Yvonne Hume's Art History 411 Blog

This week’s reading explores an installation created by David Hammons. His work is known to examine the social conditions of black lives. The installation is named Concerto in Black and Blue . The name itself gives away what the installation might be like for a viewer. It suggests music, violence, and race. When a viewer/participant goes through the installation art piece, it is described as pitch-black only illuminated by blue lights that are held by viewers. The blue lights were given to viewers at the entrance of the gallery.   Although the installation occupied three large spaces in an NYC gallery, viewers had to navigate an impossible space. The difficulty that viewers had navigating the space in the gallery represented an “inscrutable social space”. From my understanding, Hammons wanted to allow his viewers to be fully encompassed in his piece and get a glimpse of the social climate of black lives.   I actually walked through a pitch-black room a few days ago, wantin...

       Carol and Susan - Friends Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians by JEB - 1978      Jan Zita Grover, ‘Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs’ (1991) is an article that focuses on the portrayal in photographs and questions whether what is being represented is reality or the maker’s perception. Grover begins with an experience that she had with a friend that she helped put an exhibition together. The exhibition was in support of the local government and highlighted Nicaraguan people in their communities. Grover tells how her friend rejected photographs made by Nicaraguans and Cubans in favor of photographs made by North Americans and Europeans. Mainly because the photos by the Nicaraguan and Cubans showed laughing children and smiling peasants and the friend did not want to show something so sentimental. Grover explains that by denying the photos of the Nicaraguans and Cubans, her friend was denying their aspiration...

  Indigenous Methodology is an essay by Margaret Kovach. Kovach evaluates tribal epistemology and compares the indigenous methods of obtaining knowledge to traditional western methods. Kovach centers her research around the Plains Cree tribe located in the northernmost area of the North American plains (North Canada).   Unlike western academic research methods, indigenous knowledge cannot be standardized because it is highly dependent on the relationship to person and place. Indigenous methods of obtaining knowledge share characteristics and qualities and are in the constructs of a paradigm. Some of these qualities and characteristics include ceremonial practices, dreams, rituals, and prayers, which are very holistic and metaphysical. These methods and concepts of indigenous’ knowledge are foreign to western practices of research. The idea of metaphysical, extraordinary, and energy-based knowledge and calling it the fact is hard to swallow for me as well. I thought about ...