Blog for Week of March 3rd

A really interesting coincidence happened this week between this class and my Spanish class. In The Making of Latin America, we obviously talked a lot about Diego Rivera's mural A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park. Interestingly enough, this same week in my Spanish class we are starting an interactive class game that is entirely based on Latin American art. The overall purpose of the game is to basically build an art collection that showcases Latin American art at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Everyone in the class has a different role either as an artist, curator, or representative that involves different art movements of Latin America. The crazy part is that one of the movements that are a part of the game is Mexican Muralism! We briefly talked about Mexican muralism as a theme in class, so it's really cool that I am going to be making such a clear connection between the two classes. Learning about Rivera's mural in our groups and as a class was actually a lot of fun because it was so intricate and historical. Whenever I interpret art, I'm never looking at the significance behind it. After studying A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, I've realized that I should pay more attention to art not for what I see, but for what it might mean. Art is more than what meets the eye. Because of this, I'll be better prepared for my Spanish class game. I'm sure this mural will appear at some point in the next few weeks of my Spanish class, and I'll be all excited inside knowing that I've already gotten a head start at reviewing it!

Comments

  1. Joseph GreendykMarch 4, 2022 at 9:44 PM

    Hi Ben! That's really neat that the topics of two classes coincided like that, and that also sounds like an interesting game to play in a class to help learn. I definitely agree with you that there's more to art than what is immediately seen. I often struggle finding the deeper meanings in art, but it can be fascinating to learn about the messages an art piece can carry.

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  2. Médar SerrataMarch 15, 2022 at 5:58 PM

    Thank you, Ben, for your post. I agree with your statement that "art is more than what meets the eye." Indeed, a work of art is not different from a work of literature in that they both can encode several layers of meaning. In order to interpret those meanings, we should take our time and pay attention to the details.

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  3. KamrinApril 29, 2022 at 3:23 AM

    Hello, Ben. How fortunate that both courses correlated with each other during similar time frames! While you make the point that it is important to try to understand what art may mean, I encourage you to still pay just as much attention to how the art was visually created. Art styles can play a major role in how a person may interpret the picture, whether it is simple, complex, bold, colorful, dim, sad, or anything else. I believe the very mural recognized this idea; in Rivera's mural, we analyzed simple objects or pictures that were represented in certain ways that led us to trying to interpret his true intentions.

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