painting from Urbino, Fra Carnevale’s Birth of the Virgin , a Roman triumphal arch frames a holy event, thereby making it a scene of Christian victory. By studying these and other such objects, students will deepen their understanding of what Renaissance artists and patrons achieved: far from breaking completely with the late medieval world in which they lived, they developed its traditions in new ways under the inspiration of the ancient past.

Converging Cultures: Latin America 1520-1830

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:22:33 +0000

This audio tour through the Brooklyn Museum’s collections of Andean textiles, ceramics, furniture, and paintings from the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods focuses on the effects of the Spanish conquest on indigenous societies, with attention to patterns of cultural syncretism. Reflecting broad developments in Latin American scholarship, the tour approaches the cultural interactions of Andean colonial society not as a simple dichotomy between Indian and Spaniard, but rather as the mutual entanglements of the many ethnic groups and social ranks that clashed and connected after the Spanish invasion of 1531-32. The objects examined by the tour will help stimulate students to see that at the time of their meeting, both Spanish and indigenous societies were themselves cultural hybrids and their encounter generated yet another synthetic culture.

A Global Appetite: Food History as World History from 1500 to 1800

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:21:58 +0000

The Global Appetite tour of the European Decorative Arts and the European Painting collections of the Metropolitan Museum emphasizes the historical importance of food in world history as both a catalyst and consequence of larger trends and events. The audio tour focuses on the ages of exploration and empire, when Europeans diversified their larders just as they enriched their treasuries, and invites students to trace the history of European expansion in the paintings, tankards, finger bowls, and chocolate pots they examine.

The Afro-European Encounter in Africa

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:20:05 +0000

In the tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, students will examine African artifacts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century to explore, from an African perspective, the often surprising nature of the encounter and developing relations between West Africans and the Portuguese, Dutch, British traders and missionaries active in the region before the rise of European dominance of the continent.

“And pilgrimes were they alle”: The Cloisters and the World of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 19:50:39 +0000

The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that incorporates elements of five medieval cloisters and houses a collection of medieval art, was from its inception meant to evoke the sense that the visitor was walking into the Middle Ages. The Cloisters is not a traditional museum as such: Its geographical inaccessibility is intended to mimic the experience of real medieval pilgrims, as they would climb the final steep elevation to glimpse their destination and view the road they had traveled; the elevation of Fort Tryon Park gives usjust such a vantage point. This Cloisters “pilgrimage” is designed to enrich courses in medieval literature and history.

The World of Augustus and Virgil

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 19:50:00 +0000

This audio tour through some of the Ancient Roman Art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum emphasizes the imagery used by Augustus Caesar to consolidate his control over the new Roman Empire. So it works well with the political aspect of Virgil’s Aeneid: Aeneas’ destiny is to found Rome, and in Book 6 of the poem, he watches a veritable parade of illustrious future Romans, among whom is Augustus. Also, the moral qualities that Caesar espoused for citizens of Rome are epitomized in Aeneas, and Virgil imagines Augustus as the new Aeneas. In addition, Caesar’s emphasis on children and his own tragic loss of his grandsons also relate to the inherent sadness of the Aeneid, in which so many beautiful young people must die to make way for Aeneas’ destiny. This dual nature of the poem is thus well served by the tour experience.