Hello! My name is Alex Davidoff, and I have some updates on my project since I have returned from my research trip to New York. I am incredibly grateful that I was granted the opportunity to see some of the most influential galleries and see many well-established works in-person for the first time. While on my trip, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), The Guggenheim, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The American Museum of Natural Museum, and The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. I was also able to walk around New York City and see a few smaller contemporary art galleries. Each of these experiences gave me the opportunity to witness different approaches to installation and artistic styles. I was able to see a large variety of works and have been thinking about how to use the works that I saw in my own artworks. I am eager to continue sketching out ideas for larger works, and my experience in New York was eye-opening to new ways I could use materials and design.
As someone who is exploring a museum studies minor, my experience visiting museums has made me more interested in becoming a staff member of a museum someday! I was able to see so many different modes of displaying art, and I particularly found the MoMA to be incredibly interesting. While I was there, I happened to walk in on a drawing practice of Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Soft Fan and joined to sit with other people sketching. It was so nice to create with others and set a great mood for the first day of my trip. While on my last day of the trip, I visited The Strong National Museum of Play and was amazed to see all of the ways that objects could interact with viewers.
Over the course of this summer, I am excited to explore new ways in which my creative project develops. At this point in my project, I am in an exploratory phase and am narrowing down ideas for sketches. Some challenges that I have been facing is choosing a focus or specific cultural items to use as representation. While I know that there are many cultural objects to choose from, I want to infuse ideas of my own personal disconnect, and am considering many ways to approach this. I plan to go into more research about representational objects from the Soviet Union, and use those items to contrast with American ones.
At the moment I’m drawn to painting, and saw many examples of traditional and contemporary works on my trip. I am considering how much a painting needs to reveal to get its vision across, and am thinking about how I can use photography and cropping in my work. In the past I have focused on self-portraiture as a subject of my work, and now I am challenging myself to consider how objects and other people’s connection to them can be representational of a part of myself. By representing my identity in this way, I hope to find that others connect to feelings of exploring cultural heritage and belonging.
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