Rachel Chapman @ CSU Pueblo

  Vito Acconci, Still from Three Adoption Studies, 1970 Source      Art has an emotional and physical connection to all viewers. Art can make a person feel sad, happy, angry, and several other emotions. The physical movement of art can make the viewers revolt in disgust or raise their heartbeat in anticipation. Through these emotions and physical changes, each viewer carries a biased view towards the art, and the art captures a moment in time for the viewer. The term phenomenology labels this kind of connections viewers have with art, and it is constantly reciprocated between the viewer and the art piece. The reciprocal action between art and its viewer was introduced by Merleau- Ponty, a philosopher that coined the term phenomenology. Amelia Jones wrote an essay, “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Use of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology in Art History” continued to portray art in this way. This can easily be seen with art that was painted, drawn, or just an inanimate ...

Enrique Chagoya,  Illegal Alien’s Guide to Somewhere Over the Rainbow, 2010 Source                                         Source                                           Source John Singer Sargent , Portrait of Miss Elise Palmer, or A Lady in White and  Georgia O’Keefe’s, Dark Iris No. 1          All art museums have a standard for their establishments and when a person goes into a museum, they are welcomed with art pieces they know they will be seen time and time again. The museum's permanent collection is how art museums are able to gain a reputation for themselves, to have a prized piece will elevate the status of the museum and will influence the amount of donations they recieve. Directors and curators of museums know the im...

  Leon Spilliaert, Self Portrait, 1908  Source     The human being has no other way of being experienced but through the physical form. All people take information through their physical senses whether it be sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste. Visual arts utilize the sense of sight far more than all the others, but what is seen can be interpreted entirely differently through the eyes of another human. Amile Jones writes, “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Use of Merleau- Ponty’s Phenomenology in Art History” that being the observer one cannot help but be the object too.   This can be best summarized in a quote used by Jones in her essay by Rosalind Krauss, “I am not the spectator, I am involved in the situation I view.” What a person sees reflects on to them. The person can not help but internalize the art they view. The art will change them, and they will change the meaning of the art. It is because the viewer only knows what they know thei...

  Collar ( ingqosha ) , 19th–20th century. South Africa. Xhosa or Mfengu or Nguni peoples Source Voices are heard but we can also ignore them this has happened to the voices of women that live in third world countries. It happens to women all over the world, even the most prestige nations whose bank accounts can afford more than the basic of infrastructure. All women struggle based on their sex, but more on gender politics that have forced women into a position that is adverse. However, by comparing the hardship of all women, there will be no change for women. Since it is based on educating on a problem that involves all women. Importance of listening to third world women having empathy towards their story and recognizing some actions of the first world women has caused that hardship.      Trinh T. Minh-ha in “Difference: Special Third World Women Issue” says the reason women have been able not to see each other is because we view each other as different. “Words mani...

   Donato de’ Bardi,  Saint Jerome, on panel, 1445-1450 Source Waves keep crashing into the shore and there is no need to be concerned. It is when the waves have received back to the ocean and it does not seem like the waves will come back is when all should be worried. All museums have had ups and down when it comes to donations, funding’s, lack of trustee’s support its just waves crashing into the shore. But over the pasts mouth the world has been hit with a global pandemic. Museums have lost their connection with public because of lockdown. There are no funds and no audience to pander to.  It can seem like museums are the small island ready to be destroyed. However, museums have a dangerous and unappealing option to save them from having to shut down. Robin Pogrebin explains that ominous deed museum might do in “Brooklyn Museum to Sell 12 Works as Pandemic Changes the Rules”.  The action of deaccessioning art has always been seen as detrimental to museums sin...

Source The world is filled with some many people. So many that when one person thinks about the population, they cannot help but think about how different they are from everyone else. Through separation of oneself from others, they gain a view that can only fit their needs as an individual. There is a need to label all people and put them into a category that if our need.  Trinh T. Minh-ha writes about the separation and the difference society creates when we think about a Third World Women. In “Difference:  A Special Third World Women Issue” by Minh-ha deals with the issue of authenticity and the negative impacts it can have on a group of people. She gives the definition of authenticity as “in such contexts turns out to be a product that one can buy, arrange to one’s liking, and/ or preserve.” Cultures are under attack by outsiders when they search for authentic cultures. The culture must have its own distinct values that make outsiders questions their own culture. The term o...

   Source Deaccessioning to Acquisition is my topic proposal. The museum I will be doing is the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Their permanent collection is small and know for lesser know names. But the Fine Art Museum has a John Sargent- Singer portrait which makes the, “Fine Art” label more appealing and more to its name. And they have a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. They have art to offer for an exchange for other pieces. I would like to examine what kind of art would the Fine art Center be willing to offer and what art will they gain that fits into their mission statement. The Fine Art Center wants artwork done in the Americas. Before I can write a proposal about deaccessioning to acquisition, I need to understand what makes deaccession work. What is the main process in selling artwork? How to find artwork that works with in the environment of a museum? How to do deaccession an artwork right without causing a controversy or dilemma? Are there legal systems that hinder the...

