You Are Here, curated by RadicalMedia, is a film displayed on 16 screens in a dark room, compiled of movies all set in New York. The film takes clips and lines from a plethora of movies: sometimes, a couple of screens will show the same movie, or all of them will show the same clip. The visitor can choose to look at any screen they want, but sometimes the film will draw their attention to one clip or line, making it especially insightful. I remember the first thing I saw when I walked into the exhibit was all 16 screens showing Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort saying something about money…

Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly painted a stereotypical view of the Orient (the East), as the main theme of the opera was Cio-Cio-San begging for Pinkerton’s loyalty and love. In “The Spectacle of the Other,” Hall stated some harmful stereotypes that painted people from the East as submissive, childlike, innocent, and exotic. I focused on the music of the opera. Puccini tried to include some authentic melodies from Japan, but he used music that seemed overly “pure” and innocent by employing only whole tone scales (scales that are easy to layer with generally pleasing sounds, devoid of half steps, etc.), thus infantilizing Cio-Cio-San. The introduction of the opera itself shrouded Cio-Cio-San…

I really enjoyed Suffs, and thought that the inclusion of black women’s parallel fight for suffrage was mindful. It didn’t focus purely on suffrage for white women nor paint the main characters as completely morally correct— Ida B. Well’s script and performances highlighted the oppression of black women, not excluding injustices perpetrated by white women as well. Some potential challenges and responsibilities of portraying history in contemporary theater might include the language used, as well as not only telling a singular story in a fight that included so many people and groups. The suffrage movement was not without internal tension, between both the white women, black women, and with each…

One scene from Hamilton that exemplifies Stuart Hall’s themes from “Representation” is the first Cabinet Battle, where Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson debate over the nation’s financial system through a rap battle. This scene reflects Hall’s argument that “representation is the production of meaning through language” (Hall, 16). Instead of portraying the Founding Fathers in a conventional, formal manner, the scene reimagines them as modern figures, using rap, a traditionally urban genre, to discuss historical events. This choice redefines how we see these historical figures, showing that the way they are represented can shift based on who is telling the story and how. Furthermore, the rap battle format exemplifies Hall’s…

Part 1 Untitled (America/Me) by Glenn Ligon is a billboard at 18th Street and 10th Avenue depicting “AMERICA” in neon letters that are crossed out to just spell “ME.” Ligon based Untitled (America/Me) off of his 2008 installation Untitled, which was a flickering neon sculpture. He captured it in a photograph and added black, hand-drawn X’s of varying size that are bold and somewhat erratic. The X’s seem to be drawn with marker, as the lines aren’t completely straight and bleed a little. The background of the image is white so that AMERICA, big and centered, stands out in neon yellow. The relative simplicity of this artwork compared to the…

Woman in a Striped Dress by Edouard Vuillard depicts a woman tending to a vase of flowers and wearing a bold dress. The color of the stripes of her dress bleeds into the background, making dark red the overwhelming color in this painting. The subject is the woman, but I found it interesting that her side profile is less detailed than the woman next to her. At first, I actually thought that the woman was standing next to a mirror, and that the other woman was her reflection. The overall murkiness of the painting was confusing to me in the beginning.  The emphasis is on the dress she’s wearing with…