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Professor Joanna Inglot came up with the ideal location for her students' final exam in her "20th Century Art" course: the museums of New York.
For the first part of their two-part final, the class of seven students went museum-hopping in New York one weekend last December. They started with the Museum of Modern Art, seeing and discussing works by artists they had studied in class: Marc Chagall, Rene Magritte, Meret Oppenheim, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse.
| 'The art meant so much more to us seeing it in person.' |
"It was amazing how much we knew and recognized after a semester of lectures and discussions!" Raina Fox '08 (Mendota Heights, Minn.) wrote. "And the art meant so much more to us seeing it in person. There is something about a slide that can't convey the power and magnitude of a Jackson Pollock painting or the spirituality of a Constantin Brancusi sculpture."
At MOMA, Professor Inglot "would walk up to a piece and say, 'Tell me about this,'" Fox recalled. "As a group, we would explain what we knew about the artist, title, movement and work itself, and discuss our feelings about how it differed [seeing it] in person from the reproductions we had seen; in a lot of cases there was a huge change."
The students also visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they saw more of the works they had studied as well as their precursors; spent an evening at Soho galleries, where working artists display their work; and concluded their trip with a visit to the Guggenheim.
For the second part of their final, the students returned to campus and wrote two essays. "New York City and its museums made the art we have studied come alive in a new way, and made us appreciate art history even more," Fox said. "Not a bad way to take a final."
When she was an undergraduate herself, Professor Inglot dreamed of studying art at MOMA. "I know that all students who study modern art wish they could see the works they study first-hand in the museum," she said. "I wanted to make this dream come true for my students."
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