CHOOSE
ONLY ONE QUESTION - You will be handing in your (mininmum-3 three page
single spaced-typed-stapled response to one of these questions...minimum
three works/pieces/phenomena in support of your answer) at beginning
of our Midterm session . Singular
and insightful choices will be highly regarded...IE: do not hesitate to
add to your discussion specific examples "outside" of the periods etc
discussed. I'm looking for mastery/ insight and YOUR analysis of the
topic. Also- attach on a separate sheet of typed paper three of your
tentative topics for your final ( fourth marking period) research paper.
(1) DISCUSS
THE DEVELOPMENT AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STANDING MALE FIGURE IN GREEK
SCULPTURE. NOTE PARTICULARLY THE CHANGING PROPORTIONS, THE DEPICTION OF MOTION
AND THE CONCEPTION OF THE FIGURE IN SPACE. CITE SPECIFIC EXAMPLES TO ILLUSTRATE
YOUR DISCUSSION.
(2) DISCUSS THE INFLUENCE OF GREECE AND ROME IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN ART/IMAGERY. CITE SPECIFIC EXAMPLES TO ILLUSTRATE
YOUR DISCUSSION.
(3) DISCUSS THE EFFECTS/RESULTS THAT THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND PRACTICES OF ISLAM HAVE ON ISLAMIC ART. CITE SPECIFIC EXAMPLES TO ILLUSTRATE
YOUR DISCUSSION.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Through Art and Forensics, Faces of Unidentified Victims Emerge
Photo
A student at the New York Academy of Art sculpting the face of an unknown crime victim based on a replica of the person’s skull.CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times
Anyone who walked into Room 501 at the New York Academy of Art in TriBeCa the other day would have seen a roomful of sculpture students molding clay into faces that looked nearly alive.
But the people represented by the sculptures had all met ugly deaths and were found as skeletons in desolate places across New York City — train tracks, wooded areas, in a basement.
Most of the bodies bore various violent clues, including dismemberment, bullets to the head and other blunt force trauma, the instructor, Joe Mullins, told the art students. The bodies all had one thing in common.
“They lost their identity,” said Mr. Mullins, a forensic imaging specialist. “We’re going to give it back to them.”
This was the point of a weeklong workshop earlier this month in which fine art students tried to give faces to 11 unidentified crime victims found over the years who were now being handled by the city medical examiner’s office, which teamed up with the academy for this project.
The agency gets an average of about a dozen skeletonized cases a year, and the work of these artists is a “last-ditch effort” to identify these victims, as a comfort to relatives, and perhaps to open cold cases and, in homicides, find their killers, said Dr. Bradley J. Adams, the agency’s director of forensic anthropology.
Photo
The New York City medical examiner’s office provided skull replicas, hoping that the students’ work will help with identifying the victims. CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times
Since his office has only done a few skull reconstructions like these, he told the students, “selfishly, I’m going to get 11 reconstructions done in a week.”
Depending on the results, the medical examiner’s office would consider working with the academy on a somewhat regular basis.
For this class, each student was given a skull — a replica made by the medical examiner’s office of each victim — and a block of clay to sculpt a face. The students were told to incorporate whatever information investigators recorded in finding and examining the skeleton, including estimates of the victim’s age and height, maybe a hair type or style, and possible clothing sizes.
Some cases came with additional clues, like a young man believed to be Hispanic who was found in 2004 wrapped in a blanket near the Jackie Robinson Parkway with strands of hair with his remains. There was also a young woman believed to be black who was found in Jamaica Bay in 1991 and who had two gold teeth.
The details hinted at grim stories, of souls found in mysterious and depraved circumstances that often suggested gruesome deaths. The left side of the woman’s skull, for instance, had been crushed.
Photo
A forensic imaging specialist, Joe Mullins, right, reviewing the work of Marco Palli, left, at the New York Academy of Art.CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times
Mr. Mullins, who works for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va., told the class that it was the first time he knew of art students’ trying to help identify homicide victims.
