When an audience becomes present during the production of art, the artist becomes acutely aware of his or her actions, and the pressure of watching eyes often causes the artist to change or alter the way they perform. An audience is not necessary for art to occur, however. Art is any thing you do consciously that leads to an observation, emotional expression, realization, or end product. For my performance experiment I chose to talk on the phone for two hours. (Luckily, I have a lot of friends that I haven't talked to in a while! :)) Though my performance did not have an intentional audience, there was someone receiving a message on the other end of the phone, and my family could hear and see me walk by occasionally talking. My performance was a form of art- communication always involves some selection, presentation, and interpretation of words- but visually speaking, I also exuded lots of non-verbal communication in the form of hand waving, pacing, eye rolling, smiling, etc. Since, like I mentioned earlier, art is anything you do that leads to an observation, emotional expression, realization, or end product, and I observed and learned a lot about myself and the movement of my body, expressed emotion, and came to an end product, my phone conversations were indeed art. There is no real difference between life and art- life is art. In life you express emotions, come to realizations, observe, and create end products, everything you do in life has some artistic value. The only thing separating life from art is your conscious realization of life as art. If you chose not to notice the things you can learn about yourself by doing simple tasks, then you are not witnessing the art of life. If everyone would open their eyes, they would notice that everything happening around them is a work of art.

Triptych Blog

For my triptych I chose to immerse myself into three historical moments of the Civil Rights Movement. They are arranged in chronological order. The first picture shows me as Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1st, 1955. Rosa Parks' boycott of the Jim Crow Laws sparked a huge controversy, and eventually led to a Supreme Court ruling dictating that public transportation segregation was illegal. Next, I chose to put myself in the shoes of the Little Rock Nine- the nine black students who, after Brown vs. Board of Education, tried to exercise their rights to attend an all white school and faced extreme opposition. In this picture I am Elizabeth Eckford being persued by an angry mob on September 4th, 1957. Elizabeth was just 15 years old when this picture was taken- but she fought for her Consititution given rights and eventually earned a college degree and became the first African American in St. Louis to work at a bank in a non-janitorial position. Finally, I decided to become a part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech. King was the leader of the Civil Rights Movement and led his people to the equalities they have now through peaceful resistance of unjust laws known as civil disobedience. King is legendary for having a tough mind and tender heart.

These three pictures are famous; the subjects of all the pictures share a common bond of strength and perserverance. I chose to project myself as them because I idolize their ability to face adversity and strand their ground no matter how tough things get. I certainly do not possess strength to the same degree that these heroes do, but I like to think that I do my part to stand up for the injustices I see happening around me. My friends tease me for being the "crazy" person who walks up to strangers to stop an argument, puts a bully in their place, and invites the kid sitting alone at lunch to join our table, but I feel compelled to speak up in favor of those who cannot speak for themselves.My interventions are not at all heroic- but I hope that I have helped someone somewhere along the way and I hope they take the same compassion I showed them to help somebody else.

Sappho Translation Reflection

For my Sappho translation poem, I drew inspiration from three different translators- Basil Bunting, Horace Gregory, and William Carlos Williams. I chose these poems because they are all written relatively close in time and each poem had an image upon which I molded my three stanzas. All three poems seem to be written from the perspective of a man admiring his beloved. I chose, however, to write my poem from the opposite perspective of the beloved admiring her loving man. All three poems contain imagery in which the man compares his beloved to nature, so I used nature as a median for my comparisons as well. First, Williams has strong imagery in his first two stanzas about a man being speechless at the beauty of his beloved, and my poem starts with the beloved being flattered by her man's speechlessness. I, also, liked how Gregory, in his last stanza, talks optimistically about focusing not on the thunderstorms of life, but on the beautiful stars instead; in my poem the beloved is thanking he who loves her for his optimism much like the optimism that Gregory projects. Finally, I really liked how Bunting juxtaposes light and darkness in his 3rd and 4th stanzas, so I used images of color and black and white to mimic him in my poem.

The beauty, and sometimes horror, of translation is that it allows much room for interpretation and personalization. Words, meanings, intentions, and endings can all be molded in the midst of translation to change the story so that it relates to all people. I took the Sappho translation poems and put my own personal twist on the situation, for better or for worse.

Gender is the main difference between my poem and the three poems I modeled my Sappho translation after. My poem, so to speak, "turns the table," on the other three poems and offers light to the lesser heard story of the romance that posses the speaker of the original three. If my presumptions are correct and the three original poems are from a man's point-of-view, then my poem looks at the man from the woman's point-of-view. She is admiring how much her man loves her, but concerned that he may love her too much; if something were to happen to her she feels he would be so devastated that his life would end. In general, I think my poem challenges the basic stereotypes people have of all relationships where the woman is the weak, infatuated partner and the man is the strong figure-head trying to protect the woman. In my poem the opposite occurs.