Our theme for the month of March is “I was wrong about.”
Growing up, I never thought that I could create art myself; it seemed fully the domain of others. We did not practice art much in my family, nor did I know many amateur artists.
The art that I did see was quite limited in scope. There was one couple at our church who would sometimes paint live biblical scenes to accompany sermons. As the self-proclaimed “Storybook Capital,” Abilene’s city center was full of art from children’s books. The art that I was exposed to as valuable was quite traditional in its nature—its subject understandable and accessible. Art was often either a literal representation or a parable.
Being from quite a young town with shallow roots, my family travelled to find depth, to connect to a bigger story than our own. We often searched for the old, for the classical, appreciating that which signaled history in art and architecture. Modern architecture, for example, was often dismissed as an ugly marring of an otherwise beautiful cityscape.
What I did know of art, as I became aware of it growing up, is unsurprising. I had an appreciation of the Impressionists, as do many people (if the crowds one must fight through to see a Van Gogh in the flesh are any proof). I had an understanding of the advances in dimensional representation of the Renaissance; a vague notion that the Baroque period was associated with playing with light; and a complete dismissal of abstraction as something nonsensical, perhaps even anti-intellectual, replete with clichés such as “a child could have painted this square,” or “anyone could have thought of this”.
At the core of my limited valorization of art was an overall lack of context. I did not understand the bigger picture of works and movements, or external factors to which artists were responding. What else was going on at the time a piece was produced? What else was this artist making, at the time and across their life? Why did they create what they did? I did not have the answers, but beyond that, I did not even have the questions.
The beginnings of a change took shape during an art history class that I took while on exchange in Grenoble. In the course, I learned to situate different pieces and movements within their context: Rococo as a last gasp of the nobility before the French Revolution; Romanticism shaping national myths to support nineteenth-century state-building. My visits to art museums and churches took on a different light. I could read a painting title, year created, and painter’s name and years lived, then look at the painting and actually make some sense of it. When I saw paintings I’d studied in person, it felt like having a piece of history preserved and set out just for me. I was astounded at just how starstruck I felt to be in the presence of The Death of Marat, or Liberty Leading the People.
I remember finding pieces from the Realism movement, and their challenges to the status quo, particularly beautiful. I found that art could depict subjects beyond the biblical, mythological, wealthy, royal, or historical—indeed, these works depicted ordinary people, those whom our eyes would glance over. A realist painting forces your gaze, centers it upon something or someone overlooked. It valorizes that which does not align with aesthetic preferences, from a chaotic market scene of tired workers to a flabby older body immortalized in marble. Art, I found, could be revolutionary.
Even so, anything from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially post–World War I, remained of limited interest to me. I was still seeking out that feeling of history. I remember the first time I felt challenged in this—at the Detroit Institute of Art, in the spring of 2019. I came across a small screen playing a video of a woman holding a pan of milk and increasingly straining over the effort.* I remember thinking it was such a striking metaphor, and I liked its slowness combined with its motion.
Later that summer, I was again challenged, this time by my Wilderness Orientation co-leader, who told me about his own work and situated it within the broader story of contemporary art on our drive back to Grand Rapids from the Canadian wilderness. He said things I’d never thought about, things like: “We achieved perfect representation in art, and then we invented the camera—and consequently faced the question, where do we go from here?” “How do we keep moving forward in art?” “We must challenge the very foundations of representation and push the boundaries between image and word.” I remember finding this theoretically interesting, but again feeling confused when he showed me photos of his works.
These two challenges have stuck, and I’ve been surprised to find myself growing a deep appreciation of modern and contemporary art. I have been moved to tears by rooms of dark and heavy abstract paintings from artists who lived through World War II, trying to process something beyond comprehension or representation. Picasso’s fractured Cubist portraits, seeking to capture multiple perspectives in one piece and make something that feels more true to the spirit of his muse, feel achingly familiar as I grow older. I feel lucky to now know that depth is not the exclusive domain of the past.
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I had to search the difference between modern and contemporary art while writing this piece. If you, like me, are not up to date on this, I referred to the following definitions from the Irish Museum of Modern Art:
- “Modern Art refers to art theory and practice, predominantly in Western Europe and North America, from the 1860s to the late 1960s. Modern Art is defined in terms of a linear progression of styles, periods and schools, such as Impressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.”
- “Contemporary Art refers to current and very recent practice. Attributed, approximately, to the period from the 1970s to the present, it also refers to works of art made by living artists.”
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* The Kitchen V: Carrying the Milk by Marina Abramovic, it turns out.
Rylan Shewmaker (‘21) calls herself a geographer, though none of her degrees substantiate this. After growing up in Texas and studying in Grand Rapids, she moved to Brussels, Belgium, for her master’s degree in urban studies. She still lives in Brussels and works for a housing non-profit. She enjoys audiobooks, bike commuting, sunny days, and learning new things.
