ART 348 Past/Present/Future (Spring 2020)
When I signed up for this course, I will be honest I was nervous. I had not taken any type of art class since middle school. I do not consider myself a creative person in the sense of making physical projects. However, this class allowed me to use a side of my brain a typically do not always get to use. I was able to interact with people in a way I was not used to.
Since this was a perspectives class and the first time this class was ever offered, the class had roughly a 50/50 split of art majors and other random majors. The professor who taught this class was very open to us expressing our creativity in any way. Becasue of this, the projects were always different which made the class more interesting. You were able to see each person’s personality in their art and I think that was my favorite part about the whole class. Professor Rice wanted us to draw inspiration from our aesthetic pillars to help us because we all had different backgrounds. This simple request opened the door for me to be successful in this class. The moment she said that my brain wondered for the rest of the semester about time and my women’s and gender studies minor since my pillar class was a wgst class.
The class itself revolved around the aspect of time and we typically had to create pieces that incorporated time into it. This fits perfectly with my wgst minor becasue time really plays a major role in almost everything about women’s rights, the LGBTQ+ community, reproductive justice, etc. I was able to learn about these topics from such a different perspective than what I am used to and it was so enlightening. I never thought I would be able to enjoy an art class as much as a did, and I fully believe it was becasue of the atmosphere the professor created on the first day for us. Art has never really been something I consider myself to be good at. After this class, I learned more about myself than I typically do in my major classes.
This is the first art piece that I created for this class. It is a collage of all black and white pictures from different women’s marches. I decided to put them all in black and white so you could not tell what time period they were taken in. Color can sometimes put a mask on time, but when you step back you can see that all these photos look similar. This further proves the point I was trying to make which was that what women were fighting for in the ’70s, ’80s, and now is still the same. Time is moving forward but change is not. It is not until you really examine the images individually that you can spot the differences in the time periods of which they were taken.