Friday 5/12/08

We had a free morning, which we used to catch up on sleep, use the Internet to email family and friends back home and have a late breakfast/lunch. Just after lunch we met at the Hostel, to all catch the subway to Harlem together, as none of us had been there before. When we got there, we went to The Studio Museum in Harlem, one of the few museums purely dedicated to Afro-American artistic practice. The exhibitions currently on were the Birth of the Cool by Barkley L. Hendricks; VideoStudio, an ongoing series of video and time-based art; Collection in Context: Four Decades; and Project Space by Shinique Smith. Hendricks' work was a collection of portraits and landscapes; with the life size portraits blending realism and postmodern elements. My favourite pieces in this exhibition were two paintings called Vertical Hold and Dippy’s Delight, which were basketball related paintings about one of Hendricks favourite pastimes, playing basketball. I also play and coach basketball so had a connection to these pieces, which to describe in the basic geometric form were a circle, square and rectangle. It was through the cultural lens of basketball, that Hendricks looks at colour and geometry through abstraction and minimalism. I also really liked the VideoStudio, which showed short films about 3-4 minutes in length by various artists. In Shinique Smith’s Project Space, I really enjoyed the piece Like it Like That, which was a depiction of an urban street scene created with paper images overlapping graffiti painted on the wall. It was similar to a lot of street art we had seen, but obviously more in depth, with layers of expression which were mesmerising to look at. The museum was only small so it didn’t take too long to get to see everything. This was a positive in that we didn’t miss anything, unlike some of the other museums visited.

After the visit to Harlem we went back to the Hostel to get ready to go out for our end of tour dinner at Arturo’s Restaurant Pizzeria. It was a really nice Italian restaurant and the meals were so big and tasted amazing. We had heaps of fun discussing the tour, what we liked and disliked and the good and bad experiences we had all had. It was really good to just sit back and enjoy a great meal chatting about our experience and a chance to get some last minute group photos.