Lowe Art Museum

Luna Wahnon Benayoun

Lowe Art Museum

 

It was a sunny, Sunday, afternoon on July 1^st 2012 when our reading class went to the Lowe Art Museum; we had to meet at the entrance with our professor Mrs.Porges, who was waiting for us.

First of all a tour guide took us around the museum and the first sculpture we could see was majestic. It was three big men, who were standing on their head a little men were surrounded them. I thought that the meaning of this sculpture was that the world   is dominated by wrong people. Then, we got to different galleries:

Glass gallery: every object was made in glass. For example we saw a representation with the main symbols of the estate of Arizona such as skull, boots, crocodiles, feather, and a map inside glass. Another representation, which called my attention in this gallery was “The grant wonder, 2005, glass, paint and cooper.” This is a large format book composed of five pages on which photographer image and test has been sand blasted and then painted.
Tapun gallery: The theme of this gallery is bride objects, which were made with pottery, stone, jade and were connected to the death.

Beaux Art Gallery: in this gallery we can find two kind of painting styles: the first one is narrative, which describes stories about people, place, and event. Fact and fiction can be traced and the subject was derived literature, scripture mitology, history, or current event. The second part is face and form. Portrait of important individual, who represents social models. At the beginning, artists transfigured the human body, but in recent years the figure had again taken its identity.

“Adapting and Adopting”. Ways of changes as east encounters West gallery. The integration of foreign influence and its contribution to the development of modern and contemporary Japanese art is the underlying theme. Paintings of this gallery were made by the students of Miami University and are composed by two corridors. In the first one, we saw that the predominant colors were red and black. For me, red represent the east culture and black represents the feeling of mourning or grief. This painting reflects the struggle that individuals, who come from Asia to America, had to do in order to adopt another culture and leave behind their own roots. In the second corridor, at first we could appreciate painting with symbols of the Asia culture and at the end of this corridor there was a picture, were we could see Japanese imprisoned, his face had an expression of anger and he was looking at a female figure that was outside. For me, this picture is a projection of the conflict between leaving his own culture in order to improve his economic status, or staying in the hometown.

The last two galleries were amazing, both of them were the reflects of Japanese’s’ history.

Edo periods (introspection) this is a peace period of Japanese culture where we can see Japanese symbols such as writing, cloth, nature, and animals were traced.

 Meiji Periods (awakening) this is the end of period of peace, when Japan was invaded by United States. It is a period of transitions. Painting reflects the war through the fire, people adopted western clothes, the imperious was established, and a new era of industrialization started.

In the Museum Lowe Art, we could see the evolution of the paintings from one stage to another and the reflection of history of the nations though out them.