art

Cornell Names Jessica Martinez the Next Director of the Johnson Museum of Art

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Cornell has named Jessica Martinez, the current director of Academic and Public Programs at Harvard University, as the new director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. Johnson Museum’s former director Stephanie Wiles left for Yale in July. After her departure, the role has been temporarily filled by Peter Gould and Ellen Avril, who also serves the museum’s chief curator and curator of Asian art. The director of the Museum is in charge of overseeing all museum operations. Martinez will be responsible for fundraising, personnel-management, acquisition of objects and conservation efforts, for example.

Columns

LEUNG | The Art in Artist

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I spent over an hour waiting at the stage. It was mid-day and the sun was raging. But I was at Firefly Music Festival and the reason I had come in the first place was to see BØRNS perform. So there was no option but to wait. It was an experience that validated everything I had already thought about his music.

Columns

LEUNG | (Not) Behind Closed Doors

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While my professor unpackaged the books and distributed them around the room, I felt as if I was actually witnessing a part of history; as if this was something I would look back on years from now and say, that was me he handed a copy to. That was my professor. Prof. Andrew Moisey, art history and visual studies, recently published The American Fraternity. This photobook places photos that Moisey took in an unnamed fraternity at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 2000’s next to text that comes from a 60-year-old ritual manual that was found on the fraternity’s floor. Starting in 2000, Moisey documented his younger brother’s involvement in the fraternity, from initiation rituals to drunken parties to an untimely funeral.

Columns

LEUNG | We Can Still Go, Even If You Like Me

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A red carpet stretches across the room. Wooden sticks, maybe five feet long, are placed in groups of six on top of it. As we walk the expanse of the room, we contemplate the meaning of these rather enlarged sticks, watching as they alternate in fullness and parts. Most people would roll their eyes at this concept of art, others, like us, are in awe that we are a part of it. Dia:Beacon is a museum of art that houses works from the 1960s to present.

Arts & Culture

YANG | Thoughts from the Subway

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I worked in a research lab at a university in my hometown this past summer and, for the first time in my life, experienced what it’s like to have a long commute — an hour and a half each way standing in a hot, humid, insanely crowded subway car. Most of my fellow commuters spent these long and miserable daily trips on their phones, either scrolling through Weibo (think Twitter) feeds, watching viral videos, playing online games, binging the newest hit TV series or reading trending articles on Wechat (a Chinese amalgamation of Facebook and Instagram). Hundreds of commuters with headphones on staring down at their smartphone screens was quite a sight be behold but also incredibly frustrating, especially when I had to transfer lines at one of the busiest stations downtown, and had to follow a massive crowd of people up flights of stairs to another platform, a process slowed down significantly by those who were too absorbed in their phones to even walk properly. Despite my frustration, and because social learning is a natural thing that we all do, a few days into this commuter life, I also started killing time by spending it solely on my phone, going through my Weibo feed more times than necessary, replying to comments, reading Wechat articles that I normally wouldn’t care for and, when all that was still not enough, busted out my VPN to go through Instagram and Twitter. Yet, as you may have guessed by now, aggressively working my way through every social media platform every morning and evening did not make me feel “more connected” to friends and family, all the articles I read did not make me significantly more knowledgeable in certain areas or enlighten me on social or political issues, nor did the viral funny videos make me happier.