“You guys are a part of history,” he said. “Putting that face on them is our last hope of getting these people identified.”
Mr. Mullins told the students to work like police sketch artists. They were not there for art’s sake, but rather to make a likeness close enough that it might prompt someone who knew or encountered the victims to recognize them. He said his own sculptures of anonymous skulls had yielded over 30 such hits.
Photographs of the students’ sculptures would be turned over to New York City police investigators and posted on an online public database of missing persons run by theNational Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
Of the roughly 1,200 still-unidentified bodies the medical examiner’s office has received in the past 25 years, some of its coldest cases are those that arrive skeletonized or so badly decomposed that the face is nonexistent, Mr. Adams said.
Photo
Zoe Suenson-Taylor, an art student, worked on her project.CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times
The city has begun trying to use the skull to sculpt a face when more traditional methods, such as fingerprinting, dental records and DNA testing, fail.
“This is like the end of the road,” Mr. Adams told the class. “This is something we are going to do if there are no other leads.”
The class seemed an ideal fit for the fine art students at the academy, given its emphasis on anatomical study, said John Volk, the school’s director of continuing education.
One student in the class, Marco Palli, who was sculpting a young man with corn rows, said, “The whole point is having someone say, ‘Hey, that looks like my uncle or my cousin.’”
Mr. Palli said that while he worked on a face for the missing man, “I felt like he was talking to me and that he’d be happy I was doing this for him.”
Photo
The city has begun trying to use the skull to sculpt a face when more traditional methods, such as fingerprinting, dental records and DNA testing, fail. CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times
Since relatives might remember the man through photographs, Mr. Palli said he sculpted the face with a slight smile, “because people usually smile in pictures.”
The skulls seemed generic and similar at first glance. But as Mr. Mullins told the students, each would serve as a distinct blueprint, with its bone structure dictating facial features, as layers of clay were added to create the flesh, skin and cartilage that would rebuild the victim’s face.
Mr. Mullins opened a bag of marbles and placed a pair on each student’s desk, to make eyeballs. He distributed toothpicks to make a structure for the nose by following the lines of the nasal aperture.
He told students to stick closely to whatever the skull and other clues provided. The goal was not to create a brilliant likeness of a specific person, but rather a slightly generic look that might still elicit an identification.
“There is no room for artistic license,” he said.
Carmen Bilton, 48, worked on a skull of the young woman with the gold teeth. Ms. Bilton sculpted the woman with the mouth slightly open, so the teeth could be seen as an identification clue.
Ms. Bilton, a teacher from Eutawville, S.C., said she traveled to New York for the class in the hope that a realistic rendering might help a family find someone they lost.
“It’s the sense that I would get it right,” Ms. Bilton said, “that maybe I ought to do this.”
‘Chigusa and the Art of Tea in Japan’ at the Princeton Museum
The roughly 16-inch-tall, unadorned tea-leaf storage jar called Chigusa; Chigusa, right, with mouth cover and ornamental cords.Credit
Left to right: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution
Andrew M. Watsky, a professor of Japanese art history at Princeton University, understands that an exhibition about a jar — a single jar — is unlikely to incite stampedes.
The
good news for him and Louise Allison Cort, his co-curator for “Chigusa
and the Art of Tea in Japan,” an exhibition organized for the
Smithsonian Institution last spring and currently on view at the Princeton University Art Museum,
is that it is better suited to “quiet, intimate contemplation,” Dr.
Watsky said. More good news: The jar in question, which is most likely
making its only appearance outside Washington, has about 500 years of
experience beguiling the quietly contemplative.
Chigusa
is the proper name of the roughly 16-inch-tall, unadorned brown vessel
that sits behind plexiglass in the first of three galleries devoted to
its central role in chanoyu, a revered Japanese tea ceremony. Made in
China in the late 13th or 14th century, the jug for storing tea leaves
found its way to Japan sometime before the 15th century, when it was
discovered by chanoyu practitioners. Using similar vessels, the tea
ceremony is still performed in Japan, as well as in the United States
and other countries.
