Murals in Trenton!

In Professor Gregory Thielker’s Advanced Painting class, we have spent the last month creating four 10-foot murals for the side of the ARTWORKS Visual Arts Center in downtown Trenton, NJ. Bringing these large-scale paintings into existence meant engaging in activities absent from traditional painting classes but integral to the creation of public art, like meeting with members of the local […]

Whitney Biennial 2014

This year’s Whitney Biennial featured many works of Conceptual art, which, though not my favorite flavor, I nonetheless found intriguing.  I briefly tagged along with a tour group, and I got the feeling that each piece in the exhibition was imbued with multiple layers of meaning which could be peeled back as one researched the artist and his / her […]

Lotte Reiniger

German filmmaker and animator Lotte Reiniger made over 40 films in her career, predating Walt Disney’s animations by a decade.  She is famous for her Adventures of Prince Achmed, an alternate take on the story of Aladdin.  Her films are essentially grayscale animations on a solid-colored background.  Silhouetted shapes move whimsically across the screen and interact deftly with one another. […]

This American Life, Notes on Camp

What I find enticing about Notes on Camp is the use of a variety of different overlapping sounds and sonic textures to create a unified whole.  The artist uses narration, ambient noise, quotations from the campers, songs, announcements over the loudspeaker, and other such “camp sounds” to weave a tapestry of the entire experience.  This technique makes the documentation more […]