While collegiate flirting usually consists of recycled Comedy Central jokes and (barely) politically correct comments about our less-than-perfect friends and lovers, the Japanese literati of the Edo period wooed one another with art and poetry. On exhibit this week at the Johnson Museum of Art is Colored in the New Year's Light, a show featuring Japanese surimono — color wood block prints produced as holiday tokens. Surimono were traditionally commissioned by poetry societies; they were distributed at New Year's as gifts of love or friendship. Rather than that drunken text message at midnight we've all sent and received, the ancient Japanese cognoscenti sent one another delicate images of fish, elegantly clad women and mythical beasts by the ocean side.

On a day when Ithaca was putting on its best impression of Seattle, and most Cornell students were returning to campus on (achingly long) bus rides, I was at the Johnson Museum for the second time in a week. My focus was placed solely on the calligraphy exhibit on the bottom floor. Thus, ignoring my natural tendency to run up the steps and check out the sculptures on the museum’s top level, I instead leaped down two sets of stairs to find the Gold Gallery, home of the Art of the Written Word: Calligraphy in Asia exhibit.

As I walked down the wood-paneled hallway of the first floor in the Johnson, I spied the current resting place for a couple dozen or so photographs out of the world famous Martin Margulies collection. Mr. Margulies’ extensive anthology is based in Miami, but, until January 4, a presentation of photographs titled Silent but Not Quiet: The Message in Documentary Photographs stands menacingly in Bower’s Gallery, daring you to ponder what commonalities exist between the diverse arrangement of photos and how something can be silent yet still make a sound.

It was the summer of ’69. In the midst of free love, hits of LSD and political activism across the U.S., Cornell University hosted a historic exhibit that transformed the perception of art. Curated by Willoughby Sharp at the A.D. White House, Earth Art broke out of museums and galleries and into the rough-and-tumble of the wilderness. The show was the introduction to the Land Art movement, including works like Walter de Maria's “Lightning Farm,” which harnessed the power of nature for aesthetic pleasure.

Imagine that you are a homeless person in New York City. Is it so unlikely? You bum around during the day, giving yourself mental pats-on-the-back whenever someone gives you a quarter and come back to your makeshift home underneath the Brooklyn bridge just as it’s getting dark. One day, you come back and do a double take. There have always been cars underneath the bridge (you never knew how they got there in the first place), but today there are teams of scraggly haired men and women bent over in exertion, lugging pieces of sharp metal as they make their way towards the cars. You ask them what they are doing. After they catch their collective breath, they reply that it is an art demonstration named Jacks.

Correction Appended

It is 1963, just three years before the start of the Cultural Revolution: Everyone you know sports a Chairman Mao portrait badge, and red slogans confront you (literally and figuratively) as you walk down the street, proclaiming “crush the old world,” and “Chairman Mao will live forever in our hearts.” Your family is forcefully pointed towards the countryside and told they will be re-educated, will become farmers. You learn Mao Zedong Thought from the “little red book,” Quotations from Chairman Mao.