Why is art a political issue at all?

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Alma Lopez NHU web  

Uploaded on Oct 17, 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y1IIu-I7ag  

Author, Artist and Activist Alma Lopez offered a lecture at NHU, about her new book, "Our Lady of Controversy: Alma Lopez's Irreverent Apparition," (University of Texas Press, 2001), a series of essays about the history of Guadalupe and what her pervasive imagery means in our lives.

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WEEK OF 16 SEPTEMBER—NO CLASS SO YOU COULD HAVE TIME TO VISIT MORE MUSEUMS!

You should be in the middle of the museum assignment, already drafting your writing after your visiting and note taking during these hectic first weeks of classes. We did not meet last week to give you as much room to complete it all as possible!! The assignment is due TUESDAY 30 SEPTEMBER!

READ AS MUCH OF THE FREELAND BOOK AS YOU CAN WHILE COMPLETING THE FIRST PROJECT! And come into our Tuesday Seminar this week, the 23rd, after our museuming to consider these questions, having completed this preparation:

Tuesday, 23 September – Why is art a political issue at all?

• You should have read Freeland, Chs 4, 5, 7 by today and be prepared to discuss!

• Check out Freeland’s website: http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/ What sort of passionate thinker is she?

THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS WE WILL BE TALKING ABOUT IN CLASS, SO THINK ABOUT THEM AHEAD OF TIME! 

How will we activate web action to see how alive and dynamic women’s studies’ concerns are? That they involve people of passion individually and in groups? What is your stake in all this? How might it matter to you and to those you care about? You will be telling us about your museum experiences! Mentally prepare yourself to talk in class! Notice the Freeland readings for next week too! (in other words, finish up the whole book!)

Have a lot of fun!! 

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From a slide show on the establishment of the National Gallery of Art, here: http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/slideshows/paul-mellon-and-the-national-gallery-of-art.html#  

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Bits and ideas from Freeland's book to ponder while visiting, making notes, thinking, and writing. 

p105: "What should be the mood of a museum visit? Is it like going on a picnic, to school, on a shopping trip, or to church? Is money the name of the game, an inescapable fact about art today?" 

p98: "Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury under President Hoover, was embarrassed when foreign diplomats came to town and asked to be taken to the 'national gallery.' Mellon built the museum (opened in 1937) from his own collection.... The Galley's first director, David Finley, describes the museum's civilizing effects when it was first open during World War II and became a haven for soldiers visiting the city.... Free Sunday concerts, like the spacious galleries and the new practice of selling art reproductions were all aimed to promote an appreciation of beauty and quality among the ordinary men and women of the military." 

p78: "...anthropologist James Clifford, has juxtaposed the displays of totemic objects in the British Columbia Museum of Modern Art (as modernist abstract-shape sculptures) with their exhibition in Northwest Coast Indian galleries. After significant religious items were returned to tribal peoples, there were disagreements about how to display them. One group decided they should not be displayed at all. Another showed them as individual objects with commentary, whereas still another exhibited them only in a ceremonial context that recreated the potlatch ceremony in which they would traditionally be employed." 

p28: "I have argued that contemporary ugly or shocking art...has clear precedents in the Western European canon. Art includes not just works of formal beauty to be enjoyed by people with 'taste', or works with beauty and uplifting moral messages, but also works that are ugly and disturbing, with a shatteringly negative moral content. How that content is to be interpreted remains a matter for more discussion...." 

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