Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute

Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute is an art school located in Utica, NY, and it also had a museum open to the public with many famous artists as well as students’ artwork on display. The School of Art offers a nationally accredited college program and an active Community Arts Education Program that serves adults, teens and children. They also have a performing arts building where the school puts on over 100 shows a year. For my paper on a contemporary artist I will be visiting this museum and talking about the famous artists featured as well as the students work on display.

My favorite artist so far

My favorite artist this semester is Salvadore Dali. On my trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art I bought a book all about his works. The beginning of the book shows portraits that he has done and my favorite portrait is the one of Luis Bunuel, painted in 1924. I liked this piece so much because even though he uses dark colors everything is clearly shown. He used a lot of shading as the background and little actual painting strokes. Dali once said "Christ is like cheese, or, to be more precise, like mountains of cheese", it is said he based a decent amount of his paintings on this saying. Such as his most popular painting "The Persistence of Memory", he says the painting derived from a dream of runny Camembert and represents an image of time devouring itself and everything else around it. Another painting I really enjoyed was his "Portrait of Paul Eluard", it reminds me of the background of "The Persistence of Memory". The background is blurry with no detail, but the actual portrait of Paul Eluard is very vivid, including the lion and everything else painted into his body.

My Altar

In my room I have a jar filled with pictures and little souvenirs I've gotten over the past 3 years. It is filled with memories I've made with my friends and boyfriend since I've started college. I originally didn't plan on this happening, I started throwing things in there that I didn't want to throw out. It started to fill up with movie stubs, concert tickets and little toys I've gotten over the years. As I was looking through it I found my favorite part of this jar, which is the ticket stubs from the Liberty Science Center. One of them is from when my boyfriend took me to the Liberty Science Center for my paper in Mass Comm 1000, and the other is when we went back to see a film in IMAX.

Food as Art

To me food is art because people such as Buddy Valastro and the hosts of Cupcake Wars sculpt cakes and chocolate. You can design foods to look like almost anything. There are countless events organized around the symbiosis between art and food, such as food events held in art spaces, which aren’t considered art, but still make use of food in an artistic way. Prudence Staite sculpts with chocolate and food, to make edible art. “Art should be interactive and stimulate all the senses, especially taste!". Prudence also creates painting with food, she believes you can create anything from food.