Semester 1

Arts TRYathlon #1: NextNOW

Dance Squared - Parren Mitchell Art-Sociology Building - September 12, 2023

#dance #installation #visualdisplay #interdisciplinary #future

Dance Squared was an exciting blend of dance, visual expression, and technology all fused into an interdisciplinary art form that made me think about much of what I was learning. In our Arts Scholars colloquium, we consistently have talked about the question of “what is art?” and the criteria behind defining that question. Before I attended this event, I thought that art had to be homogeneous and linear, to a certain degree. I fell back on this belief because the art I create is homogeneous and linear in terms of structure, and was wary of other art forms that didn’t prescribe to this rigid definition. In our Look Club discussion, I was having that view challenged by my classmates’ definitions of what makes art, primarily from the wide display of structure I was seeing. This view was shattered when I saw Dance Squared. Combining dance and visual installation, it was an encapsulation of what I thought art wasn’t and art and its most non-traditional. And yet, I found it extremely effective. One example of this was through the viewer's incorporation of the performance. As we voted on a question posed by the installation, the answer would change how the performance would progress to “reflect” our answers. This made me think, and I landed on an uncanny appreciation for what the performance was trying to accomplish. The whole of Dance Squared is merely untraditional, and yet it uses an untraditional stimulus (voting on a question) to provoke a traditional response to the art, getting the viewers to ponder what it all means. This is even more effective when considering we are pondering on what we decided as a group, which allows for the interdisciplinary approach of the performance to work for me and my evolving definition of art. Overall, Dance Squared proved to be extremely insightful to my worldview surrounding art and has started my journey into questioning my deep-seated beliefs regarding art and its functions as well as its purposes to the consumer.

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Arts TRYathlon #2: Choose Your Own Adventure

Claude Monet & Impressionism, National Gallery of Art Livestream Tour - Dallas-Texas History & Culture - October 14, 2023

#artgallery #virtual #nationalgalleryofart #monet #impressionism

To be quite honest, I was swamped with a lot of different things these past couple of weeks, so I looked for a low-commitment virtual meeting that could allow me to sit back and take in the event in front of me. Claude Monet & Impressionism was a virtual tour of the extensive collection of pieces by Claude Monet at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC seemed to tick off all those boxes, while also providing me insight into a famous and celebrated artist who has inspired countless to pursue art. I’ve always had a proclivity for fixating on “the greats” of something that I’m interested in, whether that be novelists or figure skaters, but have never considered the greats in the painting world very closely. We all hear about the genius of these artists, but unlike in explicit ways like you would see a sport great, for example, demonstrate their prowess in their subject, painting is difficult to demonstrate complete mastery over considering the large level of nuance that exists in creating and interpreting paintings. However, this examination behind the paintings which were focused on during the webinar was an extremely effective blend of art history, painting analysis, and personal history that really helped me understand the complexity behind several of Monet’s celebrated paintings and why he made some of the artistic choices he made, which help to understand the meaning of his art. As I’ve been learning in several of my policy classes, in order to effectively understand the reasons a policy was successful or failed, there must be a multifaceted approach conducted, as, like in examining paintings, many facts and circumstances are discrete. I feel like this event allowed me to apply those principles to understanding Monet’s art and why he did the things he did, opening my eyes to allow me to understand that nuance is important in making great art.

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