A 1670 portrait of Sen no Rikyu, a revered 16th-century tea master.Credit
Collection of Jane and Raphael Bernstein
Chigusa
“is not the Mona Lisa,” Dr. Watsky said during a recent tour, meaning
that it is not as famous worldwide as da Vinci’s masterpiece, but it is
nonetheless considered an important work of art in Japan. Whether
Americans will find it as stunning or arresting is up for debate, and a
question that may well inspire them to consider the nature of beauty
while getting to know the little brown jug and what it symbolizes.
“In
China, where it was made, it was not an aesthetic object,” Dr. Watsky
explained. “It was utilitarian. Only in Japan was it perceived to embody
these rich aesthetic qualities” — possibly, he said, after a
15th-
or 16th-century owner known for his skill at recognizing beauty
discovered it. The term “Chigusa,” most likely drawn from the ancient
Japanese poetry studied by chanoyu practitioners, translates to “myriad
things” or “myriad flowers,” said Dr. Watsky, whose interest in Japanese
ceramics dates to 1980, when he lived in Japan shortly after graduating
from college.
“I
hesitate to say I think it’s beautiful,” Dr. Watsky said of the vessel,
“because as a scholar I try to separate my own response from what
people in a historical moment might have thought about it. But I do find
it appealing.”
His
vague yet appreciative response to the centuries-old container echoes
the elusive tone struck by some of its Japanese admirers, who wrote
about the jar after communing with it during chanoyu. The exhibition
includes a selection of letters and diary entries about the jar dating
to the 16th century.
The
diary excerpts often describe Chigusa physically. “The glaze is a
single layer and resembles the wood-grain pattern known as
‘quail-feather grain,' ” reads one from 1586. The letters, including one
from 1888 that describes a transfer between owners, get at the feelings
and spirituality associated with the jar a bit better. “I hope you will
long treasure it,” Hisada Hanshoan Soetsu, the initial owner, wrote.
“My thoughts cannot be fully expressed.”
In
addition to the preserved documents, the exhibition includes a model
chanoyu room outfitted with tea utensils and an alcove within which
Chigusa would have been placed for optimal viewing. Displayed in a
separate gallery are three nesting storage boxes built to house Chigusa
during its travels as well as at its owner’s home. The earliest box
dates to the Japanese Edo period (1615-1868).
Also on view: a selection of ornaments and accouterments used to “dress” the vessel.
“In
the front room we show Chigusa naked,” Dr. Watsky said. “But we know
from the diaries that when Chigusa was displayed it had clothes on. Over
time, the owners felt that one of the ways to enhance its beauty was to
dress it in fine textile clothing.”
The
wardrobe items include a mouth cover made from 15th-century silk
brocade, a 16th-century blue net bag that slips over the jar’s contours
and a set of decorative thick blue cords, tied in ornamental knots and
woven in the late 19th or early 20th century.
Storage boxes for Chigusa.Credit
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution
Though Chigusa’s days as a vessel for storing tea have long since passed, its wardrobe is still being updated. When Freer Sackler, the Smithsonian’s Museums of Asian Art,
in Washington, bought Chigusa in 2009, a conservator there said the
mouth cover could no longer be used because the jar had become too
fragile, Dr. Watsky said. “So we commissioned a new mouth cover to be
made,” he said. “That’s not something you often associate with a
museum’s practices, but owning Chigusa comes with responsibilities.”
Dr.
Watsky and Ms. Cort plan to return Chigusa to the Freer Sackler after
the Princeton show closes. “It will never leave there again,” Dr. Watsky
said, noting that the museum’s policy precludes objects’ traveling. “So
you see this is a pretty unusual opportunity.”
For
those who take it in, the show’s effect will probably be more
meditative than thrilling, Dr. Watsky said. “But with a little
concentration and a little time spent looking,” he said, “maybe the
beauty of Chigusa will reveal itself to you.”