   Vincent Van Gogh, The Sower (Sower at Sunset ), 1888 and Paul Signac, Place des Linces St.Tropez,1893  Source                                                                               Source “Good artists copy and great artists steal” a statement that came out of the mouth of great artist Pablo Picasso. But it is debated that Picasso may have stolen the quote from the poet T. S. Eliot. The idea of stealing art and putting into their own artwork can be traced back to Shakespeare.  Randal Barthes explains in his writing, “The Death of the Author” that words spoken or written are just words, yet how nothing is original. Barthes says, “we know that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidi...

    Dying Gaul  Source It is a secret that everyone knows. A forbidden action that all nations condemn, but only the powerful can perpetrate the action of stealing and smuggling art and artifacts. Museums are full of art and artifacts that have been illegal acquired, and museums play into the illegal system. It is well known and well documented the illegal and shady negotiating, and buying museums do.   There has always been a plea to not plunder the art of a conquered land, but the industrial world does not hear the plea. Ekpo Eyo writes in, “Reparation of Cultural Heritage: The African Experience” the pleas over the centuries not to steal cultural heritage. And how the nation whose cultural heritage was stolen from them through war or just plan thievery the nation suffers. Ekpo Eyo quotes the Greek Historian Polybius, “the city should not owe its beauty to adornments brought in elsewhere, but to the valor of its inhabitants.” 1   This statement has been...

  Words that are on the page only work as words. There is nothing behind the words a person reads: no agenda, no background story, or any future. Roland Barthes makes the argument an author’s ambition of writing is not reflected in the words he or she writes nor in the meaning of the text. This is the premises of, “The Death of the Author”.   When reading the reader wants to find out the mystery to all writings, why is the author writing this and what did the author mean by writing it? Barthes says, “the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding in us.” Readers look to the author like the way the faithful look at God. “Give a text an Author is to impose a limit in that text”1 If the reader knows everything about the author it creates biases. Whatever the author says is the gospel truth, the reader...

  Wangechi Mutu,  The Seated 1,  2019  Source “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators by Bell Hooks reflects how Black women watch movies with a critical eye. Black women critique what they see because, they have been taught to gaze in different way. Their gaze comes with power of changing society, and it has been controlled. So, they do not represent Black women in the most favorable light. They are related to mammies and or poor ghetto girls. Mass media has dismissed black women just by the color of their skin. This has left Black women with no choice but to look at movies, television, or any mass media with a biased opinion towards what they are seeing. Hooks explains this by saying, “when most Black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy.” Which justifies the Black female gaze.  White...

  Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski)  , Therese Dreaming,  1938 Source Exploitation is a neutral word. The word itself does not dictate the actions of a person.  Exploiting can mean utilizing or taking advantage, and it all comes down to the actions of an individual. Yet, most of the time when people are exploiting, they are taking advantage of others or a situation where they have power over another. Over years, the act of exploiting has been prevalent in the art.   Artists have used black bodies to gain attention. Artists have used young girls for their own sexual deviance and stamp it with an artistic expression. This has caused spectators to call for action and have the artist re-examined or removed for holding an exhibition. The removing of art exhibits from museums show the audience museums understand its responsibility to the community. Museums must have an ethical and social awareness that benefit everyone surrounding that museum. When museums fail to...

                                                                                                      Source Hollywood has not welcomed black women into their movies or into their audiences.  Movies are for white males but has the interest in depicting white women as the only subject. The gaze of the audience is to escape their reality. Where the Black community does not have the luxury of escaping their reality, it is dangerous to forget where they are and who they are. The black gaze is taught to other Blacks because there are consequences to unchecked gazes. The black gaze must be critical and document what is happening around them. It must look for danger and threats because, th...

  Picasso with The Weeping Woman  Source The gaze placed on a subject says more about the person that is looking then about the subject. The subject reflects the desires, fears, aspirations, and failures of the person looking. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey expresses how females are portrayed in film to be seen and not heard. To be looked at and touched in the form of sexual conquest then out of human connection. Male characters and even the directors manage to be the power holders over time, space, money, and the law. Albert Hitchcock movies proudly boast this power dynamic through his male characters, and through his own personal relationships with the lead actress too. Mulvey writes “the power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of both. Power is backed be a certainty of legal right and the established guilt o the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically spea...

                When an image is stolen it loses its originality. The image is not longer pure it is tainted with another person’s perspective. The image is consumed by another’s thoughts and options that have no context to what the image meant. The Black community has suffered and continues to suffer from their own stole image. Black women are not display the way a black woman would see herself. She is displayed through the eyes of a slave holder; someone how does not see her value as a person but as property. “Re-presenting Black Womanhood” an exhibition put on display by Winterthur Museum gives black women a say in their own image. It confronts the racist and sexist gaze that is placed on black women.   Black women need a personable gaze intended to show the humanity of them. Not to display them as happy servant content with their living with no freedom.   John Lewis Krimmel in the exhibition shows how co...